Stars Reach News

PART TWO

Then:

Clere, like everyone else in the crowded urgent care office, was staring at her phone. The video was all anyone was watching, over and over again. At first people thought it was just a great viral video hoax. But verification kept coming out from space agencies and astronomers, newspeople and governments: all saying it was true, true, true. We weren’t alone in the Galaxy. There were aliens out there. And they were inviting us up there, in the nick of time, before we destroyed ourselves.

“We hope this message reaches you in time. If you are like us, you have brought your world to the brink of destruction. If you are like us, you grow desperate. But there are other worlds, and your species need not go extinct. This message will be followed by coordinates—” The talking head scientist interrupted his tenth reading of the message to point out that the end of the message did in fact contain a whole series of equations and math, which scientists were busily deciphering. “Send one person, one of your best, and have that person come alone. We are also providing tests so that you may select the right individual.”

“And these tests,” the news anchor interrupted. “What sort of person are they looking for?”

The scientist shrugged. “We don’t know. We haven’t figured out what the tests are, much less what they are looking for.”

“Whether we’re edible, no doubt,” said one of the other pundits. “Or whether we have the right attitude to be sheep for aliens.”

Give me a fucking break, Clere thought to herself, and shifted Sofia to her other arm. She was trying not to wake her as she did it, not sick as she was, but they’d call her number soon, and then it wouldn’t matter. But the stupid talking heads made her so angry. As if aliens would offer a bit of hope to an entire planet, and then ask for one human as what, an appetizer?

“And why only one person? If they are more advanced than we are, they could presumably have landed on Earth,” the news anchor said.

The scientist shrugged, but Clere had to pull her earbud out when she heard her number called. She awkwardly stood, shoving her phone back in a pocket with the video still playing and hefting a listless Sofia as she pushed her way to the diagnostic window.

The sympathetic look on the nurse’s face told her everything. As she began to sob and clutched her child closer to her, the nurse began to explain the cryogenic care process, that with these reawakened Ice Age diseases there was nothing else they could do. Nothing they could do, the woman said. There was nothing they could do.

Now:

The shaking is brief, and the lights soon shine steady once again. The touch panel by the airlock door is now inert, and the one by the other door is blinking yellow.

Clere experimentally stands, and wobbles for a moment, unaccustomed to feeling her real weight. “They seem to have artificial gravity,” she says. “And the readouts on my screen seem to say that there’s now air. No traces of anything odd… but of course there could be anything at all in the air, pathogens or something. I shouldn’t risk it.”

But the screen is showing the human figure on the chair standing and removing their helmet. Under the helmet, it’s a woman with long hair. Faceless, but she cocks her head expectantly at Clere, as if waiting, then the image loops.

“They want me to take off my helmet.” She thinks back to long ago theories about how any aliens out here must have evil intent. But long ago, when she’d signed up for The Project, she had set aside those fears. Nothing to lose, she had told herself then. Why go to all that trouble to get one human to Saturn’s moons, just to kill them, like some sort of cosmic troll op?

She decides, and tongues the release sequence on the inside of the helmet. With a crack and a whoosh, she finds herself breathing sweet air.

That’s when she hears the Muzak playing.

“Is that… Toto’s ‘Africa’?”

Then:

“Full name?”

“Clerestory Scansion.”

“Uh… how do you spell that?”

She told him, then as usual felt compelled to explain. “I’m Puerto Rican,” she said.

The tech’s eyes widened. “Oh! A dictionary baby?” After enough hurricanes hit the Caribbean islands in quick succession and they had to be abandoned due to infrastructure collapse, thousands of orphaned children too young to know their names were collected and adopted out. Bureaucracy being what it is, the government used a simple algorithm of choosing vocabulary words to generate temporary names – some bright Silicon Valley techie’s idea. Sometimes the adoptive parents kept the names. Less often, the kids took them back, to declare their identity to the world.

“What does it mean? The name, I mean,” the tech asked, as he efficiently drew blood.

“High windows? Like in a church, the ones up near the ceiling. And the rhythm of words, like in poetry.”

“Huh,” he said, cocking an eyebrow at her. “That’s kind of pretty.”

He was flirting a bit, but she knew he was going to see hundreds of women like her, hundreds of faces in a crowd, as he drew blood day after day and fed it into the Project’s databases. “I guess,” she said.

And that’s when his jaw dropped. He held up the test strip from the Project’s sample kit. He had trouble getting the words out, probably because he had never gotten to say them before. “You—y—you’re a match. You’re one of them. The chosen ones.”

Now:

The figure on the screen has a face now. As it is still an eerie porcelain white quite unlike Clere’s actual skin tone, it takes her a moment to realize that the face is her own, and that it is smiling at her. Her double shucks the spacesuit, and Clere does the same, until she is standing there in her jumpsuit. She can’t help but tap her feet to the drums. As the camera zooms out, the figure on the screen gestures towards the door on the far side of the chamber.

“I guess this is it, everyone. Time to meet our future.” It’s a PR line self-consciously delivered, but Ismail had been insistent that there needed to be a catch phrase, something that could make headlines around the world.

Clere walks to the door, still somewhat unsteadily, and places her hand on the touchpad, which is no longer blinking. The inner door emits the same loud thunk as the outer airlock did, and Clere knows that she can pull on the oddly familiar handle and open the door to new worlds. But she hesitates. The PR line feels hollow, unsatisfying. And Ismail had been so proud of it, focus tested to within an inch of its life! But he hadn’t counted on the surreal dentist’s office, or the music. Not exactly the soundtrack I expected for first contact, she thought to herself.

She pulls the locket with Sofia’s picture from out of her jumpsuit breast pocket, opens it, and looks at that tiny face, half-asleep. She holds it up in front of the camera at her neck, and says “This is my daughter Sofia. She’s in cryosleep… she caught one of those ancient diseases that came up out of the permafrost. I know that everyone back on Earth has their hopes pinned on me. That everyone has some dream about how things could be better, and right now, those dreams are all on the other side of this door. Well, Sofia is my dream. Whatever these aliens can give us, maybe one of those things is a cure. And that’s what’s on the other side of this door for me. A second chance.”

Then:

They’d let her take her out of sleep, only briefly, just to say goodbye. “Time to sleep, mija,” she said, through her tears. She nuzzled Sofia one last time, then lay her gently down. “Mama has to go. I have a long trip ahead of me. But you stay here, and stay safe, OK? And I’ll be back for you, and then we can walk in the grass and play with puppies and do all the things, OK?”

Sofia looked at her, half awake, with the infinitely deep eyes of a child. The face of hope.

Now:

Clere kisses the locket, and then pulls her hair aside to clasp the necklace around her neck. She tucks her suit’s helmet under her arm. She imagines Mission Control ninety minutes from now, holding their breath as she grasps the handle. Then she pulls on it, and opens the door. It’s dark on the other side, but she gets the sense of a hallway.

No point in being scared, she thinks. She glances over at the screen, and the figure – the one meant to be her – is dancing to the music. No point, not when it turns out that outer space is a little bit… silly. Unaccountably, joy bubbles up inside her.

As she steps over the threshold, she thinks about small steps and giant leaps. But that’s not what it feels like to her, as she reaches for the promise of the stars. Never mind the gravity.

Clere thinks of holding her daughter again, and Clere floats.

Now:

Clere floats. Her suit keeps her warm; one scant breath away lies the vacuum of space, safely on the other side of her clear visor.

Above her is the infinite sky, cloudless and airless, of a barren ice moon by night. It holds countless stars, a spread of jewels across a profound black that is deeper than any ocean. From where she is on Saturn’s moon Enceladus, she can barely see the tip of the rings poking above the horizon, reflecting the sun she cannot see. It’s a desolate place, a surface of cratered ice, pocked and cracked from millennia of impacts.

Under other circumstances, she might stop to stare into endless space; but she’s on a mission, one that entire nations are waiting on, back on Earth. She briefly puts one hand over her chest, over the pocket on her jumpsuit that holds Sofia’s picture; then she activates her suit jets and gingerly moves away from her lander and towards her destination: the mysterious alien structure that holds all of humanity’s greatest hopes and fears.


Then:

“You’re it, Clere,” the voice said on the other side of the line. “It’s not official yet, but it will be by this afternoon. You probably have a couple of hours to get back here and shower before the press shows up.”

“Holy shit,” was all she could muster.

She’d paused her jog above the reflecting pool in front of the Lincoln Memorial to take the call; her breath condensed in the cold winter air in front of her. Snow bones and puddles had made for a tricky hour of exercise as she dodged halfhearted tourists on what was left of the Mall. The city was on one of its periodic power outages, and of course most of the Mall had been underwater for quite some time; as sea levels had risen, so had the Potomac. The reflecting pool had been given raised embankments so that people could still walk along it, see the Lincoln Memorial just offshore, and see the dirty water lapping at the steps, on its decades-long climb to Lincoln’s feet.

Clere began walking slowly back across the embankment bridge in the direction of Washington Monument Island. From there she’d be able to go over the pedestrian bridge to her office at the Smithsonian.

“You heading back now?” Ismail asked. “We need to think about how to tell the story to the press.” He was the director of public relations for The Project, and what the press thought was always his top concern.

“Yes, of course,” Clere said. “You’re sure about this? They really picked me?”

“Yes,” Ismail said. “You’re it,” and hung up.

Clere broke into a jog again, then an outright run. She was going to space. She was going to Saturn’s moons. And after that, she might be going to the stars.


Now:

“It’s a door. A human-sized door. It looks like wood paneling. With a fairly ordinary handle. Which seems odd on the face of it: why would an alien species capable of interstellar travel make a door that looks so much like one from Earth? There’s even what looks suspiciously like a welcome mat.”

Clere narrates awkwardly for the record, her suit keeping a log and taking video of this extraordinary sight. A regular front door to a house, with a regular door handle. There’s even a keyhole. The mat is fibrous and clean, bolted to the icy rock. Reflexively, she wipes her feet on it, and has to grab the door handle to keep herself from floating away in Enceladus’ low gravity.

It doesn’t open, of course. “There must be an airlock on the other side, which means there’s probably a doorbell of some sort to request access,” she muses aloud.

The surface of the door is unbroken, but to one side she finds a small square touch panel with an old-fashioned doorbell, complete with brass mount. As she moves her hand closer, the touch panel glows a soft yellow. As she touches it, she hears a solid clank from within, and the door lock releases. The panel turns black. She tugs at the handle, and this time, it opens.

Inside looks much like a waiting room, softly illuminated by diffuse overhead lights. There are chairs, clearly meant for humans. They even have cushions. Behind her the door closes and for a moment she panics, alarms on her suit jumping as her heart rate climbs.

“I am inside. The door closed behind me. I… hope I’m not trapped.” Almost ninety minutes from now, Mission Control will catch its breath in fear, when the radio transmission from Enceladus gets there. “Sorry, don’t mean to scare you,” she says self-consciously. “It looks like there is another touchpad on this side.” She taps it experimentally, and the door once again makes its solid chunk sound. This time the panel turns black. She pushes on the door, and it starts to swing. She pulls it shut again, and it turns yellow once more. “It’s got a lock, I can open it whenever I want and leave. Like an airlock but with a touch panel.”

Having reassured her listeners back home, Clere surveys the room. “It kind of looks like a dentist waiting room.” A portion of the wall seems to be a screen; right now, it is showing video of a human figure in a spacesuit sitting on one of the chairs, over and over on a loop. “Looks like they want me to sit down.” There’s a door on the far end, with another touchpad. It’s currently not illuminated at all; when she taps it experimentally, nothing happens.

“I don’t understand how there can be a human in this video,” she says, watching the figure repeatedly sit down on the chair, then stand, then sit again. They look like a department store mannequin, but it’s still clearly a human. “Whoever they are, they must have been watching us for a long time.”

In fact, she can’t shake that feeling as she looks around the room: it seems very much designed to make her feel comfortable. The floor is metal, but it has been painted in a pattern much resembling a carpet. The walls are an off-gray, but a cheerful blue stripe runs along the baseboards. There are baseboards. “If they were trying to make me feel at home, it’s not working. I actually feel a little creeped out.”

To sit or not to sit? she thinks to herself. Once again she places her hand over Sofia’s picture. It’s the whole reason she’s here. Her daughter may be stuck in cryogenic sleep to save her life, but she’s still the impetus behind all the training, the endless hours of study. Come alone, the message had said. Send one person, one of your best, and come alone. And now here she is, alone and a billion kilometers away from another human soul. And she’s debating whether or not to sit down? Fuck that. Besides, there’s nothing else to do.

Clere carefully jets over to one of the seats, and ever so slowly lets the gravity of Enceladus take her down. The moment she settles into the soft cushion, the lights flicker, gravity seizes her, and the whole room shakes.

[TO BE CONTINUED…]

By Meghann Bledsoe

Stars Reach is a game where there’s always something new to discover around the corner whether it be new ways to interact with other players or with the environment. So how do we make huge numbers of worlds for players to explore that ensure that they always have something new to find? Procedural generation is the answer, and will be pretty familiar to those that have played No Man’s Sky, Terraria, Minecraft, and many other games.

[h3]THE POWER OF THE THIRD DIMENSION[/h3]
Procedural generation, when used to create 3D terrain, tends to use mathematical algorithms with different seeds to generate 2D height fields like the one below.



When these 2D images are translated into 3D, the black areas are the lowest points and the white areas are the tallest. By changing the seed that the algorithms use, we can create an infinite number of these height fields. This is so powerful, but the downside is that these are 2D images. That means no overhangs, no caves, etc. Everything has to be wide at the lowest point of the map and narrow at the top.

What we’re doing at Playable Worlds though is unique and allows us to create fully 3D worlds that use these algorithms to create chains of tunnels, unique terrain formations, arches, overhangs, and ledges! This opens up all kinds of possibilities for new and exciting environments.

[h3]WAIT…THAT’S A REAL PLACE?[/h3]
A lot of the inspiration for our worlds comes from the most unique landforms that occur naturally on Earth. There are truly amazing and surprising things out there!



For fun, let’s grab that last image of the mushroom rock and see what we can do with our tools to make some mushroom rocks and get them into the game! The image below will be our initial shape. It’s interesting for sure, but this is the limit of what most procedural generation tech would let us do.



Now! With our tool, we can scoop out the underside and leave a cool stem shaped rock underneath. Then, all we have to do is throw it into the game.



And here’s another entirely different mushroom created by taking the algorithms that made the first mushroom and changing just the initial input value!



Both of these are made entirely of mathematical algorithms with our awesome tool, and we can combine shapes like these with other types of terrains and features in infinite numbers of combinations to bring new adventures to all the eager explorers out there!

KEEP IN TOUCH WITH OUR EXPLORERS
Join our official game Discord for an afternoon and read their stories, see their screenshots in the #your-wow-moments channel. Keep up with the amazing things folks are finding and doing in our first few planets and the space between.

https://discord.gg/starsreach

We all enjoyed your video interview months ago at the announcement of Stars Reach. That was recorded in May and debuted in June. (Editor’s note: it’s here if you missed it.)

[h3]What’s been the most rewarding or unexpected development in your work since the June 2024 announcement?[/h3]

Avi: The fact that we’ve been running playtests almost weekly (and sometimes even more frequently!) means players get to see our work almost immediately. Even debugging mundane bugs and crashes has become a lot more fun because I know there are folks who are really looking forward to those fixes and will notice right away. This obviously applies even more to the highly visible gameplay features, and the constant positive feedback loop we have with the tester community is so invigorating.

Light: Hands down the most rewarding thing has been getting the game into the hands of players. We’ve always wanted to work closely with the community while making Stars Reach, and well before we revealed the game there was an unofficial Discord with a bunch of great people who were following our progress on our unannounced game. Finally getting to the point where a bunch of those people (and many others who’ve joined the adventure) are actually in the game and giving us feedback has been unbelievably rewarding. Whether it’s reporting issues in current playtests or sharing hopes of what future playtests may hold, it’s been great hearing from everyone and I love that we’re at a place where we can move forward together.

[h3]How have players in the playtest community surprised you over the past few months?[/h3]

Avi: I expected to be surprised and impressed by our community from the beginning so in a way, I’m not at all surprised that I’m surprised and impressed at their creativity! Some of you have figured out neat tricks with the simulation like lithifying certain types of soil into stone and then melting it to create quartz, which is a useful gemstone for a bunch of crafting recipes. I didn’t even know you could do that! I just used it recently in an internal test to craft some new tools myself and others on the dev team were like, wait, how did you do that?! I can’t wait to see what other crazy things we learn from you all.

Light: The best thing about this kind of game is you can pretty much always count on players being able to surprise you. As long as you give players interesting options and a good simulation to play with, they will find ways to make it do things you didn’t intend. But actually the most surprising thing to me from our community hasn’t been an in-game mechanical interaction, but rather the social interactions that we’re already getting. We know the big-picture vision of our game has tons of support for social interactions, but the current in-game versions are pretty limited. And yet we have people in playtests who are not just excited to play, but who are already grouping up and coordinating team efforts to try to see just how far their creativity can go. We’ve had people work together to try to sculpt statues or write words on the sides of mountains. We’ve had people group up to try to make a mountain fall by collectively carving away its base. We’ve just recently had a group of people start making plans before the playtest even started to try to figure out what they were going to build together. That blew me away. We knew we were building a game that would encourage those kinds of social interactions, but given how few of our planned social systems are in right now (and how fleeting some of these early playtests are) I wasn’t sure how much social play we’d be seeing this early. Needless to say it’s been an absolute delight to watch.

[h3]What are you most excited to show the players in the next 6 months?[/h3]

Avi: Combat is very near and dear to my heart and while what we have in game today is perfectly serviceable and already pretty fun, we have some big upgrades planned that will make it feel much more polished and responsive. We’ve been hard at work on some of the non-combat trees and performance and stability, but combat will have its day soon and I’m super hyped for it!

Light: Building off of my last answer, I’m excited to get more of the social systems in. We have so many tools and ideas to help players actually play together instead of just ‘playing separately in the same space’. In the immediate future we’re adding Gifting (which is the beginnings of an actual player economy!) and the rough beginnings of Homestead Permissions, but we’ve got plenty more to add and we’d like to start doing so soon! This is where I have to make my obligatory disclaimer that I’m not making feature or timeline promises… But some of the features we have planned that I suspect will make appearances soon include a Leadership Profession which will start out helping groups in combat, more ways to trade with other players including trading information not just items, and possibly even the start of Player Contracts.

[h3]For someone just joining the playtest, what’s your top tip for getting the most out of their first session?[/h3]

Avi: This one’s easy! Now that our video NDA has been lifted, the pre-alpha tester community has already been creating guides for each other. Check out Rommi Noodles’ Pre-Alpha Beginner Guide on YouTube for a taste of what’s in the tests so far and some of the strategies and approaches they’ve already discovered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsP7Ob4qtm0

Light: I think Avi already hit the nail on the head: The best way to start learning how to play an MMO has always been (and always will be) the friends you make along the way. So join the Discord, during playtests join the voice chat, and don’t be shy if you have questions! That said, I definitely understand that it might be a little overwhelming to be just dropped into one of our playtests. There’s a lot of tools, professions, and even movement options to learn, and we’re adding more all the time! So my advice would be to narrow your focus instead of trying to learn everything at once. Pick which sounds the most interesting to you between “Fighting”, “Exploring”, or “Gathering Resources,” and start learning just the things you need to do that thing. Each of those will eventually lead to learning the other two, and the three of them collectively will lead towards Crafting, Home Building, and more. One of the advantages of Stars Reach is there’s no single ‘right way’ to play, there’s lots of playstyles so if you know what your personal playstyle is just focus on the things you know you usually enjoy. We’re planning to add more in-game onboarding for First Time Players very soon, so that should help as well, but one more time for emphasis: the best resource for any MMO is its community.

Thank you to Avi and Light for taking the time to ask questions.

If you wish to join us in the playtests, please sign up here.

If you are signed up to playtest but haven’t taken the Solsten survey, that is here.

If you wish to help us built momentum and keep our investors happy, please wishlist us on Steam here.

By Dave Georgeson

So there are all these worlds out there for you to explore. A natural question for you to ask is “Can some of it be mine?”

The answer is “yes, absolutely”.

In our current pre-Alpha state, players can use the Trailblazer tool to set up temporary camps. Soon, they’ll be able to turn those temporary camps into long-term Homesteads instead.

[h3]WHAT IS A HOMESTEAD?[/h3]
A Homestead is a patch of a world that you claim as your own. You set up a camp, register that camp with the Transplanetary League, and voila!, it is yours.

Now you can build on that plot of land. You can create a home, a shop, a manufacturing facility, a farm, a giant robot…whatever you desire. If you claim a homestead in space, you can build a starport, or hollow out the interior of an asteroid as a smuggler’s base, and more.

To do so, you use Civil Engineering tools, like the Instaformer, Fabricator, and Paver to build structures and roads. You can use Forestry tools like the Xyloslicer and Growth Pod to add/grow trees and plants. And you can use Mineralogy skills to transform the terrain around you with the Terraformer.

Later, you’ll also be able to add active defense systems (like turrets and force fields) to keep the aggressive wildlife at bay or simply build passive defenses (like walls and ditches) to discourage them from wandering into your property.

In other words, it’s your home and your imagination is the only limiter on what you can do.

[h3]EXPANDING YOUR DOMAIN[/h3]
There’s a lot of planets out there. And we don’t want you limited to living only on a single world.

So, you can unlock new homesteads as you adventure, usually by acquiring new nodes on a skill tree, but there are other ways as well that we’ll unveil as we develop.

Those additional homesteads can be used to either establish another home on a different world, or they can be placed next to your existing homestead to enlarge your original claim.


[h3]CAN I MOVE A HOMESTEAD?[/h3]
The answer is “sort of”. If your homestead is empty (you haven’t built or changed anything there), then sure, you can release it and go place it somewhere else.

But if you’ve built a lot of stuff, then it’s a different story. Eventually, we’ll be creating a system that packs up your stuff into a crate so you can move that somewhere and reassemble your structures at the new location. That takes some effort, but it does make it possible to relocate your homestead.

NOTE: The first iteration of this feature will not be nearly so refined. In the first iteration, if you release a homestead, you’ll lose everything on that homestead. So choose wisely until we get the rest of the systems built!

[h3]CAN MY FRIENDS HELP ME BUILD?[/h3]
Absolutely. Even in this first release, you’ll be able to give a friend permissions to build and change things on your homestead (and you can revoke those permissions also). We’re also adding a Gifting feature so you can (for example) mine a bunch of resources and bring them back to a friend that is crafting building tiles and creating structures.

This, coupled with the fact that you can see the controls and tiles that people use as they build, allows you to cooperatively and easily build with others on any homestead. It’s a fun way to build, so enjoy!

[h3]WILL THERE BE OTHER FEATURES IN THIS UPDATE?[/h3]
Well honestly, that’s already quite a bit. But we’re planning more on top of it. How much of the list below will make the cutoff for this particular update? We’re not sure yet. But we’re currently working on:

• Prospecting: The ability to find stone, metal and gemstone deposits on or below the surface of your worlds.
• Seasons: The world transforms around you as the seasons pass.
• Onboarding: The game now has a LOT of features (even though we’re not even close to feature complete), and despite the fact that we’re going to need to redo the onboarding many times in the future as things continue to change, it’s asking too much from our testers to join the game and learn it all from scratch without some assistance. Those F1 help screens just aren’t enough. So we’re going to try some stuff out to help with that.
• We’re working on cliff traversal and falling damage with the objective to make cross-country travel more challenging, but also more of a puzzle and fun.
• We have some ideas on how to make creatures smarter/more interesting, so we’ll be tinkering with that.
• Bug fixes. The tests we’ve run are continuously feeding us issues to examine and we keep knocking things off the list as we do these updates.
• And more. Yes. Definitely more. But that’s the list of major stuff.

[h3]WHEN WILL THIS UPDATE OCCUR?[/h3]
After the Thanksgiving holidays, so early December sometime. I hope you’re looking forward to it! We’d really like to start running longer duration tests. We’ll see how things go with the bug fixes and then decide on that.