Version 2026.8.25 – The tablet update: smoother in the browser, and the hand is yours again 📱

August 31, 2026

Justus likes playing from the sofa best — and since the gamepad update, sometimes on the tablet in the browser. Except: on our Galaxy Tab A8 it stuttered from the intro on, the controls felt sluggish, and stepping out of the ship popped up an evil-looking browser message: "EncodingError: unable to decode audio data". It looked like a crash, but it wasn't one — under memory pressure the tablet had simply failed to decode a music track, and in that case the game has long switched over to its synthesizer music on its own. Only Unity's error window turned it into a drama. That message is gone now — in Chrome, Firefox and Safari, all three of which kindly use different wording for the same error. 🙄

The bigger thing behind it: the browser version now has a real mobile profile. At startup the game looks at what kind of device it is running on (by GPU family: Mali, Adreno, PowerVR, Apple) and guesses a quality preset. And because guessing alone is not enough, it then measures real frame times in the menu for ~15 seconds and corrects the guess one notch up or down. If you pick a preset yourself, you overrule the automatics for good — promise. The most important principle throughout: touch and performance are two different things. A touch-screen laptop gets big buttons but no throttled graphics — and desktop browsers are never stripped down. 📱

On top of that, the savings that actually matter on a tablet: a smaller render resolution on the Low preset, view distance 3 and synthesizer music as the default on a mobile first run, and no more music preloading in the background — a single decoded track occupies about 80 MB of memory, which is simply too much on a tablet. The built-in singleplayer world now sticks to a tick and chunk budget per frame, so the camera does not stutter while the world loads. And touch works from the very first menu, not only in the game. Will all of that be enough on the A8? Justus gets to test that first — results in the next post. 🧪

Speaking of Justus: his latest playtest found three things, and all three are in. "Dad, why is my hand black? I painted it!" — correct: the first-person hand never received the arm design from the appearance editor and swallowed dark suit colours into a black silhouette. Now it wears your painting. The bare-hand punch has become a proper straight punch, instead of swinging the forearm — open at the back — into view (yes, that looked as creepy as it sounds). And if you land on another celestial body, you will no longer find a door hovering lonely in mid-air there while your own ship's hatch goes doorless. 👊

For the tech corner: our world server quietly left behind ~1 GB of Docker volumes every time a hosted world woke up — the server had to be cleaned from 121 GB down to 18 GB. Ouch. Now it cleans up after itself, and a weekly tidy-up run keeps watch on top. 🧹

Protocol stays 3, saves migrate. If you run your own server, please update client and server together. And if you try the game on a tablet: send us a quick report with F1 on how it runs — that is exactly what the button is for. Have fun out there! ✨