Version 2026.8.15 – Crates that know what goes in them 📦

August 15, 2026

The last update was a few hours old when three of us sat down in front of it for a LAN evening. This update is everything that evening dragged into the light — plus the one feature everyone at the table wished for: crates you can tell what belongs in them. 📦

Crates with a filter. Aim at a placed crate and press E: you now choose what that crate accepts — an ore crate, a food crate, a fuel crate. The quick-stash on H then only puts away what's on the list. Walk past a row of labelled crates with a full backpack and the loot sorts itself. Choose nothing and you simply have the old accepts-everything box. 🗃

VEGA now shows newcomers around. Right after the greeting, VEGA introduces the Tab menu (inventory, crafting, tech, map) and points at the Codex — the two things new players missed most often. In the crafting menu every ingredient now says whether it's craftable or a raw resource — and if you're missing a craftable one, the game lists right beneath it what it's made from. And VEGA's lines no longer dismiss themselves after 25 seconds: a page stays until you continue with N. Slow readers miss nothing now. 🧭

Copper is now where you dig. Which ore a world gave you used to be a lottery: a vein's whole budget sat in a few gigantic clumps — "copper is too rare, and when you find it, it's a mountain", was the LAN verdict. The shallow starter ores (iron, copper, silicate) now split up: the big mother lodes still exist, but half the ore lies scattered across many small veins that turn up during plain everyday digging. The rare deep ores stay rare — a diamond strike should stay a find. (In existing worlds the ore shifts inside untouched terrain; everything built stays.) ⛏️

Ship rooms now look like what they do. The station markers aboard were ordinary world blocks — the workshop a block of stone, the medbay ice. Now the medbay holds a healing tank, the workshop a workbench, the quarters a bed and the cargo hold a crate — exactly the blocks whose function you already know from outside. And a wooden door built into a self-built ship stays a wooden door: it opens on E instead of silently playing an energy hatch. 🚀

The LAN evening, part one: the world stays under your feet. Coming back to an area a crewmate had kept loaded the whole time showed nothing but space — ship and animals floating in front of stars, no ground. The server now remembers per player what needs re-sending. Dying next to another player could wake you up in their ship — every respawn now hangs on your own. A pad claimed by someone who landed after you never showed as taken on your map — now it does. And the frequent kick-outs: the server dropped players after 90 seconds of silence — except "silence" included sitting in the trade window or on the map. Seven kicks in one evening, none deserved. Menus now keep checking in with the server. 🌍

Part two: building next to your ship works again. "Sand and dirt can't be placed" — in truth any block aimed near a landed ship was silently rerouted into a ship edit and rejected. Exactly where you spawn. Blocks now only join the ship if you actually aim at the ship. And the wall behind a torch is no longer an X-ray: torches, lanterns and ladders made the wall face behind them disappear — visibly see-through and even walk-through. 🧱

Crafting and inventory. The craft button no longer promises what your backpack can't hold: no room for the result means the button is off and "inventory full" is right there — before, the refusal arrived as an easy-to-miss note after the click. The first entry in the Inventory tab is now called Backpack instead of "Inventory" again. And an empty hotbar slot shows your hand — in your suit's colour, with a proper swing — instead of nothing at all. 🖐

And a bit of honesty. The scanner no longer clings to its last subject: what you scan is what you aim at — not the nearest creature behind you or behind a wall — and a miss now says so instead of silently leaving the old readout up. Guard drones no longer visibly fire their lasers through solid rock (it never did damage — it just looked that way). And the forge no longer promises "faster" smelting that never existed — it now says what it's actually good at: more metal out of every ore, and the rare ores the workbench can't handle. 🔍

Set up a row of crates and tell each one what it wants. The rest sorts itself. 📦✨