Version 2026.9.18 – The ideas update: oil, the drill laser, the hover train, gas giants and a real inventory 🚝🛢️

September 28, 2026

This version is built out of ideas – Justus' idea reports and the planets and animals of the school club. 🛢️ Let us start underground: living worlds now hold oil – in sealed, tar-rimmed pockets forty to a hundred and twenty blocks down, right beside the caves but never in them (no cave floods). It is a still liquid you sink into and cannot breathe in, it burns, and a pocket is finite: what you pump out is gone. The pumping is done by the new fluid pump – a gadget after the titanium drill that draws oil, water and lava into your pack a cell at a time (water and lava refill, oil does not). At the refinery, oil becomes polymer and, with carbon, lubricant – and those are now what the big drills, the mining beam, the diamond drill, the speeder, the clone tank and the fabricator need; the beam block, the sentry post and the matter link want polymer. The starter tier stays oil-free, and oil is never burned as fuel. 🔦 Then there is the drill laser: a Crystal-Net device that, on a signal, lasers a 1×1 shaft straight down – one block every half second, up to 128 deep – and drops ore and oil into the crate beside it. It stops in front of water, lava, bedrock, a full crate and anything protected.

And then: choo-choo! 🚝 The hover train is here – a monorail without rails. You place pylons, and a glowing energy line spawns between them by itself: every pylon links to the one you placed last if it is within 32 blocks and the line does not bend more than about 30°; stacked pylons lift the line, and a line through solid blocks is refused ("Obstacle"). The rail linker couples two pylons by hand – into a loop, a join, or it uncouples two linked ones again. The monorail cab appears on the line where you use it; seat, sleeper and bar wagons couple behind it (six wagons at most). Press E beside a wagon to board – and then you can walk around inside the train while it moves: the wagon is your ground, wagon to wagon through the open ends, or you sit down on a seat. E in the cab opens the panel: speed 1–3, halt / go, autopilot; F leaves. Allies may ride, an open line turns round at both ends, a loop keeps going. Rail stops beside the line halt an autopilot train for a few seconds, and a Crystal-Net signal on the stop sends it off at once. Everything is sold by the new rail dealer (with a post of their own, a depot building and a dialogue) and crafted from the Monorail blueprint.

🎒 The inventory is rebuilt: the suit now has nine equipment slots – head, chest, legs, feet, back, tank, liner and two modules – and gear works only while you wear it. Old saves put on their best pieces by themselves the first time they load, and worn gear survives a death. The backpack grows from 20 to 36 slots in a 9-wide grid over the quick-bar: click a stack to pick it up, put it down or swap. New are the boots against fall damage. 📦 And Justus' find is fixed: dropped blocks lie on the ground in their real texture again (no more half-purple cubes), and other items show their icon.

🪐 Far out waits a new kind of world: the gas giant – a world with no ground at all. Below lies a bottomless sea of cold, toxic gas (fall in and you sink and die within seconds), above it float islands of rock in up to three tiers, and on the lower islands stand sky cities holding a pocket of breathable air. Ships land on metal decks over the gas; outside the cities it is −120 °C and toxic under a storm that never ends, and every animal there flies. New galaxies turn the lone giant of a system into a gas giant, sometimes the outermost planet too, most of them ringed. Between the islands drifts the sky giant – a sailer of 40 to 80 blocks with a row of sails that calls now and then, never lands and never strikes. Just look. 🌊 Under the deep sea of warm, living water worlds now lives the leviathan, the largest form of water life: it hears swimmers, boats and fish through the water (a pier, a raft and the shore are silent), a wake rolls toward you, VEGA warns – and then it breaches or rears up and strikes: a boat under its head takes heavy hull damage, whoever is on it is hurt, the fish in reach are gone. You can only hit it above the water. Achievement Sea Tamer. 🐛 And Marcel's find from a sand sea: the small "worms" all walked on legs. On new worlds a land species can roll the new worm body plan – legless, a chain of links running a wave.

☠️🏜️🌸🍌 On top come the planets and animals of the school club, all in this version: Toxica-Maxima, Justus' poisoned planet – one per galaxy at most, a permanent acid storm, tainted soil, stone, ores and animals with glowing eyes, six to ten factories whose halls breathe, and the Decontaminator that washes tainted ore and meat clean with carbon. Arena Nigra, Theo's black-sand planet – a sea of black sand over basalt, lava in the gorges, a red sky, no plants, and the Ignivermis, three red-and-black sandworms with the sharpest hearing of any worm; worms now hunt the animals that shake the sand on new sand-sea worlds, and a chime, horn or siren on sea sand lures them. Sophie's Fifi plant – tree-sized, yellow leaves, glowing pink blossoms, in groves on every green world, berries growing back every two minutes. And Mini-Michi-Paul by Paul and Ben – knee-high, yellow, in swarms, tamed with two bananas – and the new biped body plan with a favourite food for every begging species. The Crystal Net got its touch-ups too: devices only listen now (a beacon no longer alarms itself), the new Device Eye reports a status, arrows and status lights show the direction, an ON conduit shows a travelling glow, and the timer is a real delay line.

New worlds land on terrain generation 18; every existing world keeps its terrain, its animals and its chunks exactly as they are. Important: the network protocol moves to version 8 – an older game version has to update before it can join a 2026.9.18 world (the desktop does that on start by itself, the browser is always current). Thank you, Justus, for the idea reports, Theo, Sophie, Paul and Ben for your planets and animals – and everyone who is testing. Have fun – and all aboard! 🚝