Version 2026.8.22 – An update one player wrote 🎒

August 26, 2026

Sometimes the best game designer is simply someone who plays and writes down what feels off. On Monday Lyxette sent three reports from his singleplayer world, and one more on Tuesday morning — 20 points in total. Nine real bugs, one fall through the floor, seven variations of "why can't I see what my gear actually does?", and one honest question about lava and water. We spent two days doing nothing but working through those 20 points — all 20 are in. Justus kept testing the sentry post in the meantime and thinks that is only fair: "Well, he actually looked properly." 😄

The biggest theme was: you can't see what you're wearing. Suit gear in Blocks Beyond the Stars has always worked straight out of your backpack — there are no equipment slots, and nobody ever said so. Now the inventory has its own Suit tab: it shows exactly the pieces currently working for you (armour plates, oxygen tanks, thermal liners, scanners, the jetpack), with a line underneath reading Armour x % · Max. oxygen n · Insulation y %. 🎒 Each of the twelve gear descriptions now ends with "Works while carried." And the HUD oxygen bar finally divides by your real maximum instead of a flat 100 — if you're carrying a big tank, you can see it.

Same story on the ship. The Modules tab was a pure build catalogue. It offered "Build" for modules that were already fitted (and then the server said no), and it had no answer to "how much fits in this ship anyway?". Now fitted modules come first with a Fitted badge, a short summary explains the rule (one of each), and the Fleet tab shows you what every ship in your hangar is carrying. Best of all: modules come back out now. 🔧 At the ship workshop you get 50 % of the parts back — except for the welded-in things (workshop, medbay, quarters, the basic hold). A cargo expansion only comes out while the remaining hold still fits everything; otherwise the button tells you, instead of eating your cargo.

Then the building side, all four also from Lyxette's list: there's a new "Machines" tab in the crafting menu — 21 devices moved out of "Blocks", so Blocks is blocks again. 🔨 There's clear glass as a rare, blueprint-gated exception (2 glass + 1 polymer at the workshop = 2 panes): genuinely see-through, airtight, dyeable — regular glass stays frosted, and that's on purpose. And because it answers the obvious follow-up question straight away: every cockpit windscreen on all seven layout ships (and the starter) is made of that clear glass now. Side and rear windows stay frosted, otherwise the ship looks like an aquarium from outside. 🚀 Finally lava and water: Lyxette placed a water block next to lava and watched the two sit there peacefully side by side forever. The old contact rule only ever fired for flowing fluid. Now lava hardens wherever water touches it — a lava source turns to obsidian, flowing lava to basalt (his call). 🌋

At home you can finally see your air: aim at your own base core and you'll read "Air: n cells in k sealed rooms" — the system had been in the game for ages, nobody just ever found it. Plus a VEGA hint when you found a core on a world without breathable air, door descriptions that say which door leaks, and a new Codex article, "Bases on Airless Worlds". 🏠 And the settlers keep their distance: NPCs now gently nudge apart instead of standing inside one another.

The ten real bugs, briefly: the heal tank sat directly under the ceiling lamp on every layout ship (head in the lamp — fine on the starter, not on the hauler). After switching ships the HUD still showed the previous ship's hull and shield. The hauler advertised 96 cargo slots and had 72 — and there are two new cargo hold tiers to fix the missing upgrade path. Renaming a base spawned a duplicate settler every time. A second weapon was never selectable in the space quick-bar. Crates refused blocks. The Factory tab lit up but every craft failed. The glass description promised a clear pane. One unreadable fleet row silently dropped you back to ship one. And beaming in could drop you through a single floor slab whose chunk hadn't finished loading. All gone. 🐞

And since a few other things were waiting: the tech tree finally hangs together (eight standalone blueprints got a parent, three new nodes joined — field kitchen, archaeology, bio-refining), every workbench has at least three recipes (the campfire can now char, melt ice, boil salt and cook three real meals; obsidian melts back into glass, ancient brick makes concrete, and researchers buy rune stones), and if you want, you can run the game out of a portable folder — one portable_data_dir.txt next to the exe does it. 💾 On top of that, 17 follow-ups from a full review of the last big package, including the invisible cursor in the arcade games on a controller.

Protocol stays 3, saves migrate. There is one new network message (uninstall a module), so please update client and server together. And once more, because this time it really is the case: thank you, Lyxette. 🙏 Twenty reports in two days, every one of them precise enough to fix straight from the report. Have fun out there! ✨