Version 2026.8.17 – Which way? 🧭

August 16, 2026

Two questions we hear again and again when watching people play: "Why is that tab greyed out?" and "What am I supposed to do now?" From today the game answers both itself. The Tab menu tells you which block a locked tab needs and where it stands — and VEGA speaks up when something important is right under your nose: the lamp is off in the dark, rare ore is lying exposed, there's a settlement behind the hill. 🧭

The Tab menu names the block — and points at it. Until now the client only knew about the stations on your ship, while the server checked the world blocks you had built. The result: at the workbench in your base the Crafting tab stayed dead, a furnace recipe sent you "to the workshop", and the "lab" for Tech simply existed nowhere. Now the server says which stations are in reach, and the menu locks per recipe — not the whole tab. Every lock names the block with its icon: "Needs a Forge nearby — or your ship's Refinery module." And below it, live: "Workbench · 12 m ↗". Show sets the compass, Craft one → jumps to the recipe, and when you close the menu the block glows through the walls for eight seconds. Research, by the way, now happens at the cockpit — the phantom lab is history. 🔧

VEGA has an eye for the moment. Hints used to fire exactly once per save. Now there are context tips on top: rare, with cooldowns, and after two to four repeats the matter counts as learned. "It's dark — your suit lamp is on L." "Rare ore is exposed right here." "There's a settlement behind the ridge." "Asteroid in tractor range." "You can afford that blueprint now." Plus the warnings for oxygen, energy, hunger, cold and heat repeat every 15 minutes instead of once and never again. It all runs on one shared cadence — at least two minutes between tips, the first minute after joining stays silent, and if you react to a tip you won't hear it again. Only safety hints may jump the queue. 🤖

Minigames pay out in every world now. The Arcade only reported a run when it beat your local record — but that record is per install, while the server credits knowledge per player and per world. A game mastered in world A paid nothing in world B, on a friend's LAN server, or for the second player on the same PC. Now every completed run counts; the server filters out duplicates itself. 🕹️

Tidied up. Two checklists from July are done: broken ship layouts now fail loudly on load instead of quietly stamping iron wall; the last ten English-only server lines exist in all 14 languages; the light of placed lamps finally crosses the planet seam (daylight could for a while); a few translation fallbacks that could never trigger now do; and all 21 runtime shaders are guaranteed to be in the build. And the release run itself is about 20 minutes shorter — the tests now run on four machines in parallel, and a test that walked a million columns for 19 minutes without ever asserting anything takes two seconds and asserts something now. 🩹

Important for everyone hosting: the protocol stays 3, but there are four new messages — update client and server, or the new lines are simply missing.

Open the menu, read which block you need — and let it guide you there. 🧭✨