Stars Reach News

By Sean WeedenThe Stars Reach Trailer II project was all about creating the trailer we’ve envisioned – a true showcase of the strides we’re making in bringing Stars Reach to life. Trailer II highlights the leaps we’ve made, enhanced graphics, a dynamic world simulation, player-built structures and fast-paced, arcade-style combat, giving players a glimpse of how Stars Reach is coming together and what’s next on the horizon.All footage in the trailer is real gameplay—no staged scenes, no CG. We wanted this trailer to give a genuine look at the new features and systems we’re building. Although we’re still in the early stages, our goal is to make Stars Reach dynamic, immersive, and truly player-driven.[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][h3]A FRESH VISUAL DIRECTION: SHAPED BY COMMUNITY FEEDBACK[/h3]
During this Pre-Alpha phase, player feedback has been crucial. We heard you loud and clear on graphics improvements, so we prioritized updating the art direction to create an atmosphere that feels rich, textured, and alive. Trailer II gives an authentic snapshot of Stars Reach’s visual direction, showing how we’re reimagining the universe to align with what players have envisioned. This is just the beginning—more visual improvements are planned as we continue through Pre-Alpha, and even bigger updates are coming.

[h3]COLLABORATIVE TRAILER CREATION: A TEAM EFFORT[/h3]
Capturing footage for Trailer II was a lively and sometimes hilarious adventure, with our team in constant coordination to showcase Stars Reach’s best moments. Each new system—from our dynamic world simulation to environmental lighting upgrades—had its moment to shine, but not without a few memorable hurdles. Turns out, getting everyone to fly in the same direction in zero-gravity is easier said than done! And don’t even get us started on the swarms of skysharks—our poor avatars barely stood a chance and often had to respawn mid-shoot! Each clip you see is the result of a mix of luck, last-minute improvisations, and those rare, perfectly-timed moments. This trailer truly marks an exciting milestone in our journey Our goal was to go beyond updated graphics and reveal brand-new gameplay mechanics and immersive moments that we’re excited to share for the first time.

[h3]BEYOND VISUALS: A WORLD FULL OF DISCOVERY AND ADVENTURE[/h3]
Our goal was to balance these new visuals with a preview of engaging gameplay at the heart of Stars Reach. We knew it wasn’t enough to simply show improved graphics; we wanted to capture the depth and excitement of our world in motion, from combat sequences to world-building features. Throughout production, we carefully selected scenes to give viewers a true sense of the immersive, ever-evolving world, hoping to spark curiosity about the adventures that await them inside Stars Reach. In the end, Trailer II became more than just a visual upgrade—it’s an invitation for the community to join us as we continue to build, refine, and evolve the game together.

[h3]JOIN THE PRE-ALPHA PLAYTESTS: HELP SHAPE THE JOURNEY[/h3]
If you’d like to be part of the journey and see your feedback come to life, register to join our Pre-Alpha playtests and connect with our Discord community to help shape the future of Stars Reach. Your input is essential in building a living galaxy that reflects the creativity and passion of our players. Let’s build this adventure together!

[h3]We’re excited to share the new trailer for Stars Reach, our sci-fi sandbox MMORPG currently in Pre-Alpha. This is just a glimpse of the battles, exploration, and landscapes that make Stars Reach a different kind of MMORPG—one where your choices have real impact on a galaxy that’s constantly evolving.[/h3][previewyoutube][/previewyoutube][h3]Want to be part of the journey? Sign up now to join the Pre-Alpha playtest and help shape Stars Reach from the ground up. Every player’s input counts as we build this galaxy together.[/h3]

By Dave Georgeson

The time has come for our pre-Alpha MMO to graduate from single zone tests to multizone ones instead. Not only that, but now we start to take the training wheels off – allowing players to explore and make their own paths, gain XP, gather resources, craft new equipment, explore a new planet and space zone, and fight to stay alive while they do it!

This weekend is Part 1 of those tests.

Stars Reach is still significantly pre-Alpha, but the game has grown by leaps and bounds beyond the basic combat and survey point test we ran only a couple weeks ago.

The players start on Rodin IV, a temperate planet in unknown space. A small forward base has been established on-planet by Rangers that visited previously but they left little behind…just a few crafting stations and a ReLife node.

The players have only their basic starting equipment, a desire to explore and the willpower to stay alive, and during the course of Parts 1 and 2 of this test, they’ll go from harvesting mushrooms to potentially building colonies and starports of their own.

All of this is designed so that we can gather feedback from the players and make adjustments to the game going forward, reinforcing what works well and replacing what doesn’t as we keep forging our path toward Alpha.

[h3]WHAT’S NEW IN PART 1?[/h3]

• The Harvester and a basic Botany skill tree
• The Terraformer and a more extended Mineralogy skill tree, including Chronophasing
• Flares for the Trailblazer (Ranger skill tree). (A popular player request from previous tests!)
• You don’t start with the Grapple and Grav Mesh…you have to make them first, which makes travel and combat…interesting
• Pathfinder (survey tool) no longer has TAB modes…it’s all-in-one mode and easier to use
• Stove and Toolmaker can be used to make recipes for things you unlock with XP. (The Lathe will become functional in Part 2.)
• Added scores of recipes and around 50 new resources
• More than one zone. Look for the portal! And expect the unexpected!
• Lots of performance improvements and crash fixes

If you’d like to be part of the journey, register for the playtest and join our Discord to help shape the future of Stars Reach. We’d love to have you with us in the next round of testing!

By Carneros & Rod

TEST ONE!

A recently mapped survey point. Image provided by Soeed

On Saturday October 19th, we ran a world exploration test in Stars Reach. In this pre-alpha version of the game we haven’t tuned for difficulty, are using many placeholder artworks, and are aware that we still have bugs to deal with, but that is fine at this stage.

We gave players several new tools to play with and very little information on how to use them. The players split up and started to test out the game in various ways. Some of them explored the new Ranger skills and exploration game play.

We got a lot of great feedback on the exploration part of the game. Several players managed to completely map the planet. Those players found a trophy labeled “a sense of pride and accomplishment” in their inventories. They then usually lost it when they next died, oops.

Other players equipped a weapon and proceeded to hunt the creatures around the map. And a few players were content with setting the trees on fire and watching the world burn!

Image provided by: chooseareality

In the screenshot you see below, every tree is the equivalent of a mob in a traditional MMO. They can each run individual behavior scripts, they grow and die and burn and can be chopped. They even throw off seedlings so the forest can spread.

As you can see, it was a pretty dense forest! One of the topics of discussion on the Discord afterwards was that the forest fires don’t spread enough, so we will work on tuning that up so that it spreads more and feels more dangerous. During every test, the dev team hangs out on a Discord voice channel with the testers, talking through what testers are experiencing. Feedback like the above is exactly why we run tests.
Image provided by Julia

TEST TWO!

Not long into the test we ran into an issue where large groups of players near each other were being disconnected all at the same time. On top of that many of the players that were disconnected were then facing a crash bug on trying to log in. The development team jumped into action and began to dig through the server and crash logs as they came in to start to identify the problem.

By Monday morning, we had identified some possible fixes and built them into a new hotfix client. The problem we faced is that the issue was hard to reproduce and required more players then we could muster in house. We turned to our faithful testing Discord for help. With a simple announcement in Discord we were able to get 30 people to log into the game with only short notice. This allowed us to validate our fixes and help us identify some of the remaining ones.

The bug itself was elusive, only showing up during combat and often hiding from single-player sessions. But with enough players fighting monsters at once, it became far more frequent. We asked the community to dive in and engage in as much combat as possible. After 30 minutes of intense monster-slaying, we were thrilled to see the bug squashed-Discord saved the day!

Of course, the players had one additional note for us: “The monsters need to be much deadlier.”

Companion orbs versus skysharks. Image provided by Tako

This test showed that we were successful at fixing the crash that we had originally identified. Sadly, the test also resulted in reports of players crashing on login to the game. In fact, it was severe enough that it affected the dev team, who couldn’t even log in to end the test! (We did eventually get in, and close the server down, to the dismay of those testers who had planned to just keep playing…)

TEST THREE!

Once again, the development team dove into crash reports, player and server logs to research the issues. Everything pointed to an issue with our visual effects and how they interacted with DirectX and Vulkan. We quickly came up with some potential solutions and turned to Discord for help – pulling off two tests in a single day!

The third test in three days brought more insights, and while we’re still working through those fixes, it’s clear how valuable these quick, spontaneous Discord tests have become. We’ll keep leaning on our community for these unscheduled playtests, and though we can’t promise instant fixes every time, the progress we’re making feels great—and sometimes even faster than expected!

Image provided by mrgoshdarn.

If you’d like to be part of the journey, register for the playtest and join our Discord to help shape the future of Stars Reach. We’d love to have you with us in the next round of testing!

Exploring the deep dark deadly woods…

If you read our last blog post, you heard about the features we plan to test this weekend.

To date, we have been unlocking only specific features in each test, and trying them out in isolation, rather than letting testers play with all the systems we have done work on. Probably most notably, testers have had combat used on them, but they haven’t been able to really fight back with weapons yet.

That’s because until now, we have been doing mostly scalability and stability testing. Testing features in isolation lets us measure their performance more accurately, and reduces the number of variables as we isolate issues. This lets us iterate on them as quickly as possible.

But now that we have a good sense of what to tackle on the performance side, we’re ready to start letting players try out gameplay features! This time around, we are going to have more than one game system turned on, so that we can start to test out how they interlock.

In Stars Reach, each gameplay system is dependent on others in various ways, so we have to plan carefully what we turn on at each test.

As one example of that, crafting was mostly not available in the earlier tests, but we did give players the Paver tool. Normally, that would have required skills from the Civil Engineering profession. To enable the test of world manipulation without dragging in all of crafting, we just made it so that you didn’t need to actually craft paving stones or pavement, and instead just spawned the pavement directly in the world. The paving also all came from just one material, even though in the actual game you’d need to harvest the right materials to make a given pavement type.

This time, testers are going to try out a pretty important pair of systems, one oriented around exploration, and the other, excitingly, combat.

[h3]BEING A RANGER[/h3]
Remember, Stars Reach does not have classes. Instead, you can start learning any given skill tree, which we call a profession. Sometimes, one profession unlocks another. This means changing our mindset a little bit when we design special abilities.

As developers, we might have a natural inclination to say “learning knives plays well with stealth abilities, so I’m going to put some stealth powers in the knives skill tree.” In a system like ours, it’s better to think of stealth as a profession in its own right, that might pair up with knives, but also might pair up with mining, botany, or xenobiology because players want to avoid combat while hunting for rare samples.

We end up grouping together these “ways to play” into the professions, and testers are going to get to try out two parts of the overall Ranger tree in the test this weekend.

Rangering is big! It’s actually made up of five separate professions arranged like this diagram. Each of these bubbles specializes into different activities.

Ranger Figure 1.

The base skill to start out as a Ranger offers up just one ability: marking waypoints. This is a basic navigation aid that helps you navigate the world. You have a datapad where you can collect these waypoints, and eventually trade them with others.

From that basic ability, you then branch out.

• If you want to keep exploring what is possible with waypoints, you will want to head toward surveying and cartography. You can learn how to have more and more waypoints, how to set them from a distance, how to collect survey points in the world and craft planetary maps, and more. In Stars Reach, you do not have a minimap until you make one, or obtain one from someone who has crafted one!
• Orienteering is more about learning to hike and navigate. Until now, everyone has had the ability to fly with the gravmesh, and to use grappling. Everyone has been slowed down the same amount by slopes and everyone was equally good at climbing sheer cliffs. This profession is all about unlocking these things and about getting better at them. Hanging on a cliff is going to cost stamina, until you learn how to use pitons, for example.
• Camping is about the ability to create forward bases. In SR, when you die, you pop back to the last save point – a ReLife Station. Rangers who know camping can create these camps and they automatically come with a ReLife Station. Otherwise, you’ll be rewinding back to the start point on the planet. Camps also can have crafting stations and defenses, and they count as a “safe area” for the purposes of healing wounds and using entertainment skills.
• Being sneaky is fun, of course. Learning how to mask your scent from roving creatures, how to hide and sneak about, and even engage in sneak attacks for extra damage regardless of which weapon you use – these are all the province of the Concealment profession.
• Lastly, there’s an advanced profession for truly hardcore explorers. Someone adept at Wilderness Survival can train building up heat and cold resistances for extreme weather and climates, can learn how to resist poisons, and so on.

[h3]ENOUGH PROFESSIONS, WHAT ABOUT SKILLS?[/h3]
Even this diagram does not show the systems in real detail. You don’t need to master both Concealment and Orienteering to unlock Wilderness Survival. Professions can be unlocked and branch off midway through a tree.

In fact, even though I am about to share what the trees currently look like with you here, I’ll warn you that we expect to add, drop, and rearrange skills from these as a result of testing. Our skill system is very data-driven and it’s easy for us to do that, so we will take advantage of that capability to keep iterating! So don’t rely on this diagram much! 🙂

Ranger figure 2

Some things you might notice about this: bolded circles unlock an ability, like a new special move, or a new passive ability. Ones with the thinner ring are generally about making stats on the ability better. So once you unlock camping, you can make camps of larger size or duration by earning your way further up those progression tracks. We’ve currently settled on around three upgrade tiers as a number that felt good in terms of each new box feeling really consequential.

These trees can also crosslink into other professions. And dotted ones are ones that we aren’t quite ready to talk about or promise yet. Lastly, there are master skills that “sum up” a portion of the tree and can grant titles to players.

[h3]IN THIS UPCOMING TEST[/h3]
Players in the next test will only be playing with camping and some amount of surveying. And surveying is not all of the Cartography tree this time. We’re still keeping to the plan of unlocking features a bit at a time. The goal is for each player to try mapping the planet – no sharing of survey points yet. If you had guessed by now that this test is also about evaluating Exploration as a playstyle of its own, you’re right! That’s exactly what we hope to do here.

Players will notice that some of the abilities they’ve gotten used to seeing on other tools have moved around. Being able to clearcut underbrush like a machete, use a low-powered flamethrower, and freeze a path across liquid or hot terrain are things that a Ranger needs to do; previously, some of this capability was on a generic Agitator tool. Our goal is that abilities like that fall into the professions where they make sense. You won’t find the flamethrower melting any rock, for example. It’s just not that hot.

Camping enters the picture because you will find you probably want camps in order to succeed at mapping the planet. Get used to dying, because the creatures in this test are aggressive and fairly tough. Most of the camping skills are present.

Similarly, in this test we are going to let players experience combat. Combat has plenty of work left to do on it, especially around client prediction and networking. But this test is all about mapping a dangerous planet. We figured, you need a chance to fight back. Please don’t judge this as the final form of combat – though it should give you a decent taste of the action-oriented arcadey feel we are going for.

All in all, this should feel like “a game” more than previous tests. You have a clear goal: map the world. The world is resisting. Can’t wait to see how it goes!

Want to help shape the future of Stars Reach? Register now to join our playtest pool! While signing up doesn’t guarantee an invite to the next playtest, you’ll be in the queue for future opportunities to experience new features and gameplay. Be among the first to explore, fight, and influence the game’s direction. [Sign up here]!