Version 2026.8.23 – Animals that jump, and answers that arrive in the game 🐾

August 29, 2026

Until yesterday, the animals in Blocks Beyond the Stars were, frankly, sleds. A grazer was simply pinned to the ground height beneath it — no gravity, no jump, no landing. A block in the way stopped it dead; dig the ground away and it hovered. Justus never minded, until yesterday he watched a herd animal jump a ledge, land on the far side and keep walking. "It can do that now?!" Yes. It can do that now. 🐾

Every species now has a motion class — walker, crawler, flier, hoverer or swimmer — derived from what the species already is. Nothing was re-rolled, so your worlds keep every animal they had; they just learned how they move. Walkers jump a one-block ledge exactly like you do (launching before the step, not after), crawlers and giants haul themselves over without leaving the ground, two blocks is a wall for both. Walk off an edge and it is a real fall — with a terminal speed, no more two-block snaps. Birds land to rest and to sleep and take off again when disturbed. Hoverers never come down. Amphibians swap class at the waterline. And the scanner now tells you what you are looking at. 🦅

The second big thing is a conversation. For a while now you have been able to send us a bug report with F1 — now we can answer inside the game, in the very world you sent it from. An answer shows up as a HUD line plus a window with the whole thread, and a "Fixed in version …" once the fix has shipped. If we have a follow-up question, you can answer it right there (up to three times per report). Works on the desktop, in the browser portal and in the glitch.fun arcade. A game that never sent a report never asks anywhere. 💬

And because a report should not need an account, the browser portal grew a "▶ Play now" button: type a name, one click, singleplayer in the browser — no account, no hosted world, nothing to wake up first. The name is remembered in the browser and handed to the game; if you start without one, you are asked once instead of silently being called "Explorer". All fourteen portal languages. 🕹️

In between: Lyxette's round three. Fifteen more reports from his singleplayer world — the compass across the world seam (every blip flipped, ">3000 m" to a ship three blocks away), a ship blip that outlived its world, sneaking that stopped half a block before the edge, drop packets hanging in mid-air, animals showing up inside his walls, a ship parked inside his own paved landing pad, and water and lava you could not even aim at. All fifteen are in. You can now aim at water and lava (so you can finally fill a hole or cap a lava vent), lava flows at half speed, and sand, ash and snow fall — instantly through air, cell by cell through water, and never onto a player standing underneath. And if you wall in your yard, you get peace inside: anything an animal cannot reach from outside is fenced. A fence is not a roof, though — fliers and the Guardian machines ignore it. 🧱

Speaking of the Guardian machines: they are no longer black. Robots, scan-drones, space drones and UFOs now wear grey armour plating with etched circuit traces — you can finally see them in caves and at night, and they look less grim than the story needs. The red eyes stay; that is their signal. 🤖 And a riddle that has followed us since clear glass arrived: every cockpit canopy in the game was being rendered as water. The tile was fully transparent, and the shader reads "transparent" as "this is water" — so the windscreen ran the entire water path, waves and reflections included. Now glass is glass, fire is flame-shaped again, and dyed panes have stopped bobbing. 🪟

On top of that, a full audit of everything merged this week — three rounds, around 35 further small things, from pets that wait at a cliff instead of hopping in place to the F1 dialog now pausing the world like the Esc menu does. Protocol stays 3, saves migrate. If you run your own server, please update client and server together. And thank you, Lyxette — round three was as precise as round one. 🙏 Have fun out there! ✨