We started 2025 by releasing our
major graphics overhaul, but we have much more planned for the year, including allowing meteors to burn up in an atmosphere, simulating basic life, and getting Universe Sandbox on mobile devices so you can create and destroy on the go. Before diving into details, let’s look back on some highlights from 2024.
[h2]Highlights from 2024[/h2]
The Moon’s shadow passing over Earth during the total solar eclipse across North America on April 8, 2024.We spent 2024 working on our major graphics overhaul, released March 2025, and many of the other in-progress features mentioned in this roadmap. In addition to the
awe-inspiring realistic graphics, our March graphics update included many
quality-of-life improvements. Our biggest accomplishments from the year include:
- Improving material simulation and manipulation with more realistic atmosphere colors and opacity and the ability to swap one material for another. (Update 34.1, March 2024)
- Replacing our 10-year-old graphics technology with a state-of-the-art system so you can immerse yourself in a more awe-inspiring and realistic universe. (Update 35, March 2025)
- Implementing a new interface system that automatically positions, resizes, and closes panels so you can focus on manipulating the universe instead of managing panels. (Update 35, March 2025)
The new graphics rendering and user interface systems were major milestones on our
2024 Roadmap.
[h2]What’s the Plan for 2025?[/h2]
- ✅Finish our major graphics update.
- Released on March 3, 2025!
- Add basic life simulation where vegetation grows, dies, and gets eaten.
- Optimize and rewrite our simulation using Unity’s Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS).
- Bring Universe Sandbox to phones and tablets (iOS & Android).
We plan to work on all these projects in 2025, but some, like getting Universe Sandbox on mobile devices, have been in the works for years. Additional challenges may arise that delay features, and our priorities may change.
[h3]Even More Graphics Improvements: The Saga Continues[/h3]
A comparison of Earth and 100 Colliding Moons showing how much more realistic the scenario looks in our new graphics update.Earlier this year, we
released our major graphics update with hot, non-stellar objects emitting light, physically based lighting, and more. But we’re not done yet! We’re planning even more graphics features, including object selection highlights that are unique to the object’s shape and new point light object.
- But Wait, There’s More!
- Now that our new graphics rendering system is out, we’re planning to utilize it to add even more graphics features, including
- Redesigning object selection outlines to be more visible, useful, and unique to that object’s shape instead of always being a circle.
- Adding new Point Lights with customizable colors to light up your simulations without adding stars (and boiling Earth) for that perfect shot.
Work in Progress: Point Lights are a work in progress that allows you to customize your simulation's lighting further.
- Simulating supernovas emitting light (Spoiler - they’re really really bright).
Work in Progress: A supernova lighting up a few different objects, including Jupiter and a very large banana. Space Goggles are On because the supernova is so bright.
[h3]Life Simulation: Let There Be Life![/h3]
Work in Progress: The work-in-progress life simulation interface tracks the mass of vegetation, herbivores, and non-living matter, and the habitability of each point on a planet's surface.Last year, we began working on life simulation after adding materials like carbon dioxide and oxygen to planet atmospheres. Vegetation will grow, spread, die, and be eaten on planet surfaces, similarly to how we simulate temperature, liquid, and gas flow.
- Simulating Vegetation
- Life can spread to other planets on fragments from collisions.
- As vegetation grows and dies, the amount of carbon dioxide and oxygen in the atmosphere will change.
- Vegetation will grow, spread, and die based on the local conditions on the surface of a planet.
Work in Progress: All life on Earth is killed, only to reseed it with some vegetation using the Planetscaping tool. The vegetation slowly spreads back across Earth.
- You’ll be able to customize the conditions needed for life on your planets so your plants can absorb methane and emit hydrogen, for example.
- You can even set the conditions to make life grow on Titan!
Work in Progress: Custom vegetation thriving on the surface of Saturn’s Moon Titan after setting the temperature range and atmosphere pressure to match Titan’s surface and having it take in methane and output oxygen.
- Animals & the Circle of Life
- Herbivores, like vegetation, will also be simulated on planet surfaces. The overall herbivore mass will be tracked and will also depend on how much vegetation there is on the planet to support them.
- The names and life requirements of the two species will be customizable as well, so you can let your imagination run wild to simulate your favorite plants and animals, like cows, trees, whales, dik-diks, skunk cabbage, aliens, unicorns, you name it (literally)!
- Future Models
- We plan to make our food chain even more complex with carnivores in the future.
- You’ll be able to quickly cause catastrophic events leading to mass extinctions. For now, we have a simple Kill All Life action.
Work in Progress: Kill all life on a planet with the press of a button.
[h3]Advanced Physics Technology[/h3]
Work in Progress: Earth is orbited by eight Ceres, which get stretched and ripped apart by Earth’s tidal forces, forming rings around the planet.Improving collisions with more realistic friction and craters, simulating atmospheric drag, which allows meteors to burn up in the atmosphere, and continuing to optimize our physics simulation are all things we're working on this year.
- Advanced Game Engine Features
- We’re continuing to reconstruct our simulation architecture using the Data-Oriented Technology Stack (DOTS) from Unity, the game engine we use to build Universe Sandbox. We’re excited about the expected performance gains and future opportunities it brings. We plan to roll these changes out in multiple phases.
- Phase 1 replaces our current physics engine with a new DOTS-based system that will make Universe Sandbox easier to maintain and improve.
- Upgrading to DOTS in phase 1 lays the foundation for everyday, non-spherical object collisions (like two dice), building and flying spacecraft, and constructing megastructures like Dyson spheres.
- Phase 2 will unify our collision simulation to allow for more realistic collisions of celestial objects like planets and everyday objects like pigeons. This phase will allow
- Objects to physically deform due to craters, fragmentation, laser impacts, and more, influencing how they collide.
- Everyday objects, including simple shapes like dice and complex shapes like spacecraft, to collide according to their unique forms instead of as spheres, also called rigid-body physics.
- DOTS optimizes our simulation by efficiently running more computations simultaneously on the CPU, allowing for more objects, collisions, and fragments.
Current
Work in Progress
New Gravity Simulation
- We’re experimenting with a new method of gravity simulation, called Barnes-Hut simulation, to allow rock fragments and dust clouds to attract and merge, forming planets & moons. Currently, these particles can only be pulled on and cannot form planets independently.
Work in Progress: The red boxes show how the gravity tree used in Barnes-Hut simulation divides up space dynamically into chunks of particles to more efficiently simulate the intersections between thousands of particles instead of constantly brute force computing the gravitational interactions between all objects. You can see the boxes change as fragments are created and spread out in space.
Grinding to a Halt
- Our new friction model will simulate craters stretching out as objects skid across each other’s surfaces during collisions. In our current simplistic model, craters are always circular.
Visually Deformed Objects
- Most objects in Universe Sandbox are spheres, but in real life, some rotate so quickly that they stretch and flatten, like the dwarf planet Haumea. We’re working to simulate this stretching visually.
- This will not affect the object's physical shape, collisions, or surface simulation until after Phase 2 of our restructuring our simulation with DOTS is complete.
Current
Work in Progress
Atmospheric Drag
- To simulate meteors, we’re working on adding a drag force so objects burn up while traveling through a planet’s atmosphere. Currently, objects pass through atmospheres unchanged.
Work in Progress: A small asteroid burns up as it travels through an atmosphere before crashing into the surface.
Tidal Locking
- We’re planning to simulate objects becoming tidally locked, where the same side of one always faces the other as they orbit each other, like the Moon to the Earth.
Current
Work in Progress
Mathematical Points
- We’re planning to add more visualizations of useful mathematical points and boundaries, including
- Lagrange Points - the points where the gravitational influence of two objects is equally strong. Objects placed at these points orbit in a stationary position relative to the two objects like the James Webb Space Telescope is to Earth and the Sun.
- Hill Spheres - the boundary within which a moon is gravitationally bound to a planet.
- Roche Limit - the boundary where the tidal forces pulling on an orbiting object are stronger than its self-gravity, ripping it apart.
[h3]Universe Sandbox on Phones & Tablets[/h3]
Universe Sandbox in portrait mode with our new dynamic interface system that automatically positions, resizes, and closes panels so you can always see the simulation.Getting Universe Sandbox on mobile devices (iOS & Android) is a major focus again this year. We’ve made a lot of progress with our new graphics update and interface system, which significantly improves usability on small touchscreens, but there’s still a lot to do.
