Version 2026.8.24 – The drafting-table update: load finished ships, roll templates, menus on the pad 📐

August 30, 2026

Justus has wanted "the Scout ship, but with bigger wings" for ages. Until now that meant: open an empty room, rebuild the whole ship block by block, and then change the wings. Ten minutes in, the motivation was gone, the ship half done, and I was the bad guy. From today it is different: the LOAD button in the three build editors — ship, station, town — now lists every built-in ship and every built-in template in the game right next to your own designs. Pick the Scout, load it, add the wings, save. Five minutes, one proud eight-year-old. 📐

And if you do not want a template but a surprise: the station and town editors grew a Generate button. It runs the very same random generator that populates the worlds — pick a size and a seed, roll, reroll — and drops the result into the room as editable blocks. The vendor stays exactly where he is, promise. Above that there is a new colossal station size, and a small line under the size stepper tells you what a tier actually produces. 🎲

Blocks in the editor now also wear their real textures instead of flat colour — wood looks like wood, steel like steel, and a window is recognisably a window before you save. The ship's interior has become a clean, translucent frame with three steppers (that is what the server treats as the cabin; wings and engines may sit outside it), and the palettes gained the blocks that were missing: console, NPC, greenhouse, chest, data terminal. Plus six things that simply made the editor annoying: palette rows as tall as a wall, a double scrollbar, WASD moving the camera while you typed a name, a menu planet that got stuck in every editor, no mouse-wheel zoom, and a grid you could not see. All gone. 🧰

The second half of this update belongs to the gamepad. Eight menus were usable with a controller in theory and not in practice: the crafting search bar swallowed the stick (and then (B) stopped working too), the slot wheel could not be walked around, text fields showed no focus, in long lists the cursor scrolled out of the frame, and nothing said what the buttons did. Now: the selection wears a cyan frame and clicks as it moves, LB/RB switch the tabs, the right stick scrolls any page (credits, What's new, the story), a hint strip along the bottom says what (A) and (B) mean right now — and the pause menu finally has a controller route. Oh, and the buttons are now called View and Menu like on every Xbox pad, not "Back" and "Start" any more. Yesterday Justus played the whole game from the sofa for the first time without reaching for the keyboard once. 🎮

Small things you will notice: the loading spinners now turn in place instead of orbiting their own corner (yes, really), the update download shows a percentage and a bar, and the credits no longer vanish when you scroll all the way down. And on our side of the report inbox, two repairs: an F1 report is internally two rows, and "done" or "delete" always used to leave one of them behind. 🌀

Protocol stays 3, saves migrate. If you run your own server, please update client and server together. And if you like: build something out of the Scout and send it to us — I am curious what you make of a finished template. Have fun out there! ✨