Version 2026.8.2 – Asteroid belts, sandy beaches and biting cold 🪐

August 3, 2026

This update pulls you out into space — and finally turns mining out there into a real craft. Asteroids gather in proper belts, every rock rolls its own size and mineral family (water ice included!), and meanwhile the planets picked up names, beaches, and weather that actually concerns you. 🚀

Asteroids have an address now. In new worlds, a system's landable asteroids no longer scatter randomly between the planets — they share one or two real belt orbits beyond the outermost planet, and the flight chart draws the belt as one translucent band with its own label instead of a smear of stacked rings. Flying there pays off: every asteroid carries a cluster of ship-laser-mineable rocks, and launching from an asteroid drops you into a dense nine-rock field. On top of that, planetary rings now roll a material family — icy white stays the norm, but dusty tan, rocky grey and a rare pale violet join in, in your existing worlds too. 🪐

And no two rocks are alike anymore. Every mineable space rock used to be the same clone; now each one rolls its mineral family — stony, metallic, carbonaceous, rare crystalline, and a 20 % chance of water ice you can mine by hand — and its size, from pebble to a rare boulder with a seriously fat payout. One titanium core per field stays guaranteed. At the same time, EVA mining finally plays fair: instead of popping any block with a single bare-hand punch, the planet rules apply — the right drill, real hardness, hold-to-mine, and the aim marker glows from cyan to orange with your progress. Inventory full? The block simply stays put instead of the ore vanishing without a trace. ⛏️

The sky learned names. Instead of one naming scheme there are now several registries: coined proper names ("Tharion"), catalog designations ("HX-113"), region names ("Ember Veil") — pirate space sounds menacing, trade space busy. Planets hang off them as a hierarchy: Roman numerals ("Tharion II"), exoplanet letters ("HX-113 b"), and special worlds — ringed planets, twin worlds, your starting planet — carry proper names flavoured by their biome: ice worlds sound cold, lava worlds harsh. All unique per galaxy, and existing worlds simply wake up with better names — every waypoint stays. 🌌

Down by the water: beaches! Seas and larger lakes get real sandy beaches — sometimes wide and flat, sometimes a sliver under a cliff, alternating with rocky shore, plus a sandy shallow-water apron and the occasional palm in the tropics. Applies to newly explored terrain; coastline you already know keeps its shape. 🏖️

And the temperature readout means business now. Outside your suit's comfort zone its climate control kicks in — and drains the suit battery, faster the more extreme it gets. Only once that runs dry does slow exposure damage set in; freezing to death is a creeping affair, never a flash. Shelter genuinely helps: underground settles at cave temperature, a roof over your head halves the severity, an open fire warms like a campfire. In vacuum, the sun-driven hull temperature from −150 to +120 °C is what counts. As a yardstick: an ice world costs you about ten minutes unprotected — three times that with a good insulation liner. Creative and Sandbox worlds are spared all of it. 🌡️

Speaking of Sandbox: the mode is real now. World creation offers a true Sandbox mode next to Explorer and the Creative options: free crafting everywhere, no oxygen or hunger drain, no enemies, cheats allowed, all blueprints and ships unlocked — baked into the world save. And the launch-hour playtest bug is fixed: the starter kit stuffed your backpack so full you couldn't mine a single block — the materials now land in your starter ship's cargo hold. 🏗️

Also: plants no longer grow as identical clones on a grid — each one rolls its size, position and rotation, and meadows form visible patches of tall and short growth. The ship-computer menu, the Codex and the vendor dialog finally have visible scrollbars. And if you play in German or Italian, the selection lists no longer show raw English ids. 🌿

Have fun prospecting out there — and whoever cracks the first water-ice asteroid or builds the first beach base: we want screenshots! ✨