Version 2026.9.7 – The city update: a lava desert with one gigantic guarded city 🏙️🔥

September 12, 2026

Justus had an idea, and it is a whole world now. 🏙️ New galaxies can roll a lava desert — sand over sandstone, buttes carved by the wind, a lava sea, lava rivers, no water, no plants, no animals and 55 °C. You can breathe, but you will not want to stay outside. And in the middle of that desert stands a single city, 256 blocks across: a purple wall with a red band and four gates, streets in a grid, a landing plaza with lamps and guard posts, two markets, a hall, gardens with pools and trees, watch towers on the corners and houses of one to three storeys in between, each tinted purple or red on its own. Inside it is cool: anywhere in the city under a roof it is 22 °C. The streets, the gardens and the plaza stay desert-hot, so a walk across town is still a walk across a desert. 😅

It is all kept by the G.D.S.: machines with a red stripe across the chest and self-lit red eyes, walking their beat inside the walls and around the gates. They never fight anybody. And nobody in the city knows what the three letters stand for — go ahead and ask, they will tell you exactly that. 🤖 On Marcel's first walk through it every room was pitch dark; now every room has a light in its ceiling, the market shops and the hall too, and the tower shafts all the way up. (A city you already have stays dark — it is built once, when the world is made.)

The chat is a proper window at last. 💬 The lines used to sit bare over the world and were simply unreadable on snow, sand, water and sky; now there is a holo window behind them like VEGA's, same frame and same glow, and the text has the outline. The window is exactly as tall as the text, it is gone entirely when there is nothing to show, and while you type the input row becomes the bottom row of the window. The chat also gets out of VEGA's way: when a story line or the objective chip is up, the chat ends above them instead of drawing across them. And starting a singleplayer world now waits for the world to be ready instead of giving up after fourteen seconds — the progress bar really does follow the build, and the nameless dark curtain that sat there for ten to twenty seconds is gone. ⏳ The TAB menu and the menu screens boot like the HUD now too: header first, then sidebar, list and detail one after another. 🎛️

From your reports: Justus sent five, Lyxette another crash — thank you both! 🙏 Digging a deep shaft no longer yanks you back to the ship (the rescue thought a fifty-block hole was the bottomless void). Doorways with exactly two blocks of headroom let you through, even if you walk in off-centre. The crash that kept catching the chat and photo-note fields is fixed at the root this time. The reply dialog no longer follows you into the main menu. And when you land on the last world, VEGA tells you once that the core sits under the iron-ringed shaft marked on your map and not under the ship — with its own mark on the map and the distance in the compass. 🧭 The protocol and your saves are unchanged; the city world reaches new galaxies only. Have fun! ✨