Version 2026.9.16 – The orchard update: fruit on the trees, begging herds and toxic worlds 🍎🐑

September 26, 2026

The trees bear fruit! 🍎 On new worlds about one tree in three hangs two to five pieces of fruit under its crown – round fruit, long fruit, grape clusters or bananas 🍌. Every kind of tree rolls its own: all the broadleaf trees of a world carry the same fruit in the same colour, the conifers another and the palms yet another. You pick it by hand, and two minutes later a new one grows on the same branch – in the same colour, even after a restart. A tree you grow from a sapling bears fruit too. But careful: a fruit is poisonous exactly when its tree is. So scan the tree before you take a bite. The detoxifier washes toxic fruit clean, just like toxic berries.

With food in your hand you now make friends fast. 🐑 Some peaceful animals live in big herds of six to twelve – and about one in three kinds of gentle herd animal has a keen nose for food. Hold something edible – berries, a fruit, a ration or cooked meat – and the herd comes hopping over, runs circles around you and calls out excitedly. Press Q to throw them a piece (on a gamepad it is in the actions list on L3, on a touch screen there is a FEED button). The whole herd rushes at it, squabbles for a few seconds – and one of the animals gets it. Put the food away and they trot off again. A scan tells you which animals beg ("Comes running for food"), and the first time, VEGA explains the trick.

Far out in the galaxy a new, rare kind of planet is waiting too: the toxic world ☠️. Nothing grows or lives on its ash and sulphur, and the air is never breathable. Every toxic world rolls its own dangers: on some the air is corrosive, and out in the open your health slowly drops. Your ship, a station, a base or a sealed room protect you, and the suit liners slow it down. On most the water is poison, and it looks it. In return the ground is rich: rare ores lie just under the surface, and on some toxic worlds right on top of it. ⛏️ Nobody lives there – the settlements are empty ruins, and there are no bandit camps either. VEGA scans every toxic world when you land and tells you what to expect, and the toxic world has music of its own. Fixed along the way: toxic water no longer hurts in Creative mode or with environmental hazards switched off – and neither does the yellow water on Titas.

What else? 💡 Light is real now: a block you colour with Glow now shines by itself – bright as a lamp, in its light colour, and you can see it at night and from far away. The lantern and the campfire finally light up their surroundings, the forge glows warmly, and a beam block bathes the room in soft teal. 🔊 The giants sound like giants now: the colossus stomps with a thunder of its own, the sandworm bursts out of the dunes with a real roar, and the thumper thumps with its own sound. The thumper now looks like one too – with a heavy hammer and orange warning stripes. 🏭 In the factory, bronze and brass now need only one copper ore instead of two – thank you, Jay-Hu911, for this contribution! 🙏 Fruit, herds and toxic worlds come in new worlds; your existing worlds and saves stay as they are, and the network protocol stays at 6. Have fun – and always take a banana with you! 🍌