CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to Blocks Beyond the Stars are documented here.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog. Versions are date-based (CalVer) YYYY.MM.N — year, month, release counter within the month (e.g. 2026.7.2; SemVer2-valid, so no leading zeros and never a fourth part — see ADR 0012). Releases up to 0.9.1 followed Semantic Versioning.

Each release below mirrors its GitHub release notes; the richer, screenshot-laden versions live there. (#123) references the pull request or issue.

Unreleased

Added

• Creative and Sandbox worlds fly (#836). Double-tap Space to lift off, Space to rise, Ctrl/C to sink; collision stays on, so you can still land on things and build against them. Flight was there all along as the admin command /fly, which nobody ever found — a young playtester asked for it in capitals while sitting in a Creative world that technically had it. Both non-Explorer modes now say so, in the creation panel and in the on-screen controls hint. Existing Creative saves get it too, not just newly created ones.
• Logs have growth rings (#837). Blocks can carry a separate top/bottom texture, and the first one to use it is wood_log: cut ends show end grain instead of bark, tinted with the same per-world bark hue as the sides. The mechanism is what grass-on-top and crate lids will want next.
• A finer face editor with real tools (#840). Faces are drawn at 32×32 instead of 16×16 — four times the pixels, enough for an eye that isn't two dots. Every face drawn at the old size still works and is scaled up automatically. New Pick colour eyedropper takes the colour under the cursor, and a colour wheel lets you choose by dragging a point around a hue ring (it snaps to the palette — a face stores one hex digit per pixel, so 16 colours is the format's ceiling). Both the main-menu Avatar Designer and the in-game Character tab share the editor, so both gain it.

Fixed

• You can build under water (#851). Every placement while swimming was refused with "Target is not empty" — the cell you aim at under water holds water, and the server only accepted air. A block now displaces water or lava, so underwater walls, pillars out of a lake and a dry room on the seabed are possible at all; water only yields to a tier-3 mining beam, so before this there was no way around it either. Doors and torches keep their refusal: a door lives in an air cell the water would flow straight back into, and a torch is an open flame.

• Hovering scan-drones actually hurt now (#833). A drone's own AI holds a 4–10 block standoff ring and floats 4 blocks up, so it never came within the server's 4-block damage aura — it circled you firing a laser and was mechanically harmless, exactly as a player reported. Ranged machines now damage out to their firing range (16 blocks, matching the laser you can see), still blocked by cover, with the drone's damage lowered to 2/s to suit the longer reach.

• No more hitting through walls, in either direction. The wall check on player attacks only applied to weapons reaching over 6 blocks, so every melee weapon swung straight through cover — and a client that sent no aim data skipped the check entirely. Every attack is now sightline-gated, the same way enemy attacks already were.

• Players are no longer sealed inside rock (#834). A player restored inside solid blocks is dug straight up to the first gap with standing room, or moved to the ship/landing pad if the column has none. The void guards never caught this: they ask whether there is ground below you, and someone entombed at the world origin has stone in every direction. One report showed a player motionless at (0.5, −85.5, 0.5) for a whole session with 7550 stone blocks around him.

• Sneaking holds at corners too (#839). The sneak edge-stop tested the two axes separately, so walking diagonally off an outside corner passed both checks and dropped you anyway. "In Minecraft fällt man nicht runter wenn man sneakt aber hir schon."

• World names are checked as you type them (#835). Characters that cannot go in a save name are refused in the box instead of being silently rewritten three layers down, and Create now says plainly when the name is empty or already taken. A player typed Minecraft Wo bin ich?:( and could not tell whether his world had been created, or what it ended up being called.

• NPCs read as different people (#841). Five skin tones existed, but four of them sat in the same light tan band, so a settlement looked like one face repeated. The palette is spread across the range now — and a human NPC from an older server no longer falls back to robot grey.

• Bug reports describe the right planet (#838). A /bump snapshot read the world the server happened to be ticking rather than the reporter's own, so biome, weather, gravity and the surrounding blocks could all belong to somewhere else entirely.

• Browser: the splash screens and the intro speak again (#831). In the WebGL build the studio splash, the title splash and the intro cinematic showed raw localization keys instead of their texts, because the localizer waited for the entire content download (30+ files, fetched one at a time, re-downloaded on every start) while those screens run on fixed timers. The locale files are now fetched first and the localizer is published immediately, the remaining files download in parallel, and an already-current cache is reused instead of refetched. The intro's voxel ship, which the browser build silently skipped when content hadn't arrived yet, is now built as soon as the content lands.

2026.8.7 — 2026-08-08

The homestead release: the update that makes your base a home. Blocks take painted 32×32 pixel art now, the hand-tier gets a bed, a campfire, chairs you can actually sit on and ladders you can actually climb, and a founded base finally has air — the whole base zone is a life-support field, and sealed rooms of airtight materials extend it as far as you care to build. Fire became something you start and fight, not just something lava does to you. And the game now speaks French and Spanish — every toast, minigame and server message included.

🎨 Paint your blocks — your art on your walls (#817–#821)

• The paint tool (workshop, cheap blueprint): use it on any placed solid block and a 32×32 pixel editor opens — the same editor the ship faces use, just finer. Paint, confirm, done: the design sits on the block, on plain cubes and every shape alike, and other players see it too.
• A design library that travels with you. Save designs locally and reuse them in any world and on any server — your gallery sign, your warning stripes, your kitchen tiles.
• Designs are shared per world, Minecraft-map style: identical art is stored once (up to 256 designs per save). Mining a painted block returns the plain block — paint is decoration on the world, not an item variant.
• Moderation from day one: /reportpaint files the nearest painted design for review, and admins can /paintwipe a player's designs — wiped art blanks everywhere, live and across restarts.

🛏️ Make yourself at home — bed, campfire, furniture (#803–#809)

• The bed (hand recipe: logs + fibre, no blueprint) — E sets your home spawn, and resting near it heals you. The researched heal tank stays the clear upgrade: it heals faster and also feeds and recharges.
• The campfire cooks: cooked meat fills you far better than raw and even heals. It also warms — cold nights near the fire read as comfortable — and it never spreads.
• Sit on chairs. E on any chair seats you, camera at seat height, look around freely; other players see you sitting. Every shapeable material now forms tables, chairs, fences, sheets and pots through the normal Shape action.
• Ladders finally climb. A placed ladder was a full solid cube — you could never reach it from the side, and settlement deck holes were plugged by their own ladder. Ladders now mesh as a thin wall plate you step into and climb; settlement upper storeys just work.
• Storage & decor: a hand-tier wood box (small: 8 stacks — the workshop crate stays unlimited), a lantern, a tintable rug and a flower pot with a world-tinted flower.

🫁 A founded base always has air (#782)

• The base protection zone is now a life-support field: stand anywhere inside it and your oxygen regenerates, even on toxic or airless worlds — where you can build is where you can breathe. Visitors breathe too; build protection still only binds to owners and allies.
• Works above the atmosphere line and under water (an underwater base zone is a dome), and ship cabins no longer drain past the atmosphere line either.
• On worlds without breathable air the HUD says so: a "Life support" toast on zone entry and the O2 bar names your base as the air source.

🚪 Sealed base rooms breathe — and the energy door holds the air in (#793, #794, #795)

• Build rooms with air. A room built at your base out of airtight materials — stone, metal, concrete, brick, glass, and yes, natural rock (dig a cave!) — now gets life support beyond the base's radius-8 air zone, as long as it is sealed and connected to the base. Dirt, sand, snow and plants leak, and so do shaped blocks — a ramp is not a wall.
• The energy door is THE airtight door. New craftable Energy Door (workshop, blueprint): the same walk-through blue field as the ship's hatch. You stroll right through it, the air stays in — and because the curtain always seals, an auto-opening door can never depressurise your room. Wooden, hinged and sliding doors deliberately don't hold air. Chain room after room, door by door, into a whole airtight outpost. The energy door is also placeable in the ship, station and settlement editors.
• You can SEE the air now. On worlds without breathable air every founded base shows a soft blue shield dome over its core, and the O2 bar names what keeps you breathing.
• Breaking the seal warns you. Mine a wall (or let a fire eat one) and everyone at the base gets a "no longer airtight" warning the moment the rooms fall back to suit oxygen — no more silent leaks.

🔥 Fire you can start — and put out (#784–#791)

• Light it. Swing a torch at a plant, a log or leaves and it catches. So does a shot from a laser pistol or plasma blaster — energy weapons set flammable terrain alight, kinetic ones (scrap/gauss pistol) don't. Until now the only fire in the game came from flowing lava.
• Put it out. Hit a flame and you stamp it out; you no longer need a bucket of water to fight a fire. Rain and storms douse fires under open sky — but a fire under a roof or in a cave keeps burning, and the ash-rain of a lava world won't help you at all. While rain falls on it, wet vegetation refuses to catch in the first place.
• Fires stay fires, not wildfires. Flames now creep and fray instead of advancing as a perfect wave, and a single fire only spreads so far from where it started — a forest burns, a continent doesn't.
• Nothing you built can burn. Ships, settlements, stations, factories and claimed bases never catch fire. Village greenhouses — wooden frames full of crops — could previously be burned down by a splash of lava.
• The right things burn now. Pine needles, palm fronds and mushrooms went up in smoke before… except they didn't: a burning pine kept its canopy, while kelp and coral burned underwater. Flammability is data-driven now, and it matches what you'd expect.
• Fires survive a save. Reloading a world mid-fire used to leave flames that burned forever without ever turning to ash. They now burn down exactly where they left off.

🌍 The game speaks French and Spanish now (#810–#816)

• Français y Español: complete translations of every one of the game's ~2,900 text keys, plus the story pack. The settings language control is a real picker now (with native names — "Français", not "French"), and community languages appear in it automatically once their translation passes 45% — Italian, you're next.
• Every text surface is localizable now. Server messages — join screens, trade, docking, repair, admin output, all of it — used to be hardcoded English; German players saw English toasts all over. 334 server messages and all 8 minigames now speak the player's language.
• VEGA and the NPCs follow along: AI-generated dialogue, banter and mission flavour answer in French and Spanish too.
• Wiki articles and What's new entries can carry French/Spanish text and fall back to English until translated; the web portal now greets browsers that ask for neither German nor English in English.
• For contributors: a new translation guide plus a machine-first-pass pipeline (tools/translate_locale.py) make the next language a much smaller mountain.

⬆️ Upgrades are real upgrades now (#798, #799)

• Tier upgrades consume their predecessor — the oxygen tank II is built from your oxygen tank I (and III from II), the advanced scanner from the hand scanner, vibro knife → plasma sword from machete → vibro knife, laser pistol → plasma blaster from gauss → laser. Upgrade recipes are re-priced as a discount against building from scratch, and every consumed item can always be re-crafted (the hand scanner got a cheap rebuild recipe).
• The Mk3 AI core replaces the Mk2 when built into your ship, salvaging half the Mk2's build cost back into your pools — no more dead module hoarding.
• The starter drill and scrap pistol deliberately stay out of any chain: they are your zero-energy fallbacks and can never be consumed.

⛏️ Powered drills draw suit energy (#796, #797)

• The titanium drill and the mining beam always declared an energy cost — and never drew it. They now charge suit energy per swing, exactly as their descriptions promise; an empty suit rejects the swing with a clear message. The basic and diamond drills stay energy-free — the diamond drill's "needs no power" niche is real now, and a drained player is never locked out of mining.
• The mining beam's area sweep now respects tool tier per block — it can no longer sweep up ore the tool couldn't mine directly. Yields are untouched: upgrades buy speed, access and area, never more items per block.

🧰 The craft list puts buildable things first (#826)

• Crafting and ship-module lists used to show entries in data-file order — locked entries buried the next thing you could actually make. Both lists now sort craftable now → blueprint unlocked, materials missing → blueprint locked, with simpler recipes first within each group. The order doesn't reshuffle as you walk around a station, and when something becomes craftable it jumps to the top.

🛠️ Internal

• README, USER_MANUAL, DEVELOPER guide and the docs index caught up with everything the last month shipped (#825).

2026.8.6 — 2026-08-06

The lights-on release: a focused round of fixes. Every ship room is actually lit now — the Hammerhead's dark aft compartments were the tip of an iceberg where no authored ship layout contained a single interior lamp — the prologue's opening shot stopped flying the camera through mountainsides, and two browser bugs that hit glitch.fun players on their very first minute (singleplayer refusing to connect, joiners falling through unstreamed terrain) are gone.

💡 Lights on in every ship room (#776, #779)

• Every room gets a ceiling lamp. Multi-room ships were only lit where navigation-light glow happened to bleed in through a window: the Hammerhead's bridge was bright while its workshop and cabins stayed pitch black, and the Courier, Thunderbolt, Deathblock and Hauler interiors got no light at all — no authored layout contained a single interior lamp. Ship finishing now hangs a lamp below the ceiling of every station room; this covers all authored layouts, the starter ship and player-built ships, without touching the hand-tuned layout files.
• Light crosses chunk seams now. Ship hulls mesh in 16-block chunks and a lamp's light stopped dead at the seam, so even a lit room could go dark halfway. The whole hull's light sources now feed every chunk — in the landed ship, the flight view and the build preview alike.

🎥 The prologue camera respects the terrain (#777, #778)

• The first-spawn orbit around your landed ship flew a blind circle — on a mountainside part of the ring sat inside the slope and you looked straight through the terrain. The cinematic now scans the orbit ring before it starts: it raises the shot if the classic height is blocked, sweeps back and forth along the widest open arc instead of forcing a full circle, switches to a high crane shot in craters, and falls back to the dim+panel opening when nothing clears. A per-frame line-of-sight guard also catches terrain that streams in mid-shot.

🌐 Browser fixes — glitch.fun first minutes (#771–#774)

• Singleplayer connects reliably (#771, #772): clicking Singleplayer in the browser could bounce back to the menu with "Could not connect to the server" — the loading screen handed off while the in-process server was still booting. It now waits for the server to be up, and the boot-blocking cloud-save lookup times out sooner.
• No more falling through the world on join (#773, #774): joining a hosted world from the browser dropped you into the void once an 8-second spawn grace ran out, void rescue and all. Joiners now hover in place until the floor below has actually streamed in, then land.

🛠️ Internal

• New glitch.fun-only build + deploy workflow: a browser-facing fix can now ship to the store build on demand, without cutting a full release (#775).

2026.8.5 — 2026-08-05

The premiere release: the game opens like a film now. A watchable in-engine intro cinematic runs before your very first menu, VEGA's prologue got a real staging — letterbox bars, a slow orbit around your landed ship, a glitch flash as she boots — and she found her voice: radio chatter crackles along while her lines type out. Story memories flash back with a cinematic colour grade, and the HUD celebrates the moment your knowledge unlocks new research — a moment that means something again, because the whole knowledge ladder was stretched so the tech tree unlocks in waves instead of all at once. A nine-part playtest batch rounds it off, fixing everything from titans biting through ruin walls to jittery NPC ships in space.

🎬 Curtain up — the game gets a real opening (#759–#762)

• Intro cinematic: a ~28-second space cinematic between the title splash and the menu — starfield and nebula reveal, a sun pan with a voxel fighter crossing, planet approach, white-flash hand-off. Rendered live in-engine with the game's actual art, so it always matches what you'll play. It runs once per install, any key skips it, and a new "Watch intro" button on the Credits screen replays it. Captions in English and German.
• The prologue got a stage (#754, #760): VEGA's three opening pages play through the normal speech panel now (proper width, paging, UI scale — the full-screen black dialog is gone), dressed with letterbox, a slow exterior orbit of your actually landed ship, a push-in, and a snap back to the pilot seat with a glitch flash as VEGA boots. Esc skips the whole narration.
• VEGA has a voice (#761): vocoder radio-babble accompanies every line she types — language-independent, so German and English sound equally alive, and it stops the instant the line completes or you skip.
• Memory flashbacks (#762): story recollections pulse a short cinematic look — light letterbox, cooler desaturated colours, a chroma/grain burst — without ever locking your controls.
• Fixed along the way: the world-flavour hint no longer jumps the queue ahead of the prologue (the reason the opening sometimes only started after pressing [N]), and VEGA lines no longer play out invisibly behind the loading screen.

🔬 Research announces itself (#763)

• When gathered knowledge pushes a blueprint over its research threshold, the HUD celebrates it top-centre: the blueprint's icon, "New research available!" and the blueprint's name, with a glow pulse, a shine sweep and a soft two-note chime. Respects reduced motion.
• Fixed along the way: achievement toasts were silently mute (their sound cue never existed) — they play a rising arpeggio now.

🧠 Research pacing — the tech tree unlocks in waves again (#767)

• Every blueprint costs knowledge now: the ladder runs from ~3–10 for early tools through ~15–40 mid-game up to 60–120 for the late tiers (Deathblock, AI core Mk3, matter resynthesizer). Previously the whole tree topped out at 24 knowledge and about half the blueprints — all ships included — were free, so everything unlocked almost at once.
• Deeper prerequisites: ships sit behind the docking module, cannons behind hull plating, the heal tank behind the field medkit, the jump generator behind the radar array, and more — the tree reads as real progression chains now.
• Knowledge faucets capped: arcade minigames pay per star newly earned on that game (replays pay nothing, improving your rating pays the difference), story beats award less, and taming a species you already tamed no longer trickles endless points.
• Existing saves keep their banked knowledge and everything already unlocked — the new upper tiers simply sit above most veterans' totals, so the research tab has surprises again.

🦋 Micro-fauna joins the Codex (#757, #752)

• Ambient critters (butterflies, fireflies, wisps, …) can now be scanned with the handheld scanner — 28 localized kinds, a new Micro-fauna discoveries chapter and a small knowledge award per first find. Thermal vision shows critters as small named contacts.
• The wisp (#752): the bat-like skyray was replaced by a small drifting glow orb whose colour is unique per world — look for it at night.

Added

• Low-vitals warning (#753): any HUD bar (health, oxygen, energy, hunger, hull, shield) below 10 % blinks red and beeps until it recovers past 15 %.

🔧 Fixes

• Attacking animals no longer walk through the player: hunters hold at a size-scaled ring, roaming machines stop at bodies too, and big creatures barely lunge (#749).
• Titans no longer spawn half inside ruins or bite through walls — spawn and movement now check the actual body volume (#750).
• "G: loot" no longer shows where the key does nothing (flying/driving), a full backpack reports "inventory full" instead of silently no-opping, and the loot sound only plays on actual success (#751).
• The controls hint finally mentions jump and crouch (Space, Ctrl/C) (#755).
• NPC ships in space (traders, UFOs, raiders, other players) move smoothly: buffered interpolation on the client, bandit raiders broadcast their approach/leave movement, remote pilots refresh continuously, and patrol stop-go easing on the server (#756).

2026.8.4 — 2026-08-05

The shipyard release: four new ships joined the fleet — and every one of them started as a pencil drawing on Justus' sketch pad. The Hammerhead brings the game's first true multi-room interior, the Courier is the fastest thing in the sky, the Thunderbolt a mid-size gunship and the Deathblock a slow armoured brick. There is finally a reason to hunt bandits, too: quest givers put bounties on camps and raider ships. VEGA stopped cutting off her own sentences and keeps a re-readable tips log, the HUD tells you what you just picked up, planets roll their own cast of critters with 11 new alien species — and the machines stopped streaming in endless reinforcements.

🚀 Four new ships — drawn on paper, built in blocks (#723, #727–#729)

All four new ship types were designed by Justus — with pencil and sketch pad — and translated plan-for-plan into the game:

• Hammerhead (DE Hammerhai): a heavy gunship and the game's first multi-room interior — a wide 12-block bridge up front, a corridor running aft, workshop and sleeping cabins each behind their own interior door, stern airlock between the split engine block. Unlocks after the corvette + ship cannon.
• Courier (DE Kurier): the fastest ship in the game — an unarmed messenger with a glass nose, swept wings and a raised lookout. "Perfect for those who report battles instead of fighting them." Unlocks after the scout.
• Thunderbolt (DE Blitzschlag): a mid-size strike gunship — inset bridge, full-width workshop hall, flank cannons plus a long bow barrel.
• Deathblock (DE Todesklotz): the slowest, tankiest assault brick in the fleet — stepped brutalist silhouette, overhanging quarters, a cannon per flank and quad stacked engines. Unlocks after the Hammerhead.
• NPC traders picked the new types up automatically — you will meet them in the wild.

⚔️ Bounty missions — quest givers put a price on the bandits (#730, #731)

• Camp bounty: a settlement mission board on a planet with an uncleared bandit camp now offers a bounty to drive the bandits out. Accepting it marks the camp on your planet map; clear the camp (everyone holding the bounty gets credit — co-op friendly) and report back for a reward that beats the usual gather jobs.
• Raider bounty: station mission boards in pirate systems offer a bounty on the raider ship prowling the sector. While you hold it, the raider will show up on your next flight — no more hoping for the ambush dice. Drive it off and report back; the job is repeatable while the system stays pirate country.
• Bounties are only offered where the fight is winnable (they respect the Bandits/space-combat/ship- weapon world rules) and use kid-friendly wording throughout — bandits are chased away, never killed.
• The AI mission-text generator knows about bounty jobs now, so generated postings match the job instead of reading like a delivery.

🗣️ VEGA finishes her sentences — and you can re-read them (#736–#738)

• No more cut-off speech: long VEGA lines (German especially) were silently truncated at ~4 lines. The speech panel now splits long text into pages — [N] turns the page, a (1/2) indicator shows where you are, and the typewriter plays per page.
• VEGA tips log: every onboarding lesson and advisor hint VEGA ever told you is re-readable in the ship terminal's Story tab — dismissed a hint too fast? It's all there, in order, story pack or not.
• A proper opening: new games with a story pack begin with a short three-page text prologue — a small ship, no memory of who you are, then VEGA crackles awake. [N] advances, [Esc] skips.

🎒 You can see what you pick up now (#744, #745)

• Pickup feed: a small column above the hotbar announces what you just collected — icon +n item name, localized, newest at the bottom; repeat pickups merge and count up ("+7 berries") instead of stacking rows.
• Hotbar stack counts: every hotbar cell shows its stack size in the corner — no more opening the inventory to check if you have enough wood.

🦋 Every planet rolls its own critters — 11 alien species (#725)

• Butterflies, beetles and fireflies stopped being identical everywhere: each planet rolls a deterministic species subset and colour palette of its own — planet A's moths are consistently different from planet B's, and revisits look the same.
• 11 new alien species on two new motion styles (parabolic hops and slow balloon drift): prismwings and crystal beetles on crystal worlds, embermites and ashhoppers on lava worlds, frostmites on ice, gasbags and sporedrifters in lush jungles, skyrays, sandskimmers, night-glowing plankton over water and cavemoths underground — crystal, lava and ice worlds stop being empty.
• Every individual rolls its own size (rare giants included), rain grounds the flyers and brings out worms and snails, and low gravity makes everything float a little floatier.

🤖 Enemy pacing — machines stop streaming in, space combat is opt-in again (#740, #741)

• No more instant reinforcements on planets: destroying a robot or scan-drone used to summon its replacement within a fraction of a second (the spawn timer silently banked time while the population was full). Refills now wait a slow, varied 20–45 s (plus a breather after each kill), so machine fights are encounters with quiet in between — not an endless stream.
• Machines let go when you leave: hostiles far from every player despawn instead of trailing you across the planet forever.
• Space hostiles wait for you to come to them: drones and UFOs could see farther than their own spawn distance, so the UFO started hunting your ship the moment you launched — every single flight. Their detection ranges now match the "you choose to fly out to them" design; park at the launch point and nobody bothers you.
• Every flight stops replaying the same wave: destroyed drones/UFOs stay gone across relaunches until the sector re-arms (~8 minutes), the wave sits on a different bearing each launch, and every 4th flight runs quieter.

🔧 Fixes

• Bandit hold-up dialog fits its text (#734): long demand lines (the German "Wegzoll" lines especially) stuck out past both edges of the dialog — the line wraps now and the panel grows to fit.
• Same seed, same rocks — really (#719): the mineral-family roll for mineable space rocks keyed on the launch seed instead of the saved world seed, so desktop worlds all shared one pattern and hosted worlds re-rolled their rocks on relaunch. Every world now grows its own stable rock families, as promised.
• Ambient sounds are stable across platforms (#720): procedural audio seeded from a per-process hash could differ between runs and platforms; it uses a stable hash now.

2026.8.3 — 2026-08-04

The wonders release: planets stopped playing it safe. Terrain generation learned a whole catalogue of spectacular landforms — a canyon that girdles the globe, crater chains with ejecta rays, stone arches and sea stacks, tiered sky islands with endless waterfalls, cenotes, lava tubes and caves that finally open to the surface — and about half of all new worlds now form true continents with real oceans between them. Combat grew up alongside: enemies show health bars, the crosshair does real aiming (with auto-aim as a world rule you can switch off), and ship weapons finally respect their own cooldown and energy budget. Rounding it off: multi-biome worlds draw from their whole biome pool instead of always the same entries, and NPCs stand on the ground, step into the light and stopped being clones.

🏜️ Terrain wonders — the surface gets spectacular (#698–#703)

• A world-girdling mega-rift: a rare planet carries one canyon system that wraps the entire globe — a genuine "Valles Marineris" you can follow around the world.
• Craters became events: complex craters with central peaks and terraced walls, crater chains, and bright ejecta rays streaking away from young impacts.
• Per-world terrain grain: dune seas and mountain ranges now run in a consistent per-world direction instead of isotropic noise — deserts read as wind-swept, ranges as ranges.
• Geological set pieces: hexagonal basalt-column fields, travertine terrace pools, penitente ice-blade fields, salt polygons, ring-mountain calderas and whole-planet escarpments.
• Hybrid worlds: landform styles and archetypes can mix on one planet now, so a world can be canyon country on one face and dune sea on another.
• This is a one-time reshape: terrain you have not yet explored regenerates with the new formulas — already-built and explored chunks keep their exact shape.

🌊 Continents and true oceans — new worlds only (#704)

• Large planets (roughly half of them, the start world included) now split into continental platforms and ocean basins: domain-warped coastlines, a shelf falling away into deep sea, and the sea level flooding the basins — so beaches, rivers and landmarks react for free (a massif offshore becomes a volcanic island, a rift becomes an ocean trench).
• Lava-ocean worlds roll basalt continents in their magma seas.
• Existing worlds are untouched — continents apply only to newly created worlds (server flag continents=off opts a new world out).

🪨 Real overhangs: arches, sky islands, cenotes (#705–#707)

• The engine's strict one-surface heightfield learned multi-band columns — and the first tenants are natural arches, sea stacks off rocky coasts and hoodoo rock spires.
• Multi-tier sky islands stack floating layers with stalactite undersides and endless rim waterfalls pouring into the landscape below.
• Cenotes — sinkholes with overhanging lips and a pool at the bottom — and vast underground mega-caverns with their own lakes.

🕳️ The tunnel carver: caves finally reach the surface (#708, #709)

• A new deterministic tunnel carver threads worm-like passages through the rock — until now every cave was a sealed bubble; cave mouths and skylight shafts now genuinely open to the sky, so you can walk (or fall) into the underground.
• Lava tubes wind under volcanic terrain, waterfalls carve plunge pools where they land, and glacier worlds crack into crevasse fields.

⚡ …and generation stayed fast (#712)

• All of the above initially made every chunk pay for every wonder — a per-world wonder profile, per-cell tunnel caching and distance-first feature probes brought generation back near its old speed, with bit-identical terrain (verified by a hash sweep over every planet type).

⚔️ Enemy health bars, real aiming, honest ship weapons (#692–#694)

• Every damageable enemy shows a health bar — bandits, creatures, space hostiles, planet machines — green fading through amber to red (companions cyan), visible while in combat or under your crosshair, with distance fades matching the nameplates. A hit marker flashes when your shot lands. Client toggle in Settings.
• The crosshair aims now: whatever is genuinely under your crosshair is the target; the old magnetic lock — which could kill an enemy behind your back — only assists within a forward cone. AutoAim is a world rule (default on, so nothing changes unless you want it to): switch it off and only real crosshair hits (on foot) or boresight shots (in space) land, misses visibly striking the terrain.
• Ship weapons play by their stats: the server now enforces weapon cooldown and a reactor-fed energy pool — no more fire-rate cheating — and weapon range/cadence come from the fitted module (the tier-2 laser finally gets its longer range).

🌿 Multi-biome worlds use their whole biome pool (#696)

• Worlds rolled how many biomes they get but always took the first entries of their type's pool — so the pool's tail biomes never appeared anywhere, and the first one appeared everywhere. A seeded per-world shuffle now also decides which biomes make the cut (newly generated chunks only).

🧑‍🚀 NPCs: feet on the ground, faces in the light (#711)

• No more hovering: settlement folk, camp NPCs, bandits and enemies stand on the actual blocks (a leftover +0.5 offset from the worldgen overhaul), and settlement NPCs re-ground as they stroll — dig the floor out from under one and it drops.
• Brighter: avatar tint textures rendered at ~40 % of their authored brightness — they are normalised at load now, outfit palettes widened and lifted, and bandit/Guardian materials get the standard lighting lift.
• No more clones: per-NPC size variation, independent trouser colours, varied android chassis tones (only ~60 % of researchers are robotic now), and each NPC rolls a stable face and hair of their own.

2026.8.2 — 2026-08-03

The prospector release: space became worth mining. Asteroids gather in real belts you can see on the flight chart, every mineable space rock now rolls its own size and mineral family — water ice included — and EVA mining finally plays by planet rules: the right drill, real hardness, and ore that never silently vanishes. The planets kept pace: star systems and worlds carry proper names now, seas and larger lakes grew sandy beaches, and temperature turned from a HUD number into a real survival pressure that drains your suit before it ever touches your health. Rounding it off: a true Sandbox mode at world creation, flora that stopped growing in identical rows, scrollbars you can actually see, and selection lists that finally speak your language.

✨ Real asteroid belts (#683)

• Asteroids now orbit in belts (new worlds): all of a system's landable asteroids share 1–2 orbit annuli — the outer belt just beyond the outermost planet, big systems sometimes a second inner belt — instead of scattering randomly across planet orbits. Existing worlds keep their layout untouched.
• Belts are worth flying to: every asteroid body carries a cluster of ship-laser-mineable rocks at its position, and launching from an asteroid surrounds you with a dense 9-rock field instead of the usual three.
• The flight chart shows the belt as a belt: one translucent band with its own label ("Asteroid belt" / "Asteroidengürtel") instead of a smear of stacked orbit rings.

✨ Planetary rings in more colours (#684)

• Ring systems now roll a seeded material family — icy white stays the norm, but dusty tan, rocky grey and a rare pale violet appear too — so two ringed planets under the same star no longer wear the same colour. Applies everywhere a ring is drawn (orbit view, surface sky, horizon band), including in existing worlds (same seed → same tilt and band pattern, just richer tints).

🪨 Every space rock is its own rock (#687)

• Mineable mini-asteroids were identical clones — the same r=2 sphere, titanium core, iron/copper shell. Now each rock rolls a seeded mineral family: stony (40 %, iron veins in rock), metallic (25 %, the classic titanium core), icy (20 %, hand-mineable water ice around a rocky heart), carbonaceous (10 %) and rare crystalline (5 %) — mirroring the landable asteroid families.
• Three sizes: common pebbles (7 blocks), the classic mid rock (33) and rare boulders (123 blocks) with a core that grows with the rock. Shoot-down loot follows family and size — boulders pay out more.
• The first rock of every field stays the classic metallic mid-size, so each field still guarantees one titanium core. Fully deterministic per world seed; respawned rocks keep rolling.

⛏️ EVA asteroid mining plays fair (#685)

• During a spacewalk, any asteroid block fell to a single bare-hand click — no drill, no hardness check, titanium included — and with a full inventory the ore was silently destroyed. EVA mining now runs the same rules as planetside: drill kind and tier gate the block, hardness takes several timed hits, and a full inventory refuses the break (progress is kept, the block drops on the next hit once there is room).
• Client-side it feels like planet mining too: hold-to-mine at drill pace, and the aim marker warms from cyan to orange with your progress. Editing your own ship or station stays instant — that's construction, not prospecting.

✨ Star systems & planets got real names (#678)

• Several system-name registries instead of one pattern: coined proper names ("Tharion"), catalog designations ("HX-113"), two-part region names ("Ember Veil", "Korveth's Reach") and rare archetype-flavored names — pirate space sounds menacing, hub space busy.
• Planets are designations with a hierarchy: Roman numerals ("Tharion II"), exoplanet letters in catalog systems ("HX-113 b") — while landmark worlds (ringed planets, the Lone Giant, Twin Worlds, the Hub capital and your start planet) carry coined proper names flavored by their biome: ice worlds sound cold, lava worlds harsh. Twin Worlds share a name stem; moons letter after their planet ("Tharion II-a") or get short coined names of their own around landmarks.
• No more baked-in English: asteroid fields and wrecks are coined single words paired with the localized kind label on the map; a Hub's first station is a coined port ("Port Halvek").
• Names are unique per galaxy, profanity-guarded (EN+DE), and retroactive: they are display-only, so existing worlds keep every waypoint and simply wake up with better names — the underlying body layout is pinned byte-identical by a new regression test.

🏖️ Beaches along seas and larger lakes (#679)

• Coastlines grew real sandy beaches: a 1–3-block band of sand above the waterline plus a sandy shallow-water apron, with the varied topsoil giving a genuine 2–5-block deep sand layer. A large-scale coast mask keeps it natural — roughly half the shore is beach, alternating with bare rocky stretches, and beach width follows the slope (flat coast → wide beach, cliff → sliver).
• Larger lakes and deep ponds get shore rings too; small pools, 1-wide rivers and puddles stay as they are. Tropical shores grow the occasional palm.
• Planets can override the material via a new beachBlock data key (default sand); dry, airless and lava-sea worlds keep their coasts beach-free. Applies to newly generated terrain — coastline you have already explored keeps its current shape.

🌡️ Temperature is now a real survival hazard (#666–#671)

• The temperature reading stops being cosmetic: outside the suit's comfort band (−5…40 °C, with a grace margin) the suit's climate control drains suit energy — the further past the band, the faster — and only once the suit is empty does slow exposure damage set in (starvation-level, never a burst kill). Tuning anchor: an ice world costs you ≈ 10 minutes unprotected, ≈ 30 with the tier-2 insulation liner.
• Shelter genuinely matters: underground blends toward a steady cave temperature over ~24 blocks of depth, a roof over your head halves the severity, an open fire warms like a campfire (capped inside the comfort band), lava-adjacent spaces run hot and ice-walled rooms stay freezing.
• Vacuum joined in: on EVA and above atmosphere, a sun-tracking hull temperature (−150…+120 °C across the day curve) feeds the same math, and the HUD shows a temperature readout on spacewalks.
• The mechanic is the first real consumer of the EnvironmentalHazards world rule — Creative and Sandbox worlds stay exempt.

🏗️ True Sandbox mode at world creation (#662, #677)

• The new-world panel offers a third mode next to Explorer and Creative: Sandbox — free crafting at every craft/build/repair site, no oxygen or hunger drain, planet enemies and bandits off, cheats allowed, and all creative grants (blueprints, ships, starter kit) forced on. The mode is baked into the save, so it persists without any flags.
• Fixed the launch-week playtest bug where the creative starter kit filled the whole backpack and mining rejected every swing with "inventory full" (#677): the kit's materials now land in the starter ship's cargo hold, tools in the backpack — mining works from the first minute.

🌿 No two plants alike (#675)

• Flora of one species used to render as identical clones on a grid. Every plant now rolls individual size (a natural bell around the norm with rare outliers), a height-vs-width squash, a slight off-grid position and its own rotation — and an 8×8 patch pattern lets meadows form visible stands of taller and shorter growth.
• Purely visual and hash-deterministic from the world position: every client sees the same plants, saves and protocol untouched, applies to existing worlds. Player-built shapes stay exact.

🖱️ Scrollbars you can see (#664)

• The in-game ship-computer menu (all 12 tabs), the Codex and the vendor trade dialog scrolled only via mouse wheel with nothing showing that a list continues below the fold. All of them now show a thin auto-hiding scrollbar that vanishes when a page fits.
• The vendor dialog's offer list had no scroll region at all — long lists clipped past the panel. It scrolls properly now and keeps its position across a trade.

🌍 Selection lists speak your language (#672)

• Playing in German (or Italian), several in-game lists still showed raw English ids and enum names. Now localized: tech-tree categories, map body kinds and statuses, mission objective types, story-log chapter tags, the crafting "Max" button, the quality presets in Settings and the arcade "no record yet" line.

2026.8.1 — 2026-08-02

The wildlife release: this one belongs to the creatures. Every world's fauna rolls from a bigger, more varied pool now — translucent medusae drifting over the treetops, elephant-scale titans striding across the plains in small herds, fish that actually school. And everything out there moves like it lives in the world: animals respect cliffs, water and the walls you build (pens work now!), steer around obstacles instead of jittering against them, ease over slopes, bank into turns, and scatter as a herd when you startle one. Water learned two lessons of its own — a flowing stream no longer fossilises into permanent puddles when the server restarts, and shallow water finally looks shallow. Rounding it off: the chat overlay stays out of your HUD's way and fades when it has nothing to say, /tp finally works in singleplayer, and the Italian translation passed the 20 % mark.

🦑 New creature kinds: medusae and titans (#637, #638, #640)

• Medusae — jellyfish that drift through air and water: a translucent pulsing bell over a glowing nucleus, 6–10 tapering tentacles hanging in a ring, usually bioluminescent, never hostile. About a quarter of all air- and water-dwelling species roll the new body plan, and each species keeps its own preferred hover altitude instead of the old fixed height.
• Titans — elephant- and giraffe-scale land megafauna, far beyond the old size cap: pillar legs, a stacked neck (giraffe) or a trunk (elephant), horns worn as ivory tusks. Titans are huntable — 3.5× the health, 3–6 drops — but a provoked titan genuinely bites back, so bring a plan. They need open, level ground to appear, notice you from further away, and stride with a slow, weighty cadence.
• Bigger rosters — species per world go from 3 to 5 (sparse worlds) and 6 to 9 (rich worlds), with a guarantee that every world gets ground and airborne wildlife, and water worlds get something swimming.
• Existing worlds keep their fauna. Known species keep their names, colours, temperaments and stats; some gain a new silhouette, and the new species join alongside them.

🐾 Herds, flocks and schools (#639)

• Species have a social group size now: titan herds of 2–4, schooling fish in 3–5, flocks of fliers, the occasional grazer pair — placed together at spawn and gently held together while they roam, so a herd reads as a herd instead of scattered loners.

🏞️ Creatures respect the terrain — and your walls (#648, #650, #651)

• Cliffs are walls now. A land animal no longer glides diagonally through a mesa face, never marches along the seabed fully submerged, and a water creature never beaches itself and roams dry land until it despawns.
• Fauna reads the actual built world, not just the generated terrain: player-built walls block, dug pits hold, ramps and floors carry. You can pen animals with builds now.
• They steer. A blocked creature probes detours to either side and follows the obstacle around — contour- and wall-following instead of bumping and re-rolling — and neighbours keep a size-scaled personal space, so groups flow instead of stacking.

🎞️ Motion that reads as alive (#652, #653, #654)

• Land walkers ease over terrain instead of snapping a block per step; fliers swoop smoothly. Bodies pitch along their real motion and airborne species bank into turns — hoppers keep their pop, because the pop is their gait.
• Herd panic: wound or startle one animal and its kin nearby bolt with it — or, for the brave species, turn on you together. Fleeing animals jink in a zig-zag instead of running a straight, aimable line.
• The client now extrapolates creature motion between server updates, so everything above moves crisply instead of stepping at the network rate.

💬 Chat that stays out of the way — and /tp in singleplayer (#636, #642)

• The chat scrollback fades out 12 s after the last message and comes back at full strength the moment anything happens. It moved into the free lane of the HUD — it no longer covers the scan panel, the left hotbar cells or the controls hint — follows the UI-scale setting, and hides itself while you pilot a ship. A Chat display comfort setting (fade out / always on / off) and a rebindable J key put you in charge.
• /tp works in singleplayer now. Admin cheats were unreachable in solo play — the bundled game now enables them for your own worlds (existing saves included), while guests on hosted worlds and dedicated servers stay gated as before. Server replies land in the chat scrollback, so /tp can actually show you its target list.

💧 Water behaves (#657, #658)

• Flowing water survives a restart as flow. The simulation's per-cell state was memory-only, so every restart froze transient tongues into permanent, never-receding one-block sheets. Flow state is persisted now: an orphaned stream retracts properly across restarts. (Sheets fossilised before this release stay — mine them away.)
• Shallow water sits visibly below the bank instead of flush with it, so a thin spread tongue no longer looks like a full basin standing a block high in the landscape. Lava stays flush on purpose — it is opaque and you stand on it.

🔊 Water sounds like water (#655)

• Every fluid-simulation step used to play the full block-placed knock — flowing water sounded like rhythmic hammering. Fluid transitions are silent now and feed the ambient brook/waterfall rush instead, which was always the intended water sound.
• Mining and placing cues are positional 3D now: full volume at your own hands, fading with distance, silent past 20 m — so another player building nearby no longer sounds like they are inside your helmet.

🇮🇹 Italian passes 20 % (#645, #646)

• 183 new keys from @alessandroquirino-lab: the first half of all item names — tools, suit gear, weapons, ores, ingots and refined goods — and the last six block keys, completing block.* at 296/296. Coverage: 12.6 % → 20.6 %.
• The translation work keeps paying off in English too: the beam block description claimed to be "a glowing structural beam" — leftover concept text; it is the named teleporter pad, and now says so in English and German alike (caught by the translator, #646).
• The credits now thank the translator by name.

🛠️ Internal

• New fluid_cell persistence table in all three world repositories (SQLite, PostgreSQL, in-memory), restored on world load without forcing chunk generation.
• Block changes raise a typed BlockChangeApplied event, letting fluid audio and future systems distinguish simulation steps from player edits.
• A tamed companion silently lost its species' gait on cloning — fixed, and a reflection parity test now fails if a future species field misses the clone.
• Creature wire messages gain additive body-plan fields; the codec tag is unchanged, older clients simply render the standard body. No save migration anywhere in this release.
• Test suite at 1332 server + 154 client tests, all green.

2026.7.24 — 2026-07-30

The long-view release: on foot you can finally look into the distance. Binoculars zoom up to 6×, and their thermal upgrade paints every energy signature — creatures, bandits, NPCs, lava, whole settlements — straight through terrain and haze, each with its name and range. Closer to home, villages and cities now keep a glass greenhouse of ripe berries you may walk into and harvest, and stations grow the same crop in a hydroponics bay. The in-flight system chart stops reading as a random scatter of discs — it is centred on its star now and draws the orbit each planet actually rides — and a click on it finally lands where you made it. Rounding it off, two community contributions: the game speaks a third language, Italian, translated from scratch by a player, and the portal website works with a keyboard and a screen reader after a stranger took the time to write down what was broken.

🔭 Binoculars, and a thermal upgrade that sees through walls (#629, #630)

• Binoculars — a workshop tool (2 iron plates, 2 glass, 1 cable; blueprint 1 data fragment, 4 iron plates, 2 glass). Hold them and right-click to raise the optic, right-click again to step the magnification (2× · 3.3× · 6×), once more to lower it. A scope surround, a centre reticle and the magnification are drawn over the view, look sensitivity and head-bob are damped along with the zoom (at 6× an undamped mouse is unusable), and the optic drops itself when you switch item, open a menu, board a speeder or fly.
• Thermal binoculars — the upgrade: the workshop recipe consumes a plain pair (plus titanium, a circuit board and crystal), so you carry one optic, not two. Press I while looking through them and the world grades cold while every energy signature lights up through terrain: hostiles hot red-orange, wildlife amber (dimmer asleep, icy in stasis), your tamed companions green, NPCs cyan-white, other players white, lava deep orange, and settlements, factories, ruins, bases and your ship as magenta bearing columns. Each contact carries its name and range ("Bandit camp · 143 m").
• This does not extend your view distance — terrain only exists as far as the world is streamed around you, and that is where the haze ends. What the thermal mode buys you is contacts: they read straight through the fog, so you can tell what is out there before you walk into it. Anything past the streamed edge is drawn at that edge along its true bearing, with the real distance in its tag.
• Stealthed players stay invisible — the scope cannot defeat a stealth field. The reduced-effects setting drops the full-screen grade and keeps the contacts. The thermal key is rebindable in Settings → Controls.

🌱 Greenhouses in settlements and stations (#626, #627, #628)

• Every village and city now keeps a greenhouse you can walk into and harvest. A village grows berries in soil beds under a timber frame with a pitched glass gable, lit by a torch behind a hinged door; a town or city runs a two-tier hydroponics bay — iron frame, full glass shell, trays on the floor and on a rack above, ceiling grow lights that make it glow at night, and a sliding door. A city keeps 2–3, a town 1–2, a village one. Beds run along the aisle, so walking in doesn't put you in the crops. Ruined settlements get the shattered shell.
• Greenhouse berries are always safe to eat. Wild plants roll toxic on about a third of all worlds — a village greenhouse would have grown poison. The cultivated crop never joins a world's wild flora, never turns toxic and keeps its ripe red on every planet. Wild flora keeps rolling toxic, as before.
• You may pick a plant, but never dismantle a house. Settlement and station blocks are protected from mining, which also made the berries unpickable — plants are now exempt, and a picked crop regrows on its bed, so a greenhouse is a renewable food source rather than a one-time raid.
• Stations grow food too. Space stations carry the same hydroponics bay, and plants aboard them now actually regrow (worlds without a planet surface skipped the whole growth cycle before).
• Grow your own: 3 berries make 2 berry seeds by hand, and a hydro tray (workshop: metal panel, glass, plant fibre) lets you farm without soil — plant a bed at your own base.
• New worlds only — settlements and stations are built when a world is created, so existing saves keep their current villages.

🧭 The flight chart reads as a star-system chart (#623)

• The system chart (M in flight) is centred on its star now and every planet — and every landable asteroid — rides a drawn orbit ring in its own colour. Until now the star was a dot shoved against the rim whenever the framing lost it, and the bodies read as a scatter with nothing to say they orbit anything at all. A planet with rings (#596) wears them here too, as an ellipse.
• A click now lands where you made it. Setting a nav waypoint on the chart put it somewhere else entirely, and clicking a body to target it practically never took — the chart read clicks half a chart away from where the markers live. Both directions of the projection now come from one place, so they cannot drift apart again. (Present since the chart arrived in 2026.7.23.)
• The chart also stopped zooming out for no reason (the oversized body you launched from was padding the fit), and that body finally shows its real planet colour instead of a stand-in pale green.
• Moons deliberately get no ring — they sit on ladder slots just outside their parent, where a ring would collapse into its disc. The surface planet map is untouched.

🇮🇹 Italian, the third language (#99, #582)

• The game speaks Italian now — well, the block names do. All 290 block names and descriptions were translated from scratch by @alessandroquirino-lab, the first community language in the game, and more key groups are on the way.
• Anything not yet translated stays English, key by key, so a language can grow one group at a time instead of having to be finished before it works at all.
• Italian is not offered in the settings menu yet: it appears there once enough of the interface is covered. Until then it loads for anyone who selects it by hand in client_settings.json.

♿ Portal website accessibility (#574)

• Every form field on the portal now has a visible label — account creation, sign-in, password recovery, player name, new world, feedback and player reports. Placeholders alone vanished as soon as you started typing, and screen readers could not tell two "account name" fields apart.
• Status and error messages are announced — the message line at the top of the page is a live region now, and a blocked action moves the cursor to the field that needs fixing.
• Enter submits again — each flow is a real form, so pressing Enter in the password field signs you in instead of doing nothing.
• "Forgot your password?" is a proper button that reports whether it is open and jumps into the recovery fields, and keyboard users get a clearly visible focus ring across the whole portal.

Found and reported by @SpaleRuby — thank you!

🛠️ Internal

• A locale-coverage tool (tools/locale_report.py) reports per-language and per-key-group translation progress, and CI now checks contributed locale files for invented keys, lost {0} placeholders and blank values — so a translator gets told by the machine instead of in review.
• SystemChartLayout (Shared) holds the flight chart's projection and its inverse together, covered by round-trip tests over real generated star systems.
• Greenhouses ship with 20 new tests, two of them end to end — harvest and regrow a crop in a real stamped village, and the same aboard a boarded station.
• Both binocular tools are purely client-side: no protocol change, no server validation, no suit-energy cost. The two new shaders are registered as always-included so they survive player builds.

2026.7.23 — 2026-07-30

The milestones release: the game finally tells you what you have achieved and what to try next. 16 achievements track live progress with real item rewards, torches and hand-crafted wooden doors make a first base possible without a workshop, shaped blocks take the angle you choose, and some planets now carry Saturn-like rings you can see from their own surface. A flight system chart with nav waypoints and six-colour planet marks turn space into something you can navigate, and stacks holding 1024 mean a mining run no longer ends with a full pack. Rounding it off, this release closes the whole batch of playtest reports about losing things: a full inventory can no longer destroy what you craft or mine, you cannot fall through the world anymore, and a 2-block-high opening is walkable again.

🏆 Achievements with rewards and live progress (#614)

• 16 achievements across mining, building, crafting, exploring and survival — from "mine 5 iron" to visiting your first other planet. Each one shows live progress as a tally with a filled bar ("3/5"), so the list doubles as a guide to what you could do next.
• Earning one hands you an item — a medpack, an energy cell, ore, a better tool. If your pack is full the unlock is deferred, not consumed: you are told to make room and it is awarded on the next step of progress, so a reward can never be dropped into nowhere.
• Progress and earned achievements are saved per player. Existing saves start at zero and settle on join — which also means achievements added later are paid out on your next login.

🔥 Torches and cheap wooden doors (#616, #611)

• Torches: 1 wood log + 2 plant fibre at the hand station makes four. No workshop, no metal, no research — lighting a first base is no longer a grind. Aim at a wall to mount one; it is a slim prop with no collider, so you walk past torches instead of bumping into them, and the flame flickers (neighbouring torches deliberately flicker out of step).
• A torch needs air. On a body with no atmosphere placing one is refused with a reason you can act on instead of leaving a dud that mysteriously gives no light. A toxic atmosphere is fine — you need a suit, the flame does not.
• A wooden door from 4 wood logs at the hand station. Both existing doors were deep in the tech tree (metal panels, a bronze gear, a workshop; the sliding one a circuit board on top). The wooden door swings by hand with E, reads in warm light wood so it is clearly not the metal one, and hands itself back when you mine it.

🪐 Planetary rings (#596)

• Some planets now carry Saturn-like ring systems — tilted, banded discs with seeded gaps and an icy tint, unique per planet. You see them from orbit while flying the system, on the discs of ringed neighbours in another world's sky (pale and sky-washed by day, like the real Moon), and — standing on a ringed planet itself — as a ribbon arcing across the sky: bold at night, a faint pale arc by day.
• Ring assignment is deterministic from the world seed (every player sees the same rings) and purely visual; rings are deliberately rare (~1 planet in 9; large and icy/crystal ones more often), but the planet you start on always carries them — the band across your home sky greets you from the first spawn. Existing worlds gain rings too — nothing else about your universe changes.

🧭 Flight system chart & nav waypoint (#597)

• Press M while flying to open the system chart — a top-down map of the current system drawn from the real flight positions: star, planets, moons, asteroids, stations, wrecks, hostiles, and your ship with its heading. The ship holds position while the chart is open; the key is rebindable in Settings → Controls.
• Click to set a nav waypoint — click a body or station to target it, or click empty space for a free waypoint. The space radar shows it as an amber marker with its own live distance readout, and the VEGA autopilot (P, AI Core Mk2) now flies to your waypoint instead of just the nearest station. The waypoint clears automatically when you travel — no stale markers in the next world.

🎨 Colour-marked planets in the star map (#613)

• Mark planets in space, several at once, each in its own colour. Until now the only marker in the game was the single planet-surface waypoint — one at a time, one colour, gone on travel. In the travel screen a body now takes a mark from a fixed six-colour palette (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple) — named and translated rather than a free colour picker.
• One button cycles colour → next colour → off, tinted in the current colour, so marking and recolouring need no extra controls. Marked bodies get a matching halo in the animated orrery (it tracks its planet along the orbit) and a coloured bullet with the colour's name in the body list.
• Marks are stored locally per world — your private notebook, never sent to the server.

🪜 Choose the placement angle for shaped blocks (#615)

• The rotate key now walks the quarter turns first. Stairs, slabs and every other shaped block used to derive their facing solely from the direction you were standing in, so getting the turn you wanted meant shuffling around — impossible when building into a corner or against a wall. Rotate now steps through the four quarter turns about the current up-face, then moves on to the next face, then back to Auto, and the HUD hint names both parts ("+Y · 180°").
• No world-format change and no save migration: the chunk and wire formats have always carried all 24 orientations — only the control over the yaw was missing.

⏸️ The Esc menu really pauses a singleplayer world (#612)

• Nothing stopped before. The dialog was already titled "Pause" with a "Resume" button, but hunger drained, creatures kept hunting, night kept falling and the clock kept running while you read the menu. Opening the menu in singleplayer now genuinely holds the simulation.
• The hold is a server-side intent rather than a client freeze, because singleplayer runs the bundled server as a separate process — stopping only the client would have frozen the camera while the world carried on. Entering the hold also saves, which doubles as a safe point if the client never comes back. Multiplayer is unaffected.

🎒 Stacks hold 1024 instead of 99 (#603)

• Bulk items stack to 1024 per slot. Every block, ore, material and component (108 items) now fills a slot with up to 1024 instead of 99 — a backpack holds ~24,500 blocks instead of ~2,400, so long mining runs stop ending with a full inventory that silently eats what you dig.
• Tools, weapons and equipment are unchanged (still one per slot), and the deliberately scarce goods keep their small caps (medpacks 20, energy cells 50, access codes 10, food 16).
• Crafting keeps up. A single craft order accepts a full stack (was capped at 999), and the crafting screen's "Max" button now offers up to a full stack instead of stopping at 99.
• Existing saves need no migration: old 99-stacks simply keep filling past 99 as you pick items up.

🗑️ Throw unwanted items away

• New "Throw away" button in the Inventory and Cargo Hold tabs (#599). Until now nothing could actually be removed — the cargo hold, a storage crate and the ✕ on the quick-bar all just move an item somewhere else — so a stack of dirt you no longer want was carried around forever. It asks once before destroying, and clears every stack of that item at once.
• Your starting equipment is safe. The drill, scanner, suit lamp, machete and sidearm have no throw-away button and are refused by the server, so nobody can strand themselves without a way to dig or to see. Everything else — ores, blocks, food, better tools — can go.
• A full backpack no longer eats things in silence (#600). With inventory and cargo hold full, mined drops and craft outputs were destroyed without any message at all. You now get a warning instead — rarer now that stacks hold 1024, but no longer invisible when it does happen.

🛠️ Admin teleport by landmark, not by coordinates

• /tp takes a target word. World admins can jump to a landmark on the body they are standing on — /tp ship, /tp village2, /tp pad1, /tp factory1, plus ruin, vault, wreck, camp, monument, treasure and anything a player built here (base, beacon, beam, station). Targets are addressed by kind and a stable 1-based number rather than by their generated names, and the number can be written either way round: /tp village2 and /tp village 2 mean the same place.
• /tp on its own lists what is here — every resolvable target with the exact word to type and its distance, so the numbering is discoverable instead of guessed at.
• Factories now show on the planet map. They were tracked by the server but never drawn.

🧑 Bandits look like people again (#601)

• No more red-eyed robbers. The bandit's red headband sat across the top of the head and, at any distance, read as a pair of glowing red eyes — exactly the look of the Guardian machines. Bandits now have a real face (eye whites, pupils, brow), hair, and a cloth mask over nose and mouth as the "this one is a robber" cue.
• Their gear stopped glowing Guardian red. The energy blade, the blaster muzzle and the gunner's tracer shot are now cold blue — bought human tech, not alien machine.
• Every bandit looks like a different person. Skin tone, hair, mask and jacket colour all vary, so a raider camp is a group of individuals instead of one face copied four times.

Fixed

• A full inventory no longer destroys what you make or mine (#607). Crafting with all slots occupied and no cargo hold in reach consumed the inputs, produced nothing and still showed a success message. Craft, dye, re-shape, disassemble, mission turn-in and picking a placed door back up now check for room before consuming anything and refuse with a clear message; mining leaves a block standing (loot included) rather than clearing the cell and dropping its drops into nowhere, and area mining skips such blocks instead of destroying the loot. Loot from something already destroyed warns you instead of vanishing silently.
• You cannot fall through the world anymore (#608). Placing a block into your own feet cell — which the game allows on purpose so pillar jumping works — could, in a fast fall, wedge the collider inside the new block and push it down through every block below, forever. You are now lifted onto the cell's top explicitly, which also covers another player filling the cell. On top of that, the last safe spot you stood on is remembered: being stuck inside solid geometry or dropping below the build band puts you back there (ladders and swimming excluded).
• A 2-block-high opening can be walked through again (#609). The 1.8 m capsule leaves ~0.14 m of headroom under a 2-block ceiling, and the auto-step sweep ate far more than that, so players got wedged in doorways they had built themselves. Step height is now capped to the headroom actually available — slabs and stair treads are still climbed in the open.
• The craft toast is translated and names the item (#610). It read "Crafted glass" in an otherwise German UI, showing the raw recipe key; craft failures no longer push raw English server text at the player either.
• The admin report list shows one row per report (#617). Every in-game F1 report reaches the inbox twice by design (client direct + the game server's richer snapshot), and the list counted both — a batch of 8 player reports appeared as 16 rows. Matching halves are now paired into one row: the player's own wording as the label, linked to the record that carries the screenshot and snapshot, with a "+1" chip to reach the other. Ingest and the read API are unchanged — a player report is never dropped.

2026.7.22 — 2026-07-29

The wayfinder release: the planet map becomes a real navigation tool and the world generator stops losing villages. Map markers are redrawn as bold, backed, colour-true pictograms, waypoints get their own compass icon with a live distance readout, and every structure a world rolls is now guaranteed a home — with foundations that adapt to slopes, lakes (stilt villages!) and lava. Rounding it off: menu dialogs are properly opaque again, and moons no longer hang as black silhouettes in the daytime sky.

🗺️ Planet map you can actually read (#592)

• Landmark markers are finally legible. The world-map marker set (map_*) is regenerated as bold filled pictograms (the old thin-line icons lit as few as 1 % of their pixels), every marker now sits on a dark backing disc so it separates from any terrain colour, and markers are ~1.5× larger — and additionally scale with the UI-scale accessibility setting.
• Marker colours mean something again. The icons are pure white ink, so the tints show true: occupied landing pads are red (they rendered grey before), waypoints amber (they rendered green), and the legend shows each marker in its real on-map colour — with the full marker set listed, including the previously missing base icon.
• Waypoints work as navigation. The HUD compass shows the map-set waypoint as its own flag icon (no longer a tiny amber square identical to beacon blips) with its own distance readout, compass blip distance is log-scaled so approaching a target is visible (before, everything past ~37 m pinned to the rim), and a stale waypoint no longer survives travelling to another planet.

🏗️ Structure placement guarantee & terrain-adaptive foundations (#586)

• What the world rolls, the world gets. Settlements, ruins, factories, bandit camps, monuments, vaults, treasure chests and data cubes are no longer silently dropped when the terrain is dramatic: the placement search now escalates — classic dry-and-flat spots first, then widening best-fit rings — until every rolled structure has a home. (New worlds; existing worlds keep their exact layout.)
• Foundations that fit the terrain. The seat adapts to what it lands on: slopes get stepped terrace aprons instead of sheer foundation walls, rugged massif flanks get a cut-and-fill rock shelf, lakes carry stilt villages on pile platforms (and drowned ruins), lava plains may hold a dead city on a basalt plinth, and vaults under a water body rise as a diveable stone well head.
• Placements are now pinned. Where each structure landed is stored with the save at first stamp, so future placement improvements can never move villages, camps or vaults out from under their own blocks (previously the positions were re-derived from the seed on every load).

Fixed

• Other planets and moons in the surface sky no longer read as dark silhouettes against the daytime sky: a sky-colour atmosphere wash makes them pale and sky-tinted by day (like the real daytime Moon), and their unlit night sides survive as a faint disc instead of vanishing to black. Airless worlds and the space view are unchanged. (#585)
• Menu dialogs (world options, account, settings, …) are properly opaque again instead of ghost-transparent, and they all share one consistent darkening scrim behind the panel — the menu behind a dialog no longer bleeds through the text. (#588)

2026.7.21 — 2026-07-29

The landforms release: worlds finally dare vertical drama. The regional terrain pool grows from five to eight archetypes, a rare drama tail pushes peaks toward Y ≈ 280 under automatic snow, table mountains, massifs and rift chasms land as far-visible landmarks, and three new planet types join the galaxy. Below ground the build band opens to Y −2100 — the deep kilometre — with ore density that ramps up and deep caves that stay partly open below the lava table. Existing worlds reshape once (like the 0.9.0 overhaul); everything players built stays in place.

⛰️ Terrain extremes & landform variety (#576, #577, #578, #579)

⚠️ One-time world reshape: terrain is derived from the seed, so existing worlds change shape once with this release (like the 0.9.0 worldgen overhaul). Player-built blocks survive in place.

• Three new regional terrain archetypes join the blend pool: plateau decks (terraced mesa country), extreme peaks (sharpened crests far above the old ceiling) and rift gorges — and worlds now draw 2–8 archetypes instead of 2–5, so regions differ more. (#576)
• A ~6 % drama tail: a small share of bodies rolls 1.9–2.6× relief instead of 0.9–1.5× — the rare world that reads genuinely extreme, with peaks toward Y ≈ 280 under automatic snow and ice. (#576)
• Table mountains: sparse flat-topped buttes with near-vertical walls on dry, rocky-reading worlds (dunes/mesa/canyon styles + savanna) — a climbable landmark with a dead-flat crown. (#577)
• Massifs and rift chasms: rare single giant mountains (+120–220, ridged flanks, iced summits, visible from very far) and deep straight gorges (50–130 blocks) that flood into fjord lakes where they dip under the sea. At most one landmark claims a column; everything stays seam-free and caps safely under the atmosphere line. (#578)
• Three new planet types: Tablelands (monumental grand-mesa terraces), Badlands (fine-ridged painted gully country) and the exotic Karst (sheer jungle towers with walkable crowns) — with DE+EN names and descriptions. (#579)

⛏️ The deep kilometre opens up (#580)

• The vertical build band now reaches Y −2100 (was −512): even the deepest-rolled world foundation is reachable, so "dig to the bedrock" works on every world.
• Cave/ore calibration now samples the full depth band, deep caves below the lava table stay partly open (coherent molten regions instead of a uniform lava bath), and ore density ramps up to +60 % over the first ~600 blocks down — digging deep rewards instead of frustrates, while shallow starter veins stay exactly where they were.

🧹 Fixed

• Monuments: a body whose roll decided "no monuments here" never persisted that decision and re-rolled it on every load — the decision is now recorded like every other stamp. (#578)

2026.7.20 — 2026-07-28

The suit-up release: pilots finally look like astronauts — a proper spacesuit with an open helmet, visor band, gloves and a life-support pack, while NPCs deliberately stay civilian so a suited figure is always a real player at a glance. And a forgotten account password is no longer fatal: rescue codes at signup, in-game password change and an operator reset path close the last gap in account access. Also the first release the new startup update notice announces on its own.

🧑‍🚀 Player avatars now wear a spacesuit (#564)

• Your avatar (third-person, other players, the avatar editor and colour-menu previews) now reads as an astronaut: an open helmet with a raised dark-glass visor band, gloves, a neck seal and collar ring, a chest control panel and a life-support backpack with twin tanks. The suit tints with your chosen avatar colours, and your face — including a drawn pixel face — stays visible through the open visor. Settlement and station NPCs deliberately keep their civilian look, so a suited figure is always a real player at a glance.
• Fixed invisible head gear: the armor-helmet and helmet-lamp visuals had been buried inside the avatar's head since gear existed (a coordinate-space slip). The armor helmet now shows as an open face-guard shell over the suit helmet, the lamp sits visibly on its side, and the armor backpack replaces the suit's life-support pack while worn.

🧹 Fixed

• Portal website: the rules-consent checkbox rendered as a centered full-width block (the global input styling caught it) and its label wrapped awkwardly around the button — it is now an inline checkbox in a proper flex row, on both the signup card and the rules re-accept box. (#560)
• WorldHost: the admin password-reset log lines no longer include raw account ids (they log the account name instead, matching the signup log rule; CodeQL cs/cleartext-storage), and the API twin now resolves the account first so unknown ids take the refusal path too. (#561)

🆘 Rescue codes + operator password reset — a forgotten password is no longer fatal (#557, #558)

• Rescue codes ("Rettungscodes"): every new account gets 3 one-time codes at signup — shown exactly once with a big "write these on paper!" prompt (in-game and on the portal website). A code plus a new password resets a forgotten account password via the new "Forgot password?" button; codes are stored only as PBKDF2 hashes, survive sloppy typing (case/spaces/dashes), and can be re-issued from the Account panel (current password required — the old set is void).
• Operator reset: the /admin account lookup gained a "reset password" button — it shows a one-time readable temp password (never in a URL), signs out every session, and the next login lands the player directly in the change-password form until they pick their own. Developer accounts are excluded on every path, so admin credentials can never take over the operator.

🔑 Account access: change your password + clearer sign-in (#555, #556)

• Change your account password in-game: the Official Worlds → Account panel now rotates a known password (current one required; every other signed-in device is signed out). New endpoint POST /api/account/password — wrong-guess attempts share the failed-login budget, so a stolen session cannot brute-force its way to owning the account.
• The sign-in form no longer causes lockouts: signing out keeps the account name prefilled (it was blanked, and players then typed their player name and concluded the account was gone), the password field is labelled "account password" (it borrowed the world-password wording), and both the in-game and web signup say clearly that the account name is for signing in only — the player name stays a separate, freely changeable identity.

2026.7.19 — 2026-07-28

The constellation release — and the first under the date-based version scheme (YYYY.MM.N, see ADR 0012): after v0.9.1 comes v2026.7.19, July's nineteenth release. Newly created worlds roll star-system archetypes from lone giants to pirate havens, the installed client finally announces new versions by itself from an official update feed, and the devblog release notes are readable in-game.

🌌 Star systems have character now (#546–#549)

• Every system rolls an archetype in newly created worlds: alongside the familiar mix there are Lone Giants (one oversized planet with 4–8 moons), Swarms (many small planets, hardly any moons), Belts (asteroid fields with barely a planet), Hubs (guaranteed stations and busy trade lanes), Desolate systems (empty, silent space), Pirate Havens (always lawless — no stations, more camps, more wrecks) and Twin Worlds (two like-sized planets on close orbits). The home system never rolls the hostile/empty archetypes, so a fresh start stays friendly (#546).
• Planets genuinely differ in size now (#549): archetypes bias the walkable circumference — giants reach 16000 blocks around, swarm dwarfs go down to 4000 (the classic band is 5000–12000) — and the orbit view, the sky and gravity all reflect it.
• The inhabitants follow the archetype (#547): trader traffic, pirate-space flags, bandit-camp odds, ambient drones/UFOs and wreck frequency all read the system's character; the previously dead Danger world option now scales hostile encounter odds globally. The synthesised fallback station only appears in the home system anymore — a Desolate system out there really has none.
• The space view keeps up (#548): moons stack on their own orbit rings around their true parent planet (a giant's 8 moons read as a family, not one crowded shell), and the from-the-surface sky sizes bodies by their real circumference, capped at the 14 most prominent.
• Existing worlds are completely untouched: variance only applies to worlds created from this release on (the galaxy re-derives from the seed, so changing counts on an old save would orphan visited worlds — bias 0 and the Standard archetype reproduce the old layout bit-for-bit).

📅 Date-based versions

• The version scheme switches from SemVer to CalVer YYYY.MM.N (year, month, release counter within the month) — this release is the first under the new scheme; v0.9.1 was the last SemVer release. The tag stays the single source of truth and the format stays SemVer2-compatible, so auto-updates keep working across the switch. The machine-wide MSI shows the year mapped down (26.x.x) in Apps & Features because Windows Installer caps its major version field at 255 — all other surfaces show the full version.
• The MSI install wizard's finish page now shows a copyright line (© year JuMaVe Games).

🔔 The game finally tells you about updates (#543)

• Update notice on startup. An installed client now quietly checks for a newer release while the splash screens play and, if one exists, offers it on the main menu: Install now downloads and restarts into the new version, Later dismisses the notice until the next launch. Can be turned off in Settings → Software update.
• An official update feed exists now. Release builds attach the Velopack feed files to the GitHub release, and the client's update server defaults to it — previously the feed was never published anywhere and the URL shipped empty, so even the manual "Check for updates" button could never find one. Self-hosters can still point the URL at their own server's /updates endpoint.
• Applies from this release onward: older installs (0.9.1 and before) don't carry the check yet, so they need one last manual download.

📰 "What's new?" in the main menu (#543)

• The devblog release notes are readable in-game now — a new bottom-bar button opens them, localized in German and English, newest first. After an update the notes open once by themselves, so you see what changed without hunting for a blog post.
• Sourced from the same posts the website devblog publishes; the game fetches the latest feed online and falls back to the notes bundled with the build when offline.

🔗 Fixed

• The GitHub link in the "Join in" overlay actually opens now (#544) — it was link-styled text with no click handler on every desktop platform. It's a real button now, joined by a second one that opens the game website in your language.
• Settings: language and back are always visible now — they used to be the last rows of the scroll list, so leaving the screen meant scrolling the whole way down first. They sit in a fixed footer under the list now.
• The pilot-name field on the main menu stands out — an accented backdrop and a bold label make the required first step obvious instead of a grey side note.

0.9.1 — 2026-07-27

The relics release: somebody was here before you. Ancient monuments now stand on worlds — and on airless moons — with glowing runes worth scanning, asteroids finally come in five distinct families with their own crater relief, stopping a hosted world saves it properly again, and the in-game chat help stopped shouting HTML at everyone.

⚠️ Existing asteroids change with this release. An asteroid's family and crater relief are derived deterministically from the world seed and were never persisted, so asteroids in existing worlds change surface type and shape — the same one-time cut as the 0.9.0 worldgen overhaul. Everything players built or mined is preserved, though blocks placed on an old surface can end up floating above or buried under the new one.

🗿 Monuments: somebody was here first (#522–#527)

• Five new relics stand on the surface of a world: a half-collapsed arcade of arches, a free-standing gate that leads nowhere, a ring of standing stones, a weathered obelisk and a rune altar. Up to three per world, never two of the same kind.
• They are the only structure that also stands on airless moons — whoever raised them did not need air either, and nothing has weathered them since.
• Glowing runes. Every monument is carved with them. Scan the runes where they stand and you read the inscriptions themselves: worth far more knowledge than identifying a stone, with a lore line and a new Codex → Discoveries → Monuments entry. Each kind of monument pays once per planet, so the stone circle on the next world is worth the walk too.
• New building materials. Ancient Brick and Rune Stone are freely mineable — like ruins, what you clear stays cleared — and yours to build with. About one relic in three hides a small relic cache.
• Fallen towns finally have a landmark again: ruins now keep the broken version of their central feature — snapped column stumps, an arch springer jutting into nothing, toppled inscribed stones.
• A new world feature that ships in a later release can no longer be stamped on top of somebody's base: the placement check now skips any footprint that already holds player-built blocks.

☄️ Asteroids come in five families now (#515, #518)

• Every landable asteroid used to be the same crystal-covered rock — one hardcoded type with no biome list, so every column of every asteroid surfaced as crystal. Asteroids now roll one of five families per body: stony (the workhorse — stone, basalt and sand over shallow iron, silicate, copper and tin), metallic (nearly solid metal, with cobalt, tungsten, platinum and neodymium deep down), icy (−95 °C, volatiles instead of metals), carbon (soot-black, cave-riddled, uranium and diamond deep, the best data-cache odds) — and crystalline, yesterday's everywhere-look, now the rare find.
• Craters have character per body. Crater density, basin width, depth, rim height and how rolling the regolith in between is are now rolled from each body's own seed instead of five global constants — and airless moons share the same path, so they gain the same variance.
• Every family carries copper and silicate, so the cable progression can never strand you on a rock without them — a content test now guarantees it.

🛟 Stopping a hosted world saves it again (#519)

• Stopping a world from the admin page silently lost everything since the last autosave. The game server inside the container inherited an ignored interrupt signal (a POSIX shell rule for background jobs), so the polite shutdown never arrived and Docker hard-killed the world after its full grace period — on every admin stop, scheduled restart and image redeploy. The server now handles SIGTERM directly and drains + saves before exit. Idle shutdowns were never affected.
• The admin page answers immediately instead of hanging for the whole stop: both stop endpoints run the container stop off the request path. And for an instance that will not go down there is a new, clearly-labelled emergency kill button (no drain, no save — the lever of last resort).

💬 Chat help that speaks your language (#507)

• /help no longer floods the chat with what looked like broken HTML. Placeholders lost their angle brackets (/give Gegenstand [Anzahl] instead of /give <item> [count], DE + EN), the player help is two short lines again, and the 509-character admin wall moved behind /help admin, split into readable grouped lines. Ten hardcoded English usage: lines became proper DE + EN locale strings.
• Closed on the way: a chat rich-text hole. Any player could type <color=…> or <size=200> and recolour or blow up everyone's scrollback — every line the chat log shows is now sanitized.

🛠️ The in-game content editors match the game again (#508–#514, #516, #517, #520)

• The Material and Item & Recipe editors had drifted from the game's data model: the crafting-station picker offered two stations that do not exist (exporting them made the game refuse to start) while three real ones were unreachable — it is now derived from the game's own station list. Ore depth bands reach the true 2 048 blocks, a live readout shows the share of rock a vein actually claims, materials gained the palette category and dyeable/shapeable flags, items gained their missing stats (area mining, cooldown, scan-knowledge multiplier, vendor theme), and typed item keys are checked against the live registry before export instead of failing later at startup.
• The merge pipeline behind the editors was broken outright: the recipe merge tool crashed on the game's own shipped recipe file (legal // comments), and both tools rewrote whole data files — merging one material produced a 5 000-line reformat. A new splice-based tool now lands each merge as a 1–3 line diff.

🔧 Under the hood

• A faulted browser-gateway request now gets an honest 500 instead of a torn-down socket, and the gateway no longer waits out a ~2-minute idle sweep on shutdown — which also means a stopping hosted world's process exits promptly instead of being parked by an idle browser connection. (#536)
• CI got a broad wall-clock pass: platform-correct Unity Library caches (the Windows build was restoring the WebGL cache), a saved WebGL cache on the release critical path, and the 10 GB cache budget reclaimed. (#528–#533)

0.9.0 — 2026-07-27

The frontier release: space got wilder. Every world now has its own face, seas and volcanoes are real, bandits roam the frontier — and the family running the servers got real oversight tools to keep everyone safe out there.

⚠️ Existing worlds change with this release. The world generator was overhauled from the ground up, and terrain that no player has touched regenerates under the new rules — coastlines, caves, ore, rivers and snow lines will differ from what you remember. Everything players built or mined is preserved (player edits always override the generator), and each body's planet type is now pinned so it can never change again. This is a deliberate one-time cut for much better worlds ahead.

🌋 Every world is now its own world (#466–#481)

• Per-body identity. Two jungle planets used to be the same jungle twice. Now every celestial body seeds its own terrain, plant and creature rosters, settlements, ruins and colours — the map preview in the menu shows the actual world you will land on.
• Real seas and coasts. Sea level is derived from each world's actual terrain, so jungle, swamp, savanna and varied worlds finally have oceans (measured, not guessed: ~20–27 % water) — and ocean worlds roll how much land they keep, from island chains to near-endless water.
• Ore you can actually find. Cave and ore generation is calibrated against each world's real rock distribution — the old constants sat so deep in the noise tail that "there is no ore" was literally true. Veins now reach 2 048 blocks deep, starter veins near the surface pay out double, and deep caves below the lava table fill with molten rock.
• Rivers, waterfalls, volcanoes. Rivers get real headwaters and run 2–3 blocks deep, waterfalls actually fire (~200 on a highland world), and watery worlds grow basalt volcanoes with molten summit craters, vents and hot springs. Water meeting lava chills into the new obsidian block.
• Cold peaks, warm valleys. Temperature now drops with altitude: dithered snow caps and tree lines on highlands, cold-faded flora, and the HUD thermometer reads your position — rain in the valley can be snow on the summit.
• Living-world fixes. Fauna spawning reaches its intended population (the old cap starved it), lava creatures can finally spawn on melt pools, amphibians hold the water surface — and mined ruins, claimed wrecks and looted vaults stay mined, claimed and looted across re-entry instead of resurrecting (which also closes a free-ship exploit).

🏴‍☠️ Bandits: hold-ups on foot, raider camps, pirate ambushes in space (#504)

• Lone robbers now roam some worlds. Rarely, a scruffy figure with a red bandana walks straight up to you — and demands about a third of your two biggest stacks (never your tools). You get a real choice with a 25-second timer: hand it over and the robber keeps its word and leaves you alone for a long while, or refuse (or attack, or just stay silent) and it fights. Players with empty pockets are not worth the trouble and are simply left in peace. Killing a robber wins its loot — including anything you paid it earlier. New world option "Bandits" (Off/Rare/Normal/ Frequent/Extreme, default Normal on survival worlds, Off on peaceful/family presets), live-editable.
• Bandit camps. Some worlds carry a small raider outpost — log huts behind a palisade around a campfire, guarded by melee and gunner bandits that attack on sight but never chase far from camp. The reward is their stash (better loot than ruins). Camps are yours to raze: the blocks are unprotected, a demolished camp stays demolished, and once every guard is down the camp is permanently cleared — the guards never respawn.
• Pirate space. About a quarter of all star systems are bandit country. In those, a raider ship may warp in mid-flight, close in, and hail you with a cargo demand (drawn from your inventory and hold) — the same pay-or-fight choice, while you keep flying. Pay and it warps out for good; refuse or open fire and it fights like any hostile. Bandit ships only ever appear when the rules let you shoot back (space combat on + ship weapons usable), so an unkillable extortionist can never happen. Destroying one returns your goods.
• VEGA teaches the rules BEFORE the first hold-up. The first time you enter a flagged sector or land on a bandit world, the ship AI explains what bandits want and that paying is a safe, valid choice — afterwards you get short "pirate activity flagged" warnings on entry, always before any bandit shows up.

🛡️ Moderation that explains itself

• A blocked player is told what happened, at the next sign-in. Until now a banned account signed in completely normally — the world list loaded, everything looked fine, and the wall only appeared at create world or join, with no way to find out why. The sign-in (and a poll behind it, since a ban can land while someone stays signed in for weeks) now carries the state, and the game client and the portal show a proper screen: the reason, since when, until when, and what to do if you think it is a mistake. (#496)
• Bans can be timeouts. The admin panel offers 1 / 3 / 7 / 30 days or "until lifted", with the 3-day timeout as the default — it ends by itself, so nobody has to remember to lift it, and the player can be told the day they are welcome back. Alongside the operator's own words there is now a canned reason (chat, griefing, cheating, name, other) that the player reads in their own language. A ban also ends the sessions that are running right now instead of letting the offender play on until they feel like logging off. (#496)
• A deleted world no longer just vanishes. When an operator deletes someone's world, the owner gets a message with the world's name and the reason typed into the admin panel — previously the world row was gone and there was literally nothing left to explain it with. (#496)
• World owners can block and kick players from their own world. Manage world → Manage players (in the game and on the portal) lists everyone who has played there and lets the owner kick them out right now or block them for good — enforced at the join grant, so it holds for every client, and matching on the account, so a rename does not get around it. The rest of the game is untouched: this is the small hammer next to the operator's fleet-wide ban. World admins also get /kick <player> in chat. (#497)
• The operator can never be banned or kicked — not by a world owner's ban list, not by a kick, not even from the admin panel. Oversight of worlds where kids play must not be something anyone can switch off, and an operator locked out of their own fleet would have nobody left to lift it. (#496, #497)
• A kick now says the truth: if the player is not in the world at that moment (or the world is asleep), the owner reads "the player is not in this world right now" instead of a "kicked ✓" that never happened. The block itself always holds — it decides the next join. (#502)

🪐 Room to fly between the worlds

• Planets and their moons no longer huddle together in space. Out in the flight view, every moon used to sit glued to the surface of its planet, and the odd pair of planets came out nearly touching — the view kept a flat 8-unit gap between any two bodies, whether they were pebbles or gas giants, and that gap is less than the distance the ship itself is held at. The gap now grows with the bodies, so a moon rides at a real altitude above its planet and neighbouring worlds read as separate places you fly between. Measured across 2 400 generated systems the typical clear space between two bodies went from 8 to 21 units, and moon-to-planet from 8 to 22 — while the time to cruise out to the system's farthest body is unchanged. A moon of the world you launched from could also end up stuck inside it; it can't any more (#493).

🔍 The UI got readable (#482–#484)

• VEGA speaks up. The ship AI's dialogue panel and the scan-result panel were sized for a magnifying glass; both grew properly, and scan results arrive in your language instead of raw keys.
• A real "HUD size" setting. Settings gains a live stepper that scales the whole in-game HUD — change it and watch it apply, no restart. Scanned discoveries also land in a new Codex "Discoveries" chapter, with the species names captured at scan time (every world names its own species, so the name has to be remembered when it is known).

👁️ Family oversight: the operator can check on any world (#487–#490, #495)

For a game whose players are mostly kids, the family running the servers needs to be able to look after them — without disturbing anyone's game.

• Observer mode. A fleet admin (the operator of the installation — not the same as a world's owner) can enter any world invisibly with /spectate: no avatar, no nameplate, no parked ship, no claimed landing pad, no player slot used, ignored by creatures and NPCs, invulnerable, flying freely through walls. Muted by default (/say to speak deliberately); block removal stays possible as the one in-world moderation lever, and every action is logged.
• Finding things. /players lists everyone the world knows — online and offline, with their last position and when they were last seen. /builds lists named bases, beacons, teleporter pads and stations with owners. /goto jumps to a player (even on another planet — the old /tp never could), to a named build, or to raw coordinates.
• A world-detail page for the fleet panel. Each world on /admin links to a page showing its players, structures and build hotspots — clusters of changed blocks that reveal a house built without any registered base — each with a ready-to-paste /goto line.
• Who built this? Block changes now record who last changed each cell and when ("last editor wins" — no history is kept, and the table gains zero extra rows). Old cells stay anonymous; attribution starts with this release.
• Any world, safely. The operator reaches private and password-protected worlds too — the worlds kids actually play on. The power is double-locked: it needs a developer account (registered only with a secret code) and the operator's player name, which is auto-reserved so nobody else can ever claim it. A normal account sees none of this — not even the world list.

🛰️ Fleet operations

• The fleet admin panel can delete worlds. Every row on /admin gets a folded-away delete… control: type the world's name (checked on the server — there is no undo), then either delete, which stops the instance and drops it from the registry but leaves its saves recoverable on disk, or purge saves, which erases them including the archived copy. Both now also remove the world's container object — instances run without --rm, and a deleted world never wakes again to clean up its own leftovers, so until today every deleted world left one behind for good. Arcade worlds show reset… instead, because the glitch.fun pool refills itself (and its replacement worlds are now numbered from the highest name in use, so a reset can no longer produce two "Glitch Arcade 3"). Scriptable twin for bulk cleanup: DELETE /api/admin/worlds/{id}[?purge=true].

🌍 Worlds portal

• The portal links to the game's website. The shared footer carries a "Game website ↗" link on every page of play.blocksbeyondthestars.de, and the landing page repeats it in a line under the headline where first-time visitors actually look — German pages to the German site, English pages to /en. Self-hosters can point both elsewhere or drop the link entirely (BBS_WH_WEBSITE_URL / _EN, - = off).

❄️ Cold worlds freeze over

• Water on cold worlds now generates frozen. Below the freeze line a sea, pond or river carries a solid ice sheet — one to four blocks thick, growing with the cold — and in the deep cold (ice-type worlds) the whole body freezes through to the seabed. The waterline is walkable: no more diving into open water on a −38 °C planet. On merely-cold worlds (tundra, high mountain lakes on temperate planets) liquid water survives under the sheet — mine through the hand-diggable ice to reach the water, the kelp and the fish below, and take an oxygen reserve: under a closed sheet you dig your way back out. Mined ice stacks and crafts into water by hand (2 ice → 1 water, as before), so frozen worlds feed an algae tank just fine, and ice remains placeable as a building block. Ships treat thickly frozen seas as solid ground and may land on them. Freeze edges are noise-dithered, so partially frozen lakes with open patches appear right at the freeze line. ⚠️ One-time world change: existing cold worlds freeze retroactively on next load (player-built blocks are untouched). (#501, closes #494)

0.8.7 — 2026-07-25

The homestead release: player bases and space stations get their first real life support. A new heal tank block heals, feeds and recharges everyone nearby, doubles as a settable home spawn point, and dying now lets you choose whether to wake up at your ship or at your base — plus the ship's console and lab stations finally do something, and glitch.fun visitors see Singleplayer first.

🏠 Your base becomes a home

• New block: the heal tank (workshop recipe behind a research blueprint). Placed in a base or a player-built station, it slowly heals and feeds every player within a few blocks and recharges the suit — the only way to refill suit energy away from the ship (a code comment had promised "only refills at a heal-tank" for months while no such block existed). Deliberately simple and robust: the placed block itself is the whole machine — no wiring, no fuel, nothing extra to persist. (#464, closes #460)
• Press E on a placed heal tank to make it your home spawn. The spot is stored per player, remembers which planet or station it is on and survives save/load — deliberately separate from the ship's medbay respawn point, which the game rewrites on every landing and jump (the reason it could never hold a base). (#464, closes #461)
• Dying now asks where you want to wake up. With a home spawn set, the death screen offers "wake up at <your base>" vs "wake up at your ship" — including a full world transition if you died on another planet (your ship re-homes with you), or a re-board if your home is a space station. Without a home spawn everything behaves exactly as before. Fail-safes everywhere: an unanswered choice falls back to the ship after ~30 s, and so does a home whose tank was mined or whose station no longer exists — you can never be stranded. (#464, closes #462)
• Fixed along the way: dying while boarded on a space station left you flagged as "in station" forever afterwards — permanent free life support and a hunger bar that never drained again until relog.

🛠️ The ship's console and lab finally do something

• The console and lab stations in ship interiors showed a "Press E" prompt with a raw untranslated key — and pressing E did nothing at all (a silent server no-op). E on the console now opens the Ship tab (status + repairs — the cockpit without the helm, so still no launching from a console), E on the lab opens the Tech/research tab, both prompts are properly named in German and English, and any future unknown station id logs itself instead of failing silently. (#464, closes #463)

🕹️ glitch.fun: Singleplayer first

• On play.glitch.fun the main menu now leads with Singleplayer, and the shared-worlds entry moved to second place as "Multiplayer (Arcade)" — the first live store feedback showed visitors didn't discover that an instant in-browser singleplayer exists at all. The swap is gated to the glitch context; native builds and the fleet's own /play menu are unchanged. (#458)

0.8.6 — 2026-07-22

The new-player release: this cycle went back to the first ten minutes — the exact stretch where Severin's second handwritten playtest kept getting stuck — and fixed the whole first-run loop, from the mission text that ran off-screen to the hunger bar that emptied too fast. It also makes the ship/station/settlement build editors genuinely usable in both languages, and clears the last see-through holes and washed-out panels off ship hulls.

🚀 The first ten minutes finally hold together

The six fixes below all come from Severin's second playtest and land squarely in the new-player loop. (#456, closes #450–#455)

• The mission objective text is no longer clipped. The description drew with no word-wrap inside a masked scroll box, so the tail — the actual "dig straight down for iron" hint — ran off-screen. It now wraps and scrolls to its real height, in both languages. (#450)
• "Station not available" now tells you which station. Trying to cook meat used to fail with a hard-coded English line that never said you needed a detoxifier, not the workbench you were standing at. The server now sends a machine-readable token the client localizes and names the exact station (DE + EN). (#451)
• Diggable ore is more common and easier to reach on every planet. The per-world richness multiplier was raised, iron_ore was added to ice planets (where it was simply absent — an iron mission there was impossible), and the surface layer is now uneven: its thickness rolls between one block and the planet's full topsoil depth per column, so in the thin patches ore-bearing stone surfaces within a block or two and shallow digging is sometimes rewarded. (#452)
• Hunger is gentler and now tiered like oxygen. The flat, fast drain (a full bar in ~200 s) became an Off / Slow / Normal / Fast setting, with Normal draining over ~330 s. The world-options screen gets a proper four-step row (DE + EN); old hunger=true/false saves still load. (#453)
• Consistent headroom under two-block-high ceilings. The player capsule's skin width was left at Unity's default, leaving almost no clearance, and a step-up sweep would randomly punch your head into the ceiling ("sometimes I get stuck, sometimes not"). Flat two-high tunnels now pass reliably, while slabs, stairs and ramps step up exactly as before. (#454)
• Crouch / sneak. Hold Ctrl or C on the ground to shrink down, walk slower, and stop at ledges instead of walking off them — which also lets you lean out and place a bridging block against a ledge's side face. You stay crouched under a low ceiling instead of popping up through it. (#455)

🧱 Build palettes you can actually read

• The ship, station and settlement build editors shipped with a flat ~150-row material list sorted by internal English id and dotted with random hash-coloured swatches, and much of the ship editor's UI was hard-coded English. The palette is now grouped under localized section headers (markers and ship parts first, then block categories — building, terrain, ore, flora, light, door, machine), sorted by each block's localized name, and each entry shows the block's real procedural atlas tile as its icon — whose average colour also tints the 3D placement preview, so builds preview in true material colours. The ship and structure editors are fully localized (shape names, size tiers, markers, statuses), the Save button sits on its own full-width row so its label never gets clipped, and search fields have a proper placeholder. Roughly 75 new locale keys, and a content test now fails the build if any block category is missing a translation. (#446)

🩹 Ship hulls and crash telemetry

• The last see-through holes in ship hulls are plugged. A full hull cube next to a shaped block (slab, ramp, stairs, sphere) had its shared face culled while the shaped cell didn't fill the gap — a hole straight into the interior, visible in flight, on landed ships, in the paint preview and on other players' ships. Builders never saw it in the editor, only after launch. Raised greeble hull panels also rendered near-white from a zero-area texture footprint (the same defect fixed for bevels earlier); they now sample the hull's own texel and read as proper darker plating. (#448, closes #420)
• Crash reports upload whole, and a broken Arcade says so. Crash bodies were written straight into the live spool, so a reader could catch a half-written file and upload truncated JSON — reports are now written to a temp file and atomically moved into place. And if the minigame catalogue fails to load, the Arcade used to claim you had "no data fragments yet" (wrong, and it hid the real problem); it now shows a distinct "Games couldn't be loaded" screen instead. (#449, closes #425)

0.8.5 — 2026-07-19

The audit release: a full static bug-hunt swept the whole stack — client, server and the hosted-worlds fleet — and this release ships the fixes. The headline for players: the locked-cursor family of bugs is gone for good, world changes no longer leave ghosts behind, touch players can't get soft-locked anymore, and a series of exploits and denial-of-service holes on the server side is closed.

🖱️ One owner for the cursor — the locked-cursor bugs are gone

• A dock or trade request arriving while the Tab menu was open used to permanently lock the cursor — the accept/decline panel sat invisible under the crafting menu, the cursor never came back, and every T/K/U interaction was dead until restart. That worst case was fixed first with a targeted patch, and then the whole family was closed for good: instead of ~12 panels each writing the shared "menu open" flag and forcing the cursor lock on their own (last writer wins), a single arbiter now derives the cursor state every frame from the set of open panels and overlays. (#407, #413)
• The same rework fixes the whole checklist of cousins: pause-menu Resume re-locks the cursor again; Alt-Tab re-locks reliably in every mode, including space flight; a ship destroyed while its landing-pad chooser was open no longer leaves a dead map floating over the on-foot world; the Esc that closes a dialog can no longer also pop the quit prompt; Esc/Tab while typing in a search or name field just leaves the field instead of closing the menu; opening a menu while driving a speeder holds the hover position instead of dropping you; the planet map closes on Esc and won't open over the death prompt; and the crafting menu can no longer stack over trade/beacon/dock dialogs. The freeze during settle/teleport also stops draining suit energy. (#413)

👻 World changes no longer leave ghosts behind

• Landing, boarding a station, hyperjumping or entering a ship interior used to carry stale state along: the old world's robots kept growling and firing on peaceful destinations, ghost map markers and speeder prompts lingered, and frozen remote players stood around with live trade/dock prompts. A world change now clears every world-scoped entity list and remote avatar; the new world re-sends what actually exists there. (#412)
• Ship hatches stopped ghosting for other players: a launched ship's hatch used to float in place (and a freshly parked ship's hatch stayed missing) for everyone else until some other door toggled, because door registry changes were never re-broadcast. They are now. (#412)
• The client stopped leaking ~20 MB+ per menu↔world cycle. Unity never garbage-collects procedurally created textures, materials and meshes on its own — and this single-scene game never asked it to. Atlas textures, chunk materials, ship/speeder preview meshes and the static icon caches are now freed on world teardown, followed by a full unused-asset sweep. Especially relevant in the browser, where repeated world-hopping could run a tab out of memory. (#423)

📱 Touch & browser: no more soft-locks and dead ends

• Naming a beacon or beam pad soft-locked touch players (tablets, play.glitch.fun): the modal only closed on a physical Enter/Esc, and every on-screen touch control was hidden behind it — reload was the only way out. The dialog now has proper on-screen Confirm/Cancel buttons. (#408)
• A failed content load now explains itself and offers Retry. A malformed data file used to freeze the shell with no message; a failed WebGL content download left a dead menu showing raw ui.* keys forever. Both now raise a bilingual error overlay with a working Retry, and a mid-session re-load failure keeps the working in-memory content instead of tearing it down. (#422)
• Browser builds finally ship crash telemetry: the crash uploader ran on a thread pool that never executes on WebGL, so browsers reported nothing while the local spool grew forever. Uploads now use the browser-native path and the spool is capped. (#421)

🚀 Teleports actually stick now

• Admin teleports (teleport_to_location, teleport_to_player) and the ship-recall teleport were silently reverted a moment after arrival — the position change travelled on a channel the client's own movement stream immediately overwrote. They now use the same snap channel as the void-fall rescue, so the move is authoritative (and doesn't flash the death screen). (#414)
• The craftable suit teleporter gained its missing trigger: right-click the held item to recall to your ship — the server validates device, energy and cooldown, and rejections surface as toasts. (#414)

🛟 Failing loudly instead of silently

• A failed singleplayer launch no longer strands you in a void. When the bundled local server couldn't start — antivirus blocking the fresh EXE, a broken update, the port already taken — the client sailed on into an empty, chunk-less world with no explanation (exactly the first-run experience that makes people quietly uninstall). It now returns to the menu with a clear notice (including an antivirus hint), and a mistyped multiplayer address gets a proper "connection failed" instead of an endless loading veil. (#409)
• A corrupt settings file can no longer destroy your identity. A truncated client_settings.json used to silently reset everything including the PlayerToken that backs your claimed player name — leaving you permanently rejected under your own name. Saves are now atomic with a rolling backup, the token is additionally mirrored to its own file that settings writes never touch, and the menu tells you whether settings were restored from backup or reset. (#410)
• A failed chunk mesh build is retried instead of becoming a permanent hole. The off-thread mesher swallowed exceptions and never re-queued the chunk — leaving an un-meshed 16³ hole with no collider. Failures now re-dirty the chunk (bounded retries) and log the fault. (#421)

🛡️ Server: exploits closed, hardening everywhere

• Item duplication via trade offers is fixed: an offer listing the same item twice (with only one stack owned) validated per entry and paid out per entry — a straight item-minting exploit. Offers are now merged per item id before validation, with overflow-safe sums. (#406)
• Wrecked ships stay wrecked: the "downed" state never survived a server restart, so any rejoin returned the wreck fully repaired and flight-ready for free. It now persists on every backend; old saves are unaffected. (#419)
• The admin /api fails closed: without an admin password on a non-loopback bind, every admin route (config, backups, missions, logs) used to run unauthenticated — a password-less public Docker deploy was open to full takeover. Such deploys now answer 401 with a hint; local dashboards keep working; the public portal/download pages are unaffected. (#411)
• Rate limits can no longer be bypassed with a forged X-Forwarded-For: the fleet's world host trusted the header from anyone, letting a single machine mint fresh rate-limit buckets per request (unlimited signup floods, login brute force). Only configured proxies are trusted now (BBS_WH_TRUSTED_PROXIES, sane private-range default), and logins get a per-account backoff on failures — the real owner with the right password is never locked out. (#418)
• Protocol and transport hardening (#424): re-sent join requests are dropped instead of rolling the player back to their last autosave and re-running the expensive join burst; joins pass a per-connection token bucket; browser WebSocket connections get a cap and a handshake window (no more slow-loris socket hoarding); incoming MessagePack decodes with untrusted-data limits; a hung Docker daemon can no longer wedge the fleet's join path; and every secret comparison (admin tokens, report keys, server passwords) is fixed-time.
• Fleet resilience (#415, #416, #417, #426): the world reaper and the hourly archive sweep no longer race a world that is just waking up (which could SIGKILL a live container or move its database out from under it); one bad request can no longer kill the browser gateway's accept loop (previously a silent browser-only outage until restart); two unbounded server-side caches now prune themselves; ship docking now requires same world + proximity on both request and accept (it's guest access, and range was never checked server-side); and per-connection socket resources are reliably released.

📸 Also in this release

• All 13 English marketing screenshots were regenerated against the current engine, and the unattended capture pipeline that produces them was repaired. (#405)

0.8.4 — 2026-07-18

The visual-fidelity release: a real twilight, name-tagged ships, and an end to the "black silhouette / see-through floor" rendering bugs — plus the Medium-preset ambient-occlusion work and the browser-feedback fixes from this cycle.

🌗 Day & night now flow through a real twilight / golden hour

• Crossing the day/night terminator on a planet — or just standing still while the local day advances — used to snap almost instantly to a dark, starry sky, with no visible dusk or dawn. Sky.cs now computes a smoothstepped twilight weight that peaks with the sun on the horizon: a warm golden-hour horizon glow (which the distance fog inherits) plus a warm amber cast on the block light, sun disc and god-rays at low sun angles. Because it's driven by sun height, the dusk length scales with each planet's DayLengthSeconds on its own — long day → long lazy dusk, short day → quick one, no per-planet tuning. Stars now rise as the sun sinks past the horizon instead of popping on a still-bright sky. Airless / space-sky bodies keep a hard terminator (no atmosphere → no scattering), which also sets those worlds apart. Client-visual only. (#393)

🏷️ Ships now show their pilot's name in flight

• Other pilots in a space instance were rendered as ships / EVA suits but carried no name label, so you couldn't tell who was who. A floating nameplate now rides over each ship or suit via the shared screen-label layer — the same path as the ground remote-players, with a radar-scale distance fade (90 → 140 m). Synthetic NPC-trader poses have empty names and get no plate. Client-only; the name was already on the wire. (#386)

🎨 A sweep of rendering fixes — colour is back

• Creatures no longer render as flat black silhouettes — wild or tamed, flying or ground. The species colour arrived correct on the client but was crushed to ~15% of its true value by a stack of multipliers (grayscale hide-tile × the 0.35 ambient floor × the 0.6 asleep-dim, worst in linear space). LitColor gains per-material _Floor / _Fill (defaults leave every other user — avatars, doors, ships, stations, held items — byte-identical), only CreatureBuilder raises them, and creature hide tiles are lifted toward near-white on load (they're multiply-tint detail maps, not dark albedo). Detail is preserved; only shadows rise. (#396)
• Sky bodies no longer render as black discs by day. From a planet surface the sun and every visible body share the upper hemisphere, so the camera sees the body's unlit far side ("new moon") — a dark disc against the bright day sky. A new _DayLight blend in SkyBodyPhase.shader, driven by the day factor, lifts back-lit bodies toward a fully front-lit disc by day (limb darkening keeps their round depth); at night and twilight the true crescent/phase is preserved. Defaults to 0, so space view and the menu background are unchanged. (#399)
• Flora no longer shows a see-through "transparent floor". The ground under cross-plant flora and at the base of solid flora (puffballs, cacti, crystal domes) showed a hole to the sky. The mesher was culling the ground-top face because IsTransparent lists only glass/fluids/fields — not flora/foliage — so the sealed face left a gap the thin billboard couldn't cover. Flora and foliage neighbours are now treated as non-occluding, mirroring the AO occluder exactly; tree crowns stay a thin shell. Render-only; verified across biomes with a regression test. (#382)
• Edge-bevel corners stopped rendering white. The render-only T0 edge bevel drew white triangles at exposed convex corners because every chamfer vertex shared one zero-area UV (uv.center), which samples a near-white cross-tile average on the mipmapped, gutter-less block atlas. Each bevel vertex now gets a real per-vertex UV projected onto the block's own tile, so the chamfer samples the block's own, correctly-lit texel. (#382)

🌅 Distant terrain no longer pops in at the horizon

• The horizon stopped popping. Distant terrain used to appear abruptly at the view edge because the fog ended past the streamed terrain (up to 1.6× the view radius) and the haze was capped at 60–75% opacity — so the outermost chunks were always partly visible when they streamed in. The fog now saturates fully at the view edge, and the server streams one extra chunk ring beyond the fog line, so the last ring is already loaded-and-hazed and simply fades in as you walk instead of materializing from nothing. (#388)
• The world no longer assembles in front of you after loading. The loading screen used to lift as soon as the single chunk under your feet had loaded, while the rest of the view was still streaming and meshing — so you watched the landscape build itself for a few seconds. It now holds until the streamed view has actually finished arriving and meshing (with the same hard time cap so it can never feel stuck). (#390)

🤖 Walking ground robots actually spawn now

• The planet Guardian machines come in two variants — a flying scan-drone and a walking three-eyed ground robot — but only drones ever appeared in playtests. The spawn mix keyed off the raw live count while the spawn guard only fires below the cap, so at the default cap the count was always 0 or 1 at decision time and every slot filled as a drone; robots only showed at Frequent/Extreme or with 2+ players. The mix now keys off how many drones are already alive, guaranteeing a walking robot even at cap 2 (steady state: 1 drone + 1 robot) while still converging on the intended ~2-in-5 drone ratio at larger caps. Server-only. (#398)

💾 Singleplayer quit saves your live position

• Native singleplayer quit hard-killed the bundled server before its graceful drain + save could run, so everything since the last 5-minute autosave was lost — and on reload you reappeared at the last durable checkpoint (often the landing pad at the ship's heal-tank), a few blocks above your ship, falling onto the hull. Quit now closes the server's stdin and the server drains + saves your live position on the tick thread (up to a 5 s wait) before exit, mirroring the existing SIGINT → save path; it falls back to a hard kill only if the server wedges. Flag-guarded, so dedicated/docker hosts are untouched, and WebGL (in-process) is unaffected. (#401)

⚡ Medium preset: ambient occlusion at half the cost

• Itemised the Medium preset's GPU cost on the reference laptop (Ryzen 9 7940HS / RTX 2000 Ada) with a new per-feature probe: SSAO was the entire Low→Medium frame-time cliff — everything else Medium switches on (depth/opaque copies, SMAA, ground scatter) sat within measurement noise. Medium now runs SSAO at half resolution: it keeps ambient occlusion but roughly halves the pass cost (~2.8 ms vs ~4–7 ms full-res across runs), recovering a few milliseconds per frame. High is unchanged (full-res SSAO). (#374)
• The main-light shadowmap also drops 4096 → 2048 below High — free on the reference GPU, a small win on weaker ones; High keeps 4096. (#374)
• The PerfProbe harness gained per-feature toggles (-perfFeature ssao=off|half|full,depth=off,smaa=off,scatter=off,shadowmap=…,shadowdist=…) so one preset feature's cost can be isolated in a single thermal session, plus an optional dense night scene (-perfDense: Extreme creature abundance at forced midnight) to measure the glowing-entity light cost for a future pass. (#374)
• Hosted worlds now cap chunk streaming — and the first-visit worldgen that happens inside it — at a per-tick wall-clock budget (default 25 ms), so one player's fresh join or fast flight over new terrain can no longer stall the shared tick for everyone else in that world. At least one chunk always streams; the rest resume the next tick, nearest-first. Tunable via BBS_WH_CHUNK_STREAM_BUDGET_MS (0 = off); dedicated servers can set it directly with --chunk-stream-budget-ms / BBS_CHUNK_STREAM_BUDGET_MS. (#360)

🐛 Reports show the right version

• Bug reports and feedback in the report inbox showed the game version 1.0.0 for reports that came in through the server (a /bump, its feedback forward, or a server crash), because the dedicated-server build never stamped its version and defaulted to 1.0.0. The server build now bakes in the release version, and a /bump additionally carries the reporting player's own client build so the inbox shows the player's version rather than the server's. (#389)
• The server-side /bump forward now also carries the screenshot into the report inbox (top-level base64 node matching the F1 wire contract), so a graphics-feedback bump no longer arrives image-less — a reliable path for the picture even on older/native builds where the client-direct upload may not run. (#381)

📮 Browser feedback fixes

• Feedback in the browser no longer needs F1 — F1 opens the browser's own help, so the in-game feedback dialog now opens with F2 in WebGL builds (F1 stays on desktop). The HUD and flight hints show the right key per platform. (#376)
• Raw ui.* keys no longer stick in the browser UI. On WebGL the locale files load asynchronously, so a screen built during that window (e.g. the main menu) could show untranslated resource keys and never refresh. Cached shell screens are now rebuilt once the language finishes loading, and the missing ui.feedback.send label was added. (#377)
• Browser feedback actually reaches the inbox now. The WebGL build was uploading an empty {} body (IL2CPP stripped the report type's metadata), so reports were silently dropped while the game said "queued". The type is now preserved, and a server rejection shows a real error instead of a false "saved, will retry". (#378)
• The two admin inboxes now point at each other — the fleet admin and the ReportHost admin each note what the other one holds, so in-game feedback isn't hunted for on the wrong page. (#379)

0.8.3 — 2026-07-17

The performance release: a measured pass over the whole stack — meshing, physics, graphics presets and the network wire. Every claim below comes from automated before/after captures on the same reference laptop (Ryzen 9 7940HS / RTX 2000 Ada); the tool that produced them ships in this release too.

⚡ Exploring no longer stutters

• Chunk meshing stopped allocating. Building a chunk's mesh used to create fresh geometry buffers every time — the garbage collector ran ~25 times per second during a walk on High, each one a small stop-the-world pause. The buffers are now pooled and reused (~1 collection/s), and the worst frame in a full minute of walking dropped from 61 ms to 26 ms — zero frames above 33 ms remain. (#368)
• The collision mesh is greedy-merged: coplanar block faces collapse into large rectangles (collision-only — the rendered world is untouched, and collision behaves identically). Far fewer triangles to cook means cheaper physics baking on desktop and a lighter single-threaded collider build in the browser. (#369)
• The HUD stopped rebuilding its texts every frame, and the entity views stopped allocating per frame. (#365)
• Net effect on High/VD8: 41 → 48 FPS in the walking benchmark, with the hitches gone entirely.

🎚️ Quality presets that actually scale (Low: +35%)

• MSAA 4x and HDR were silently on for every preset — Potato and the browser included. Now they scale: MSAA off on Potato/Low, 2x on Medium, 4x on High; HDR off on Potato; Potato additionally renders the 3D view at 75% resolution while the UI stays pixel-crisp. (#370)
• The holographic visor HUD rendered a second full-screen camera into a texture every frame — on every preset. That pipeline now only runs on Medium+ with visor effects enabled; below that the HUD is the same clean flat overlay it always falls back to. Flipping the setting or preset in the pause menu switches live. (#370)
• Measured on the Low preset: 72 → 97 FPS in the same walk, zero hitch frames.

🌐 Browser: world data ~20x smaller on the wire

• Terrain chunks now travel run-length encoded: the browser's JSON wire path shrinks from ~15–25 KB per chunk to usually a few hundred bytes, and an initial view fill drops from several megabytes to a fraction — faster arcade joins on glitch.fun, a faster first picture in browser singleplayer, and lighter server egress. Native clients get smaller payloads too. The server always sends whichever encoding is smaller, so worst-case terrain costs nothing extra. (#371)
• Browser singleplayer already streams world data under a per-frame time budget, and phone/tablet browsers render at a capped pixel density since this cycle's quick-wins round. (#365)
• ⚠️ Compatibility: the network protocol version moves to 2. Updated servers reject older game versions at join with a clear "please update" message — the desktop launcher updates automatically, and browser players always run the latest build. Singleplayer is unaffected (client and bundled server always match).

📮 Singleplayer feedback finally reaches us

• Crash reports from the bundled singleplayer server and the rich F1-feedback snapshots now flow to our own report inbox (release builds only — dev builds stay local), so "it broke in singleplayer" no longer disappears into a folder nobody sees. Your screenshot is only ever sent once, and the local file remains the source of truth. (#373)
• Fleet worlds forward the crash-report key to every world instance, so a crashed hosted world reports itself on its next start. (#364)

🔬 For the curious

• PerfProbe — the automated benchmark behind this release's numbers: -perfProbe boots a fixed-seed world, records a standing and a scripted-walk phase and writes frame-time/GC stats, so every future perf claim is one command away. (#367)
• The pull-request CI gate is back under five minutes. (#366)

0.8.2 — 2026-07-16

A small arcade-identity patch for glitch.fun, straight from the first post-launch live tests.

🕹️ glitch.fun: your arcade identity now survives updates

• Returning visitors were rejected with "The name '…' belongs to another player" — over their own name: the name-verification claim keyed on browser-local storage, which Glitch effectively resets with every deployment (each release is served from a fresh content path). The claim is now derived from the Glitch install itself, so the same install keeps its identity in every browser and across every update — no more lockouts after a release. (#345)
• The player-name field in the menu now actually does something on glitch.fun: the requested name is sent along to the arcade gateway (which keeps the stable 3-character install suffix, so custom names stay unique), instead of being silently ignored and overwritten. (#346)

0.8.1 — 2026-07-16

The glitch.fun edition's launch-day round: the first live tests turned up several arcade rough edges (all fixed here), and in-game feedback now works in the browser and flows to our own inbox.

📮 In-game feedback (F1): works in the browser, lands in our own inbox

• The F1 feedback key now works in the WebGL player. Browsers have neither the HTTP client nor the threads the old uploader used, so the browser build could never actually send feedback — it now posts through the proper browser path. (#342)
• F1 works during space flight too — it was silently blocked in the flight view; the dialog also restores your cursor cleanly on close (matters for the landing-pad picker). (#342)
• Feedback never gets lost: a failed send is spooled locally and retried on your next launches (a handful of times, then quietly parked — never deleted), with a clear "saved, will retry" note. (#342)
• Under the hood, player feedback and crash reports now go to our own report service (reports.blocksbeyondthestars.de) instead of the old third-party endpoint. Already-installed builds keep using the old one for now. (#342)

🕹️ glitch.fun: arcade joins actually work now

• The arcade session gateway validated a visitor's install before registering it with Glitch — but Glitch's contract requires create-then-validate, so every fresh browser session was rejected with "could not be verified" and nobody could enter the arcade worlds. The gateway now follows the required call order (create/resume first, then validate), with a regression test pinning the sequence. (#334)
• CORS knew the wrong address: Glitch serves the actual game files from its S3 content bucket, not from play.glitch.fun — so the browser refused to even send the arcade requests. The bucket origin is now part of the default allowlist. (#336)
• The arcade never sleeps: the pool worlds now run permanently — woken at startup, never idle-exiting, re-woken automatically if one crashes — so a store visitor lands in a running world instead of waiting out a cold world generation. (BBS_WH_GLITCH_KEEP_AWAKE=false opts tight hosts out.) (#336)
• Fleet side (no download needed): the arcade gateway env passthrough was fixed in deployment, so the gateway is actually switched on. (#330)

🕹️ glitch.fun: pick your mode — arcade or singleplayer

• The page used to jump straight into the shared arcade world, so nobody ever learned that a full browser singleplayer exists. glitch.fun now lands on the menu with two clear choices: Play Online (Arcade) and Singleplayer — still one click to play, but a chosen one. (#340)
• That menu also stops offering the generic browser actions that made no sense on Glitch: Play used to dial a meaningless default host and drop the player into an empty, serverless void, and "Connect to a server…" suggested picking a server — never the player's job on Glitch. The arcade button requests a session properly and the manual picker is gone. (#331)

0.8.0 — 2026-07-15

The glitch.fun edition: Blocks Beyond the Stars becomes instantly playable on glitch.fun — shared arcade worlds you join with one click, plus full singleplayer that runs entirely in your browser and follows you across devices via cloud saves. (#326)

🕹️ Arcade worlds on glitch.fun (#322)

• A small pool of persistent multiplayer arcade worlds that exist only on glitch.fun: one click on the store and you are in — no account, no world creation, no password. The platform's install_id is validated server-side, you get a stable guest identity, and a sleeping world wakes on demand.
• These worlds never appear on our own portal (not in the public browser, not in any world list) — the Baumhaus rule for our own platform is unchanged: your worlds stay password + word-of-mouth only. The arcade is a separate playground under Glitch's platform accounts and rules; a devblog explains the amendment.
• Moderation without accounts: the operator can ban a Glitch install — banned installs get no new sessions and are live-kicked from a running world.

🌍 Singleplayer in the browser (#323)

• The real authoritative game server now runs inside the WebGL page — the same simulation the fleet and desktop run, pumped over an in-memory loopback instead of sockets. The browser menu has its Singleplayer button back, and ?singleplayer=1 deep-links straight into your world.
• One persistent world per browser: saved automatically every two minutes, when the tab goes to the background, and on exit — into the browser's own storage, as a compact snapshot of the whole world.
• Under the hood this retargets the server simulation to a Unity-consumable library (desktop singleplayer keeps its bundled server), adds a fully managed save backend (no native SQLite in WASM), and switches the in-browser wire to the JSON envelope — MessagePack's runtime formatters don't run under IL2CPP.

☁️ Cloud saves for logged-in Glitch players (#324)

• Playing on glitch.fun with a Glitch account? Your singleplayer world syncs to Glitch Cloud Saves and follows you to any device. Conflicts use Glitch's explicit resolve flow (the live session wins; nothing is silently overwritten), and guests simply stay local.
• The sync runs through our WorldHost as a relay, so the Glitch API credential never ships inside the public browser build; uploads are size-capped and rate-limited.

🚀 Releases now ship to glitch.fun automatically (#325)

• Every tagged release mirrors its WebGL build to glitch.fun through the platform's deployments API — same gating as the itch.io mirror (full test suite first, skipped cleanly on forks). One build serves both our portal's /play and the Glitch store.
• Small fix on the way: the browser menu's My Worlds button now always points at our worlds portal (on glitch.fun it used to be a dead link) — the door from the arcade to creating your own world with friends.

✅ Verification

• The suite grows to 1127 tests, including 31 for the glitch gateway/registry (guest tokens, capacity, bans, heartbeat + save relay, CORS) and 7 for the browser persistence path (full mine→save→reload round-trip on the real server + client). An automated real-browser smoke test drives the in-browser world end-to-end: boot, join, durable save. (#326)

⚠️ Known limitations

• In-game player reports need a portal session and are unavailable for arcade guests and browser singleplayer (operator recourse: install bans, world stop/reset).
• The in-browser world runs with AI texts off (static lines) — the LLM backend is not reachable from a browser.

0.7.7 — 2026-07-14

A pure stability release: a full code audit of the game server and the Unity client turned up eight bugs — all fixed here, the risky ones with new regression tests. Highlights: your saves are now safe across future content updates, multi-world hosting got fairer and lighter, and long play sessions stop growing in memory. (#319)

💾 Saves are now safe across content updates

• Saved worlds stored every block as a numeric id derived from the sorted content list — adding a new block in a later update could shift those ids and silently decode your existing builds into the wrong blocks. Worlds now persist an id→block palette and remap all stored ids (block & structure edits, regrown flora, space structures) when the content set changes — atomically, on SQLite and PostgreSQL alike. (#318)

🛰️ Multi-world hosting: fairer, lighter, harder to freeze

• Presence updates, enemy sync and void-rescue checks each ran on a single shared timer for the whole server — with several occupied worlds, one world could starve all the others of those updates. Each occupied world now keeps its own cadence. (#315)
• A world now really unloads (and frees its memory) when its last player disconnects — before, the unload could silently do nothing and the world stayed resident. (#313)
• /ai_mission called the AI backend synchronously on the tick thread, so a slow LLM response froze the entire server for everyone. Mission generation now runs off-thread and the result is applied on a later tick. (#314)

🪐 Planets: flora variety restored

• The set of plants for a planet was resolved once — for the first planet visited after server start — and then reused everywhere, so every world grew that first planet's flora. Each planet now resolves its own subset, deterministic from the seed again. (#317)

🧠 Client: mesh memory leaks plugged

• Unity never frees procedurally-built meshes on its own — chunk re-meshing, chunk unload, world reset and ship/asteroid re-meshing each leaked their outgoing render/collision meshes. All of these now destroy the replaced meshes, so long sessions no longer creep up in memory. (#316)

🤝 Trading: the right cargo on both sides (security fix)

• Player-to-player trades (and the admin give_item command) now validate and swap each partner's items against that player's own ship cargo instead of the last ship the server happened to look at — an offer made while aboard someone else's ship no longer resolves against the wrong hold. (#319)
• Security note (disclosed only after the official fleet was patched): the wrong-cargo lookup was player-reproducible and could be abused to duplicate items in multiplayer trades. The official hosted worlds already run v0.7.7 — if you host your own server, please update / pull the rebuilt Docker image promptly.

✅ Verification

• The full suite is now 1116 tests (998 server + 118 client), including 5 new regression tests: block-palette remap, per-partner trade cargo, per-planet flora determinism, and world unload on disconnect. (#319)

0.7.6 — 2026-07-12

A small under-the-hood release: the entire server-side stack moves to .NET 10 LTS (with a security fix included), and a subtle singleplayer start-world bug is gone for good. (#307, #309)

⚙️ .NET 10 LTS (server stack)

• The game server, web portal/API, world host, launcher and tooling now run on .NET 10 LTS (supported until November 2028) instead of .NET 8, whose support ends this November. (#309)
• Security: the upgrade surfaced a known high-severity vulnerability in the SQLite native library we were shipping (GHSA-2m69-gcr7-jv3q) — patched in this release.
• No action needed for players — the bundled singleplayer server and the launchers are self-contained and bring their own runtime. Self-hosters just pull the rebuilt Docker image; only local development now needs the .NET 10 SDK.

🪐 Singleplayer: start world can no longer get stuck on an old default

• The bundled singleplayer server used to read a config/server.json it once wrote next to its exe — a leftover file from an older version could silently pin outdated defaults, most visibly the start planet staying the old rocky world instead of the varied start worlds introduced in v0.7.x. The singleplayer host now always starts from current defaults and ignores any stale config. (#307)
• Official installers were never affected — this hardens portable-zip-overwrite setups and local builds. Dedicated servers are unchanged and keep their editable config/server.json.

📖 Docs

• The README now spells out the hosted-worlds friend flow up front: create your own world → set a join password → list it publicly so friends can find and join it. (#305)

0.7.5 — 2026-07-10

A small onboarding-and-trust release: newcomers now get the hosted-worlds model explained where they actually look, and Windows builds are moving to free, verified code signing. (#301, #302)

🌐 "Official Worlds," explained for first-timers

The game has no open public servers — everyone creates their own world, sets a join password, and lists it publicly so friends can find it. That rule was enforced everywhere but never spelled out for someone opening the menu for the first time. Now it is. (#301)

• The signed-out Official Worlds screen opens with a one-line explainer of how online play works: create your own world → set a join password → list it publicly → friends join with the password.
• The public worlds list now shows the note that was written for it but never displayed — these are worlds shared by other players, and you need the creator's password to join.
• Creating a world shows a friends hint right in the dialog: set a join password now, then list the world publicly under Manage so friends can find and join it.
• The web portal landing page gains a "So funktioniert's / How it works" card with the three steps and the no-open-servers rule, instead of just a one-line tagline before you log in.
• The README and user manual now state the model and the friends-join path up front.

🔒 Windows code signing (SignPath)

• Windows installers are moving to free, verified code signing through the SignPath Foundation's open-source program, so Microsoft Defender SmartScreen stops flagging them as coming from an "unknown publisher." A new CODE_SIGNING.md documents exactly what is signed, from where, and by whom; the README security notice and SECURITY.md link to it. (#302)
• During onboarding: while the certificate is still being provisioned, some builds may remain unsigned and SmartScreen may still warn — the notice explains the one-time More info → Run anyway step until signing is fully live.

📓 Devblog

• We keep a development blog (blocksbeyondthestars.com/blog) with the story behind the game — it now has its own link in the README header row.

0.7.4 — 2026-07-08

A round of new-player and comfort fixes from a hands-on playtest by Severin, plus Official Worlds & portal polish. (#289, #290, #298, #299)

🎮 Comfort & controls

• Pause menu on Esc — pressing Esc in-game now opens a small pause menu (Resume / Settings / Quit to main menu) instead of jumping straight to a "leave the game?" prompt. You can finally reach Settings — and the volume — without leaving your world, and volume changes are audible immediately. (#291)
• Settings apply live in a running world — language now switches the live HUD/chat instantly (the world previously kept its own snapshot until re-entry), quality preset / VSync / FPS cap / lens flare / motion blur / volumetric fog / mouse sensitivity / invert-Y push straight to the running world, and the view-distance row honestly says it takes effect at the next world start (the server streams the radius it was started with). (#291)
• Settings screen readability — the window (main menu and in-game, it's the same screen) is wider (600 → 900), every label/control lines up on one shared column pair, and the section headers are now real headers: bold, uppercase, with a divider line and breathing room, so the long list finally scans. (#291)
• Mouse no longer escapes after Alt-Tab — tabbing out and back used to leave the cursor free to drift or click outside the window; the game now re-locks it on focus return during normal play. (#292)

🌊 Survival tweaks

• Shallow water breaks your fall — landing in even a single block of water now cushions the drop (like Minecraft), instead of only saving you when you were chest-deep. (#293)
• Oxygen lasts longer — suit-oxygen drain has been softened again across all rates (at Normal a full tank now lasts ~285 s on foot). (#294)

🧭 New-player guidance

• The oxygen mechanic is finally visible — on a breathable world the vitals bar now reads "Oxygen (breathable)" so you understand why it never drains here, and a one-time advisor line explains that space, water and toxic worlds will empty your suit tank. (#294)
• Finding iron — the starter mission and the mining tutorial now tell you iron sits just a few blocks underground, so "where's the iron?" has an answer. Ores in general — and iron in particular — are also a bit more common now. (#295)
• The first minutes stay yours — the guaranteed starter data cube no longer glows right beside your ship; it now sits a short walk off the landing pad (~20 blocks), so new players aren't pulled into a minigame before they've even looked around. (#296)

🙌 Credits

• Severin is credited as a playtester (README + in-game credits) for the feedback behind all of the above. (#297)

🖱️ Official Worlds & portal UX polish

Follow-up polish to the hosted-worlds flow (portal + in-game Official Worlds menu). (#289, #290)

• Loading spinners everywhere an action runs in the background — waking/playing, creating, stopping, deleting and uploading a save. The web portal now also gives stopping and deleting a progress state (button disabled + "Stopping…/Deleting…" → "stopped/deleted"); before, those looked like nothing happened until the list refreshed.
• Play → clearer name handling in the game client: if the chosen player name is reserved or not allowed, an in-place prompt lets you pick another name and retries the join, instead of a dead-end error you could only fix from the main menu.
• "Play" (portal) reads a prefilled, remembered player-name field instead of a pop-up prompt; the browser-play button is the clear primary action with the native host/port/token in an expander.
• Official Worlds window widened and laid out as a clean grid: the five action buttons share one uniform row, the per-world Play/Manage buttons line up with the columns above them, and the world status ("starting…", "running") gets its own wide column so it never hides behind the buttons.
• One window for both world lists (game client): public worlds no longer open a second window. The Official Worlds screen now shows your own worlds and the public ones in a single scrollable view, split into clearly labelled "My worlds" and "Public worlds" sections (own worlds are filtered out of the public list).

0.7.3 — 2026-07-07

Find and join worlds other players are running, plus a round of interface fixes. (#287)

🌍 Public world browser

Hosted worlds used to be invite-only — there was no way to discover a world someone else made; you needed a link or token from its owner. Now there's an opt-in public list.

• Owners can list a world publicly with a per-world toggle — in the portal and in the game's Official Worlds menu — but only once the world has a join password, so a listed world is never wide open. Worlds stay private by default, and removing the password automatically un-lists the world.
• A new "Public worlds" section (portal card + in-game browse dialog) shows everyone's listed worlds; joining still asks for the owner-shared password, so discovery never means free entry.

🖥️ Interface fixes

• Credits screen — the contributor text now scrolls inside its panel (with a scrollbar) instead of spilling out the bottom and being covered by the Back button.
• "Create world" (portal) — the button now shows a "Creating…" → "Created 🚀" state and refreshes the list itself, so it no longer looks like nothing happened until you reload the page.
• "Play" (portal) — reads a prefilled, remembered player-name field instead of a pop-up prompt; clearer "waking…/ready" messages, with the browser-play button as the obvious primary action and the native host/port/token tucked into an expander.
• Official Worlds — the "View rules" button no longer crowds the panel's edge.

0.7.2 — 2026-07-06

Play the whole hosted-worlds flow without ever opening a browser, grow your own food, pen in your creatures, get treasure hints from villagers, and start new games somewhere friendlier — plus a round of UI polish.

🖥️ Play without a browser — full client-portal parity

Everything you could previously only do on the web portal now works inside the game's Official Worlds menu; for desktop players the website is optional. (#271, closes #268–#270, #272)

• Sign up in-game with the community rules shown and accepted right there. A new anonymous GET /api/terms single-sources the rules text with the /rules page (via a new CommunityRules class) so they can never drift, and an outdated-terms login opens a re-accept flow.
• Create a world (name + optional join password with a repeat check) and a per-world manage dialog: set/remove the join password, stop the world, or delete it behind a type-the-name confirmation.
• Save backup round-trip without a browser — download to / upload from portal_saves/<worldId>-world.db with an "Open folder" button (world must be stopped; the 50 MB cap surfaces server-side).
• Feedback & ideas form and GDPR account deletion (type-the-name confirm; erases the account, its worlds and saves) are both reachable in-game.
• WebGL round-trip — the browser client gains a visible "My Worlds / Account" button linking back to the worlds portal on the same origin (#272). It still never selects servers itself, so no portal features are duplicated in WebGL.
• UI polish — modal dialogs are now fully opaque everywhere (forms no longer shine through), the settings list scrolls, overlay notices wrap instead of clipping, the Play/Manage row buttons are wide enough for their labels, signup shows a proper "Password (at least 8 characters)" label, and the rules screen shows a friendly offline message + retry instead of silently dropping "accept" when the terms can't be reached.

🌱 Algae tank — grow food from water at a base

• New algae tank station block, the game's first food-producing machine (detoxifier station-recipe pattern, base-only). (#265, closes #261)
• Crafted at the workshop (2 metal panel + 3 glass, no blueprint); turns 1 water → 2 algae rations (+30 hunger). A new hand recipe (2 ice → 1 water) feeds it.
• Dedicated bubbling craft cue, new block tile + ration icon, and full bilingual Codex coverage (survival-guide article + auto chapters).

🐾 Energy fence & gate — pen in creatures, companions and enemies

Wild creatures, companions and planet enemies never consult the voxel world for collision, so ordinary walls can't hold them. Two new blocks change that. (#266, closes #263)

• energy_fence — a solid emissive pylon that blocks players, NPCs and all fauna (workshop: 2 metal panel + 2 cable → 4).
• energy_gate — a non-solid membrane players and NPCs walk through but fauna bounce off; a door with no open/close state (workshop: 2 metal panel + 1 energy cell + 1 circuit board → 1).
• A new fauna fence sweep wires this into creature, companion and enemy movement — so a pen holds your own animals and the fence doubles as base defense. Flying creatures glide over normal-height fences (documented).
• New atlas tiles for both blocks plus an energy_fence_hum loop; DE+EN locales, taming wiki article and manual sections.

🗺️ NPC treasure hints

Settlement NPCs can now point you toward the crashed wreck and hidden caches. (#267, closes #262)

• On greeting there's a 35% chance to emit a hint instead of the flavour line: the wreck (while unclaimed) for everyone; the nearest unlooted chest only once your relationship reaches "known".
• The reveal is world-global and co-op friendly — the POI is added to the map and broadcast to all joined players, and persisted in world metadata (no codec change).
• The spoken line is deterministic and localized DE+EN: an 8-way compass direction + distance, torus-wrap aware. Claimed wrecks and looted chests drop out automatically and are never re-hinted.

🪨 Friendlier start planet

• New games now start on a hospitable planet (varied) instead of toxic, plantless rocky; carbon ore was added to varied so the medpack/energy-cell chain still works. Only new worlds are affected — existing saves keep their persisted start type. (#264, closes #260)
• World generation is hardened: an unknown or unmatched start type no longer crashes world load (it falls back to the first breathable planet with flora).
• Fixed a latent bug this surfaced: breathable-surface health regen ran before the same-tick death check, so a 0-HP player was nudged to 0.2 HP and never respawned. No regen at 0 HP now.

🌐 Portal polish & security

• Discoverable DE/EN language switcher — a header "DE | EN" pill (the old switcher was invisible grey footer links), plus Accept-Language detection on first visit. Auto-detection sets no cookie; only an explicit choice persists. (#259)
• Resolved both open CodeQL alerts: the bbs_lang cookie now sets Secure + HttpOnly, and the /admin/announce handler logs the world id through the safe helper. (#259)

📚 Docs

• README now links to the game's website. (#264)

0.7.1 — 2026-07-06

This release is all about playing together safely: world creators can password-protect their worlds, server restarts announce themselves with an in-game countdown, reporting and feedback are easier to find (especially for kids), the portal got a kid-friendly rework, and the Play button finally launches the game right in your browser.

🔒 World join passwords

World creators can lock a hosted world with a password — perfect for "just my friends" worlds. (#255)

• Set, change or remove the password any time in the portal; new worlds can get one at creation (with a confirm field so no typos lock you out).
• Joining asks for the password — in the portal and in the game client (masked input). The world owner never needs one.
• Guess-proof: 10 wrong tries in 15 minutes puts a cooldown on that world, and sleeping worlds aren't even woken for wrong guesses.

🔧 Maintenance announcements

Server restarts no longer come out of nowhere. (#255)

• In-game countdown banner when a maintenance restart is scheduled, plus an acknowledgeable dialog and a proper "server is restarting" screen instead of a generic disconnect.
• New commands //restart <minutes> and //cancelrestart for world admins, a token-gated /announce endpoint, and an Announce card in /admin with a per-world graceful-restart button.
• Worlds finish the countdown, save, and stop cleanly — no more surprise kicks.

🧒 Kid-friendly portal & feedback

The web portal now reads like the family project it is. (#258)

• New "Feedback & ideas" card on the worlds page — kids and parents can send wishes directly, without filing a "report" against anyone; feedback lands in its own /admin queue, separate from player reports.
• Parental notice on the landing page, and "ask your parents first" is now the first community rule.
• Kid UX pass: create-account card comes first, the name field speaks plain words, a "write your password down!" warning replaces jargon, and the join prompt remembers your player name.
• Reporting is discoverable: rules and portal now point at the in-game Report button and /report command first.

🛡️ Easier reporting in-game

• New /report <name> chat command on official worlds — it attaches the last 10 chat lines as evidence. (#248)
• Every report now records which world it happened in — from the button, the command and the portal form. (#248)
• /help now leads with the commands for everyone (/report, /bump), and official worlds show a one-time chat tip pointing at both report paths (DE+EN). (#258)

🌐 Play in the browser, for real

• The portal Play button now launches the game directly in your browser — signed in, world picked, one click, playing — by deep-linking the WebGL client with a short-lived join token. (#256)
• Fixed the Play button doing nothing for returning players (a permission wipe ate the grant). (#256)
• The whole portal is now fully bilingual (DE/EN, ?lang=en or the toggle) and finally shows the game logo and a favicon. (#256)

🛠️ Fixes & polish

• Stopping a server during initial world generation now works — previously the stop was ignored and the container was force-killed (exit 137); the generation grace period is also longer now. (#247)
• Admin server-health card shows the real host core count, so the load bar means what it says.
• Hardened the admin stop endpoint against log forging (CodeQL): world ids are sanitized before logging.

0.7.0 — 2026-07-05

A big visual glow-up with the organic look overhaul, plus gamepad and touch controls, hosted Official Worlds with a web portal, a fleshed-out in-game Codex, and a browser client that's actually playable end-to-end.

🎨 Organic look overhaul

A full presentation pass — all client-side, no save/world migration needed. (#192)

• Softer voxel surfaces (per-vertex + cavity AO, beveled convex edges). (#186)
• GPU-instanced grass tufts and pebbles on open ground. (#187)
• 3D mesh flora — leaning 3-plane plant rosettes; cacti, crystals and mushrooms are real shapes. (#188)
• Finer building shapes: panel, post, beam, low ramp, quarter cube. (#189)
• Fully orientable shapes (all 24 orientations, auto-orient, rebindable rotate key). (#190)
• Sparse raised plating on exposed ship hull faces. (#191)

🎮 Gamepad & touch controls (experimental)

The whole input epic (#193) shipped — inert on desktop keyboard+mouse.

• Gamepad/controller support behind a new input-abstraction layer (flight, EVA, menus, building). (#199)
• Pad rebinding in Settings with device-aware button glyphs. (#206)
• On-screen touch controls with localized labels (DE+EN). (#204, #206)
• Text entry on touch in the browser; menus navigable by pad focus-nav. (#206)
• ⚠️ On-device feel still being playtested (#201–#203).

🌍 Hosted Official Worlds (beta)

Player-created worlds hosted by us, joinable in one click — no port forwarding, no server setup. (#227)

• "Official Worlds" in the main menu; sleeping worlds wake on demand and idle worlds shut down cleanly.
• Web portal with privacy-minimal sign-up (name + password, no email), world create/manage, and save upload/download.
• Kid-friendly bilingual community rules + a beta notice; DSGVO account self-deletion. (#233)
• One-tap in-game Report button + portal report form; operators can review and ban, enforced at join.
• Optional AI backend runs containerized in the fleet (internal-only, OpenAI-compatible) and feeds NPC chatter. (#234)
• Basic-Auth /admin panel: live fleet overview, report queue, ban/unban, server-health card; public aggregate-only /api/stats. (#234, #246)
• Per-world memory/CPU/pids fences + a global cap on awake worlds. (#234)
• Fixed a stale container blocking every re-wake, found in the first real end-to-end test. (#235)
• Developer names protected against impersonation + a blocked-name filter. (#230)
• Worlds untouched for months are archived, not deleted, and restored transparently on join. (#230)
• Rate limits on signups, logins, save uploads and reports + Prometheus metrics. (#230)
• Self-hosting unchanged — everything inert by default. Fleet deploys from the repo via an approval-gated SSH workflow. (#229, #231)

🐛 Self-owned bug-report inbox

• New ReportHost service: a small Docker container that receives F1 feedback and crash reports (unchanged wire contract), stores them in SQLite with screenshots, and offers a filterable triage UI. (#227)
• One-click JSON bulk export honoring the current filters. (#234)

📖 Codex

• Every block, item and all 19 worlds now have bilingual (EN/DE) descriptions, plus 14 new guide articles. (#184)
• Codex is fully navigable again: working chapter links, list descriptions, correct scan names. (#178)

🌐 Browser client

The experimental WebGL path is now genuinely playable.

• Fixed falling through terrain on landing — chunks and colliders now build synchronously on WebGL. (#205, #207)
• One-click /play flow polished (required name, deep-linking, dark loading template, reliable touch). (#217–#222)
• WebGL builds no longer drag in the desktop updater (Velopack); dedicated WebGL attach workflow. (#151)

🛠️ Fixes & polish

• You can walk out of your ship again (nozzles moved, doorway cleared, hatch raised to 3 blocks). (#179, #211, #212, #214, #215)
• Deep water reads see-through — vertical depth, softer reflections and glint. (#213, #216)
• Helmet lamp switches off when you leave a planet. (#180, #182)
• Opaque world-options dialog with non-overlapping footer buttons. (#181, #182, #209, #210)
• All 27 Unity compiler/build warnings resolved — the client builds warning-clean.
• Game-input hardening on every server: packet-size caps, per-connection rate limiting, validated face data, voice frame-rate cap, control characters stripped from chat/labels. (#233)
• CI: two-tier test gate — fast PR checks, full suite on main + before release. (#208)

0.6.2 — 2026-06-29

Sharpens core gameplay, adds oxygen-tank tiers, seals a station/space exploit, and lays the groundwork for playing in the browser.

🎮 Gameplay

• Shaped blocks now have proper icons in hotbar, crafting and inventory. (#125)
• Ladders are climbable (forward/Jump up, back/Ctrl down). (#126)
• Auto-step onto slabs & stairs without jumping. (#127)
• Tool-gated mining — stone needs a drill (the starter kit grants one); soft blocks stay bare-handed. (#128)

🫧 Survival

• Oxygen Tank tiers I/II/III — worn components giving +50/+100/+200 max oxygen; only your best tank counts, Tank III gated behind titanium. (#133)
• Easier to climb out of water. (#133)

🌐 Browser client (experimental)

• Hosted WebGL client + optional PostgreSQL backend, servable from the dedicated-server Docker image. Contributed by @ProdigyView (Devin Dixon). (#116, #123)
• Slimmed browser start menu to name + Play. (#122)
• ⚠️ Not yet verified end-to-end — ships as experimental.

🛠️ Fixes & polish

• Sealed a station-to-space gap via a bounded flood-fill enclosure check. (#134, #135)
• Dev builds isolated under a separate pack ID. (#115)
• German localization fixes — thanks to @Maqbool61 (Maqbool Ahmed). (#112)

0.6.1 — 2026-06-28

A focused follow-up to v0.6.0: an experimental macOS build, automatic crash reports, and one-click client downloads from your own server.

• 🍎 Experimental macOS build (StandaloneOSX, portable zip) — unsigned/un-notarized, not yet tested on real hardware; testers wanted (#87). (#84, #105)
• 🐧 Native Linux client (new in v0.6.0) gains a one-click download from the server portal. (#83)
• 🛡️ Automatic crash reporting (server + client, opt-in, with a PII scrubber); the server tick is hardened so one bad event can't crash the world. (#103)
• ⬇️ The dedicated-server portal now hands out Windows, Linux (AppImage) and macOS clients directly. (#107)
• 👨‍👩‍👦 README, Code of Conduct, in-game Credits and Codex now state the kid-friendly intent. (#109)
• ⚙️ Faster, cleaner release CI (version resolved once and shared; Docker build decoupled; overlapping runs serialized). (#106)

0.6.0 — 2026-06-27

Our biggest update yet: claim your own factory, explore alien ruins — and play natively on Linux.

• 🎉 First community contribution — native Linux support by @corarona (Cora de la Mouche). (#69)
• 🏭 Factories — rare industrial halls with animated machine bays and a production terminal that turns cheap materials into bulk output.
• 🏚️ Ruins — collapsed settlements you can mine, plus standalone treasure chests with richer loot.
• 🔑 SPS access codes — a rare item that lets you claim a factory as your own editable base, shared with allies.
• 🐧 Native Linux client — real StandaloneLinux64 build as AppImage + Portable.zip; the Windows-only embedded browser (CEF) was removed so the Codex Wiki and Arcade run without it.
• 🛠️ Deeper crafting: new Transmuter station, the Refinery becomes full metallurgy, and the titanium/carbide deadlock is fixed.
• 🌍 Bigger in-game editors, longer view distance, smoother movement, downhill rivers/lava with waterfalls, brighter worlds, per-world named tree species.
• 📚 New factory/ruins docs (manual + Codex, EN/DE) and a canonical source-code URL (AGPL).

0.5.0 — 2026-06-25

A graphics-quality pass and a licensing/foundation cleanup.

• 🎨 Pro-look graphics quick-wins: in-game post + SMAA + SSAO + emissive glow. (#50)
• 🎨 Per-biome cinematic mood LUTs (#51), PBR-ish GGX specular + roughness-aware reflections on voxels (#52), and a global Brightness control. (#53)
• 💧 Soft water reflections + visible sky bodies (#55); clear water you can see into again. (#56)
• 📜 Relicensed MIT → AGPL-3.0-or-later + a Contributor License Agreement. (#59)
• 🧩 Native in-game Arcade + Wiki — removed UnityWebBrowser/CEF, unblocking Linux/macOS. (#58)
• ⚡ Runtime-quality pass: client perf, netcode area-of-interest & interpolation, input remapping. (#60)
• 🚀 Ship cargo hold is now actively usable — manual transfer, capacity, auto-stow. (#62)

0.4.2 — 2026-06-23

• 🍽️ You no longer starve in the first few minutes — starter food (5 berries + 2 rations), an "eat" onboarding objective, an earlier hunger warning, and clearer food descriptions. (#46)
• 🔫 A fighting chance against early hostiles — a weak ranged starter scrap pistol, fixed ranged weapons only firing at point-blank, and a 3D line-of-sight gate so enemies can't hit what they can't see. (#45)
• 🐧 Linux/Proton: no more hard 30 fps lock — VSync is now its own setting with a separate frame-rate cap. (#47)
• 📝 README intro reworked around the family-and-community project story. (#44)

0.4.1 — 2026-06-22

• 🚀 No more creatures trapped in your ship — the ship evicts wild creatures on landing (companions may still follow you aboard); same guard for planet enemies. (#43)
• 🛡️ You're truly safe once aboard — visible attacks (drone fire, robot claws, creature bites) now stop the moment you board. (#41)
• 🧭 Cleaner HUD in space — the planet compass and day/night–temperature–gravity panel hide while piloting (compass stays on during EVA). (#39)
• ⌨️ Feedback is now simply F1 — the never-clickable bottom-right button is gone. (#42)
• 🎥 Automated in-game clip recorder (video + frame-synced audio) for marketing clips. (#40)
• 🐳 Docker Desktop local-test walkthrough in SELF_HOSTING. (#38)

0.4.0 — 2026-06-21

• 👥 Raised the default player cap from 4 to 12 + a 12-player smoke test. (#19, #21)
• 📻 Tiered radio reach + live voice chat. (#30)
• 🐳 Optional Docker image for the dedicated server. (#26)
• 🧰 UI fix: split the in-game menu top bar into two rows so Close no longer overlaps tabs. (#35)
• ⚙️ CI hardening: PR build/test gate (warnings-as-errors, docs-only skip), format/lint/CodeQL checks, Actions pinned to SHAs, CodeQL compiles C# in manual build mode, release notes prepend the Docker pull command. (#16–#37)

0.3.2 — 2026-06-21

• 🚀 Explosion stays with no landing animation after ship destruction (#10); rear hatch shows a blue energy door in flight, not an open hole. (#11)
• 🛬 Landing flies the descent to the chosen planet, not the launch body. (#12)
• 👾 Floating scan-drones fire a ranged laser. (#13)
• 📸 Per-planet surface screenshots for variety (#8) with terrain-aware capture placement. (#14)
• 📝 README gains a Project Status section, table of contents and itch.io/releases links. (#6, #15)

0.3.1 — 2026-06-20

• 🧹 Release CI strips the Burst _DoNotShip folder and mirrors installers to itch.io. (#4)

0.3.0 — 2026-06-20

• 🔀 Require a pull-request workflow (repo public, main protected). (#1)
• 🔒 Patched langchain/langsmith/starlette security alerts in the AI backend. (#2)
• 🧹 Cleared analyzer warnings (nullable, async, dispose). (#3)

0.2.0 — 2026-06-20

• Early release. See the full diff.

0.1.0 — 2026-06-20

• Initial public release.