Version 2026.8.4 – Four new ships straight off the sketch pad 🚀

August 5, 2026

This update comes straight from the drawing table: four new ship types just rolled out of the shipyard — and every single one of them started as a pencil drawing on Justus' sketch pad. On top of that there is finally a reason to hunt bandits (bounties!), a VEGA who gets to finish her sentences, a HUD that tells you what you just picked up, and eleven new alien critters. 🚀

Designed with pencil and paper — built block by block. All four new ships were hand-drawn by Justus, and the floor plans were translated into the game line for line. The flagship of the batch is the Hammerhead: a heavy gunship with the game's first true multi-room interior — a twelve-block-wide bridge up front (the hammer head!), a corridor running aft, a workshop to port and sleeping cabins to starboard, each behind its own interior door, with the stern airlock sitting between the split engine blocks. ⚙️

And the other three? The Courier is the fastest ship in the game — unarmed, with a glass nose, swept wings and a raised lookout: "perfect for those who report battles instead of fighting them." The Thunderbolt is a mid-size gunship with an inset bridge, a full-width workshop hall and a long bow cannon on top of its flank guns. And the Deathblock is exactly what it sounds like: the slowest, toughest ship in the fleet — a brutalist stepped silhouette with overhanging quarters, one cannon per flank and four stacked engines. The NPC traders picked the new types up automatically, by the way — you will meet them out there. 🛠️

Bounties on bandits! Mission boards now offer real bounty jobs: settlements on planets with a bandit camp pay a reward for clearing it out — accept, and the camp appears on your planet map; everyone who helps clear it gets credit (co-op friendly!). And stations in pirate systems put a bounty on the sector's raider ship — while you hold it, the raider is guaranteed to show up on your next flight, no more hoping for the ambush dice. All of it kid-friendly: bandits get chased away, never killed. ⚔️

VEGA finally gets to finish her sentences. Long announcements — German ones especially — used to be silently cut off after four lines. Now the speech panel turns pages: [N] flips to the next one, a (1/2) indicator shows where you are. And missed tips are no longer lost: every lesson and hint VEGA ever gave you can be re-read in the ship terminal's Story tab. On top of that, new games with a story pack now open with a short text prologue — a small ship, no memory of who you are, then VEGA crackles onto the line. 🗣️

You can now see what you pick up. An unobtrusive pickup feed above the hotbar announces what just went into your backpack — "+7 berries" instead of seven separate lines — and every hotbar cell shows its stack count right in the corner. Never open the inventory again just to check whether you have enough wood. 🎒

Every planet now has critters of its own. Butterflies, beetles and fireflies stopped being one-size-fits-all: each planet rolls its own cast of species and its own colour palette — and keeps both on every revisit. Joining them are eleven new alien species with two new motion styles (hopping and balloon-drifting): prismwings on crystal worlds, embermites over lava, frostmites on ice, gasbags in the jungle, night-glowing plankton over water, cavemoths underground… crystal, lava and ice worlds finally aren't empty anymore. Rain brings out the worms and snails, by the way. 🦋

And the machines are having supply problems — on purpose. Until now the replacement for a destroyed robot was standing there again within the blink of an eye; now reinforcements take a leisurely 20–45 seconds, plus a breather after every kill — machine fights are encounters with quiet in between again. Pursuers you leave far behind give up. And in space: drones and UFOs wait until you come to them — park at the launch point and nobody hunts you automatically anymore, and defeated waves stay defeated for a few minutes. 🤖

Also in this one: the bandit hold-up dialog no longer cuts off long demands — it wraps and grows to fit. Mineable space rocks now genuinely roll their mineral families per world (instead of every desktop world sharing one pattern — and hosted worlds even re-rolling on restart). And the ambient sounds now sound the same on every platform. 🔧

Have fun on the test flights — and whoever comes back from a bounty in the Deathblock first: we want screenshots! ✨