Version 2026.9.10 – The shapeshifter update: eight professions, two new planets, stations as they really are 🎭🛰️

September 16, 2026

This week one player moved the game forward more than anyone: Justus. In two days he sent more than twenty reports — a crash, a ship in a lava lake, a chat that swallowed /help, a station that was gone after a restart — and a whole pile of ideas. Thank you! 🙏 The biggest of them: eight new professions. 🧑‍⚕️ The doctor sells medpacks, field medkits and — expensive — a detoxifier, the shopkeeper sells food (but only while you stand in the shop with them), the arms dealer has cables, plates, energy cells and finished laser pistols for diamonds and gold, and the sage sells data fragments at a very high price. The animal tamer brings baits and the creature translator and has a tame animal at their side, and the blockfarmer quarries blocks outside by day and sells stone, sand, dirt and basalt. The streamer is your biggest fan and asks once a day for a photo together (say no and they leave you alone), and the reporter gives you an interview — anyone can read what you told them by asking "What's in the news?". 📰 You meet them in new villages and towns in a clinic, shop, armory, library, stable, quarry, studio or newsroom, on new stations and in a quarter of their own in the G.D.S. city. With the Profession posts research you can even bring them into your own base or onto your own station. And a vendor now asks "Trade or talk?" when you press E — before, it always opened the market.

On top of that there are two new planets, both from Justus's reports. ❄️ Titas exists only once per galaxy: ten blocks of snow over yellow sulfur stone, toxic yellow water under a sheet of ice, dead forests, and hot zones with lava ponds right in the middle of the cold. Your suit alone is not enough there — a new meter shows your cold protection (or heat protection), and your ship, a station, a base, a campfire or a deep hole fill it up again. Abandoned SPS research stations hold salvage, but inside there is no air, it is −90 °C, and Titas has far more machines about than anywhere else. 🤖 Valuma, on the other hand, looks perfectly peaceful: wide, flat grass plains and animals that never bite. Only one of them is not an animal. The Sreekmakra wears the shape of an animal and changes it when nobody is looking. Hunt the animal it is copying, or hit it, and it comes after you — beat it and you see its true form. 🎭 Justus wanted to tame it too, so now you can: directly while it is disguised, or by taming an animal of the kind it copies — then it comes to you in its true form as a companion (achievement "Shapeshifter's Friend"). The scanner reads its real name under the disguise. And if you stay on Valuma for a long time… at some point VEGA starts to feel watched.

Space stations now look like themselves. 🛰️ Until now every station in space was the same placeholder model, and inside it was something else entirely. Now what you see from the cockpit is exactly the station you walk through afterwards — block for block and at full size, with its module halls, windows and the glowing force field in front of the hangar, plus solar wings, antennas and domes. A colossal station is more than a hundred blocks across. The hull is solid, you can fly between its modules, and on E your ship flies round and parks right inside the hangar. Your start system always has a station now (more than one new world in three used to have none), and if you quit the game on a station you come back on it instead of on the planet below.

For everyone who would rather build: Sandbox worlds get an All items page in the inventory — searchable, take one or a whole stack, nothing has to be crafted any more. 🧰 With /gamemode explorer|creative|sandbox world admins switch the mode of a running world. The chat scrolls back (mouse wheel or PageUp/PageDown), so a long /help is no longer cut off, and /tp city takes you to a city. Every drill, pistol, blade and the scanner now look different in your hand. 🔫 A bed shows its picture once instead of on every side, chairs no longer stand in cabin doors, plants and ladders under water no longer hide air pockets, shore foam moves with the flood, and trader ships stay longer, wait while you are near and show up as a gold marker on the map.

And the repairs: landing pads are never in a lava lake any more but on a basalt island — in older worlds a lava pad is marked orange-red, only used when everything else is taken, and a ship parked on one is moved. 🌋 The rare crash while typing is fixed, long F1 reports are no longer cut off (4800 characters, with a counter — Justus's Valuma idea had been cut off mid-sentence), coined names are filtered so no station carries an unfortunate name any more, and the loading screen is centred in the browser again. Every new text is in all 14 languages. The network protocol stays at 6 and your saves stay as they are: Titas, Valuma and the lava islands come with new worlds, the profession posts, the new stations and everything else work in the worlds you already have. Have fun! ✨