Version 2026.8.3 – Canyons, continents and floating islands 🏔️

August 4, 2026

This update belongs to the planets. Terrain generation learned a whole catalogue of spectacular landforms — from a canyon that runs all the way around the globe to caves that finally have an entrance — and about every second new world now forms true continents with real oceans in between. And since you'll want to defend all that: enemies show health bars, and your crosshair actually aims now. 🌍

The surface got bold. A rare planet now carries a mega-rift — one canyon system wrapping the entire world, a genuine Valles Marineris you can follow around the globe. Craters became events: central peaks, terraced walls, crater chains and bright ejecta rays around young impacts. Dune seas and mountain ranges run in one consistent direction per world instead of directionless noise — deserts finally look wind-swept. On top: hexagonal basalt-column fields, travertine terrace pools, penitente ice-blade fields, salt polygons, ring-mountain calderas and whole-planet escarpments. All of this is a one-time reshape: only terrain you haven't explored yet regenerates — everything built and explored keeps its exact shape. 🏜️

The sky is full of islands — and the rock makes arches. The engine can do real overhangs now: natural arches, sea stacks off rocky coasts, hoodoo rock spires. Multi-tier sky islands stack floating layers with stalactite undersides and endless rim waterfalls pouring off the edge into the landscape below. And looking down: cenotes — sinkholes with overhanging lips and a pool at the bottom — plus vast underground caverns with lakes of their own. 🏝️

Caves finally have an entrance. Until now every cave was a sealed bubble in the rock. A new tunnel carver threads worm-like passages through the stone — with cave mouths and skylight shafts that genuinely open to the surface. You can walk into the underground now (or fall into it 😅). Lava tubes wind beneath volcanic terrain, waterfalls carve plunge pools where they land, and glacier worlds crack into crevasse fields. 🕳️

And new worlds get continents. Roughly half of all new large planets — start world included — now split into continental platforms and ocean basins: sweeping coastlines, a shelf falling away into deep sea, and oceans flooding the basins. Beaches, rivers and landmarks react on their own — a massif offshore becomes a volcanic island, a rift becomes an ocean trench. Lava-ocean worlds roll basalt continents in their magma seas. Existing worlds are untouched — continents only appear on newly created ones. And don't worry about loading times: a performance pass keeps world generation practically as fast as before, despite the whole catalogue. 🌊

In combat you can now see who you're hitting. Every attackable enemy — bandits, creatures, space hostiles — shows a health bar fading from green through amber to red (companions in cyan), visible in combat or under your crosshair, plus a hit marker flashes when your shot lands. And the crosshair actually aims: whatever you point at is what gets hit — the old aim assist, which would happily kill the enemy behind you, now only helps within a forward cone. If you like it sporty: AutoAim is a world rule (on by default, so nothing changes unless you want it to) — switch it off and only genuine crosshair hits count, with misses visibly striking the terrain. Ship weapons also play by their own stats now: the server enforces cooldown and reactor energy, and the tier-2 laser cannon finally gets its longer range. ⚔️

NPCs stand on the ground now. Literally: settlers, camp folk and bandits had been hovering half a block above the ground since the worldgen overhaul — now they stand on real blocks, and if you dig the floor out from under a settler, they drop. They're also noticeably brighter (the avatar textures ran at 40 % of their authored brightness) and finally no longer clones: individual size, trouser colour, face and hair — and only about half of the researchers are androids now. 🧑‍🚀

Also in this one: multi-biome worlds now draw from their whole biome pool — the tail entries never appeared on any world before, while the first one appeared everywhere. From now on a per-world roll also decides which biomes make the cut (in newly generated chunks). 🌿

Have fun exploring — and if you find the first sky island with a waterfall, or set sail from your own continental coast: we want screenshots! ✨