Version 2026.9.4 – The living-world update: animals finally walk properly, plus glaciers, atolls and meandering rivers 🐾🏔️

September 8, 2026

If you had been looking closely, the animals were sliding across the ground. A leg was a single box swinging at a rate that had nothing to do with how far the animal actually travelled. That is over. 🐾 Every creature has real limbs now: hip, thigh, knee, shin and foot, front legs folding back and hind legs forward, and a foot that is set down stays where it is while the body travels over it. The game picks between six ways of walking on its own – a walk, a trot, a bound, the insect tripod, the wave a many-legged creature runs down its side, and a paddle in the water. Feet look for real blocks, so animals walk over slopes, steps and ledges instead of on an invisible plane. Wings fold at the wrist, tails, necks, trunks and tentacles are chains now and swing outward as a wave, and the jaw finally opens when an animal calls – until now the voices were coming out of sealed heads. 😄 Animals blink, watch you go past, lie down to sleep and flick their ears when they have been standing around a while. And legless swimmers grew fins.

And the landscape is finished. 🏔️ We measured the world builder against 84 real-world landforms – 26 were missing entirely, 15 were half-done. New worlds now roll all of them: slot canyons, rock gates and mountain halls, desert pavement, petrified dunes, rainbow strata, stone forests and labyrinths. Underground there are dripstone caves and karst cathedrals, and rivers that vanish below the surface on karst worlds. Rivers meander and leave oxbow lakes behind, deltas and floodplains form at the mouth, and there are peat bogs, thaw ponds and floating mats of plants. The coast has sea arches and blowholes, tidal islands you can walk to at low water, lagoons and atolls of coral rock, reef fields, blue holes, submarine canyons and deep trenches. Glaciers are real bodies of ice now, with crevasses, icefalls, moraines and ice caves, nunataks poke through the ice sheets, and icebergs drift at sea. Two new blocks (peat and coral rock) and three new kinds of planet – a coral sea, an ice cap and river lowlands – come with it. Your existing worlds stay exactly as they are, of course. 🌍

And then Lyxette sent two more rounds of reports. 🛰️ The biggest one: water you place yourself did not count as water for the animals – a moat dug around a spaceport by hand was simply walked across by the attackers. Now they stop at the bank, wade through the shallow kind, and a flying animal settles on the surface of a pool instead of falling asleep under it. Same story for fire: lava and flames now burn everything that steps in – animals, robbers and Guardian machines – so a fire moat is a real defence. Tame companions never burn, and on a peaceful world nothing burns at all. The sentry post shoots at animals too now (never a tame one) and tells you on a scan how far it reaches and how close to a base core it has to stand. You can fight while swimming, a wide water surface looks like one surface, a hyperjump from the cockpit really arrives in the new system, two ships never share a landing spot any more, and the compass points at your ship again. And when your tool will not break a block, the game finally says which one would – "Needs: Titanium Drill" is in every scan now. Thank you, Lyxette! 🙏 Protocol and saves stay unchanged – the desktop updates itself, the browser is always current. Create a new world and watch the animals walk! ✨