Version 2026.9.17 – The crystal-net update: switches, sensors, doors on a signal and matter through the beam 💎🔔

September 27, 2026

Crystal can do more than glow now: it carries signals! 💎 Lay a line of crystal conduits from a crystal switch to a lamp, and the whole line glows while the signal is ON. There is nothing more to learn – only ON or OFF, no strengths, no colours, nothing hidden. Everything the line touches belongs to the same network. A crystal button gives a short pulse, a step plate is on while someone stands on it – and you use it all the way you always do, with Interact (E, X on a gamepad, USE on a touch screen): look at a switch and press it, press a button, look at a device and open its menu. 🚪 Doors obey the signal: ON holds them open, OFF locks them (the latch stays stubborn then, and tells you why). 💡 Lamps switch – white, red and green lights, strip lights, torches, lanterns – and go dark while the signal is missing. All your old lamps and doors stay as they are until you lay a conduit beside them.

Then come the senses. 👁️ A proximity sensor notices when someone comes – only you, all players, wild animals, tame animals, hostiles or settlers, just as you set it. A daylight sensor makes the night light for the whole square, a storage sensor knows when the crate is full, and the watcher reports when the block in front of it changes. With a logic block (AND, OR, NOT, XOR) and a timer block (delay, clock, counter, toggle) you build airlocks, puzzle doors and clocks out of them. 🔔 And there is sound: an alarm siren that wails, blinks and turns the beacon red on the map, a chime for the front door, a horn, a melody block with eight notes and four instruments – a few in a row on a clock play a tune – and an announcer that tells you and your allies a line. If you do not want to hear the siren for a while (classroom!), mute it in the settings; it keeps blinking anyway.

Now it gets wild. ✨ The Matter Sender turns the contents of the crate beside it into information and beams it to the Matter Receiver, which turns it back into matter anywhere on the world – without a single conduit in between. Name the receiver when you place it, pick it in the sender, pulse: a stack of ore is at the other end. ⛏️ The Auto-Drill mines the ground below itself, layer by layer, into the crate beside it – Mk1 starts small, Mk3 digs a 9×9 hole thirty-two blocks deep, two blocks per second. In its menu you choose "only ore" (the ground stays standing) or "everything" (a real pit); it stops in front of water and lava and never touches anything you built. 🛠️ The Fabricator crafts one recipe of your choice per pulse from the crates beside it. 🐾 The Caller brings the peaceful animals around and your companions over, and the Clone Tank grows, from one bait and two matter dust, a wild animal of a species you have scanned or tamed on this world in one minute – only peaceful species, never a hostile one. Your beam blocks, beacons, sentry posts, the thumper, the water spout, the energy gate and the hydro tray have a port now too.

It all lives in a new tech category, Crystal Net, after the comm radio; every device has a blueprint, a recipe, its own tile, its own icon and – where it makes a sound – its own clip. The Codex has a new chapter on it, the manual a whole section. The Crystal Net runs in every world, old and new, on planets, moons, asteroids and your own stations – and only while you are on the world: your base wakes up with you. Important: the network protocol moves to version 7 – an older game version has to update before it can join a 2026.9.17 world (the desktop does that on start by itself, the browser is always current). Have fun wiring things up – and give your front door a doorbell! 🔔