Stars Reach News

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.

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!