PAT24 GovBot

It’s time to take a look at the newest patch update for Stars Reach: the GovBot update, or as I prefer to call it: the grind update. The new patch rolled out last Thursday, the 13th of November 2025.

Stars Reach marks Raph Koster’s (lead designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies pre-CU) return to making MMORPGs. It plans to become a living, dynamic world - entirely player driven and simulated. Not a static setpiece for telling a pre-written story, but a living world where players live their own stories. The goal is to support as many different playstyles as possible - including non-combat ones - and make them all useful and economically viable. Everyone will be able to contribute something to the game’s virtual society, and things are tweaked in such a way, to hinder larger groups to become dominant, form monopolies or control entire markets. But as of now, the game is still in pre-alpha. Incomplete, WIP, lots of mechanics and systems not in the game yet at all.

Audath V is the new Planet, the other three are like last patch

To an outside observer it might still appear more like a survival game, than a sandbox MMORPG - but with the introduction of player vendors last patch, and a first iteration of the player governance system this patch, things are starting to change. And yes, this is a game where players can create cities, own planets, from governments, vote for a mayor, and set rules for public spaces.

Bugs, Stability and Performance

The last few updates have been plagued by some quite severe issues. A few patches were needed just to address bugs and performance - and when patches did introduce new features, those often ended up not working at all, or barely working but with many bugs. I’d love to tell you that this newest patch is bucking that trend - because in some ways it is - but I’m not fully convinced about that.

One the one hand, the headline feature of this patch is a big one, and it works perfectly with no major bugs. Yes, I did manage to get my total “Citizenship Points” into the negative - but that’s a minor thing. Performance is currently pretty good as well (not great, but none of the bigger issues we experienced during previous patches) - but we don’t know yet, how much of that can be attributed to the wipe, and how performance will be, once more player houses have been built again. Work on Performance is ongoing - with all plants now having been replaced with new models that support the new super-shader and impostor system. Character models, creatures and hard-surface items are still coming.

Missions are kinda boring, but a financial necessity

Several testers even exclaimed that after several hours of playing, they didn’t notice any bugs at all. I think what the meant by that, is no new bugs? Because there’s still a ton of smaller bugs around. Maybe many testers don’t even notice those any more. But there’s still sometimes crashes on zoning. The reticle will disappear after zoning, requiring alt-tab to make it visible again. The HUD might still show the wrong item highlighted, or be missing some specials or features of the currently selected item. Switching back and forth between different tools normally fixes that. Character animations still can freeze sometimes. Landing at the space-station might get you stuck in a “touching down” loop, never really standing at the floor. And many more such small things - but no character corruptions, no lost items, no hard crashes, no disappearing inventory screens, etc. - none of these critical issues.

On the other hand, server crashes and server rollbacks have returned. We haven’t had those in a while, and while they aren’t too frequent, and do typically not affect character progression - having the world state rolled back by 4 hours is still a major issue. This is not a minor bug, like the HUD display weirding out. So overall, two steps forward, one step back?

The GovBot

Every planet now has a GovBot kiosk right next to the portal. All the other things (crafting stations, ecology kiosk) are gone - the GovBot is now the only station present at a planet’s portal. Those other kiosks (and more) can be unlocked and brought back by the players though.

But first of all, a player government must be formed. In the future, players will have to go through a sequence of team-work oriented tasks first, to just unlock the GovBot for a planet. That’s not implemented yet, so for this update, the devs have pre-placed a GovBot at each planet. Players can simply walk up to it, and become a citizen of a planet. Right now it seems to be one possible citizenship per character - but devs have said this should be per account. Eventually.

The GovBot

Once you are a citizen, you can contribute by donating various things. What you can donate varies a bit per level of GovBot (and is not final yet either) - but for now, and for the first few levels of GovBot, it’s mainly money (Klaatus) and simple Materials (Wood, Gas, Metal, Gems, etc.). Whoever contributes the most during the first level-up of GovBot, becomes the first mayor. Two weeks later, players can vote in a new mayor if they want to - but if they don’t the existing mayor will stay on by default.

Every level up will unlock more stuff for the players to use. Right now, that’s mostly all the terminals you can already find at the TPL space station, including mission terminals, the bank, starter item shop, title shop, etc. But starting with the first level, the mayor will also be able to set rules on the planet. Both a set of global permissions, including mining and chronophasing (but weirdly NOT logging trees - more on that later) - as well as permissions for purchasable zoning lots. These zoning lots are like homesteads, but meant for public buildings and infrastructure.

The new planet: Audath V

All the materials donated to GovBot are consumed/deleted - but the money goes into the government coffers, from where it can be used to purchase zoning lots and unlocked kiosks (but it can’t be withdrawn for personal use - once donated, the money has to be used for government expenses and cannot be returned to any player).

People who donate, will receive “Citizenship Points” in return. These points are shown on a leaderboard, so players can compete for who donates the most (which also unlocks a custom title to show off), but also allow players to purchase rewards. Right now, “learning engrams” (18,000 CP) and “skill chits” (27,000 CP) are available. The former increases your profession XP gain for a short while, the latter allows you to unlock one skill for 0 Klaatus (but you still need to pay the XP cost).

Player reception

This update seems very achiever-oriented to me, and the more achiever-leaning players absolutely loved it. There was a lot of talk about things finally having a “purpose”, and being able to grind towards a larger shared community goal, and to achieve things and be recognized for doing so. People also talked about nicely paced dopamine dings, and the addictiveness of the whole grind-missions -> donate-klaatus -> get-rewards loop.

The zoning lots are a huge boon to those groups of players who already were organizing cities and larger player builds in the past. That previously had to rely on maxing out all character slots per account, unlocking all the homesteads for each character, and sharing permissions for those homesteads once placed. With the zoning lots, such things are a lot easier and more comfortable to achieve now.

Akacala on day one

The adjustable rules also allow to protect a planet to a degree - but how that actually works out still remains to be seen. It’s too early still, after the wipe, to really tell if players will now be able to prevent major environmental damage to planets. Especially the tree issue seems to be much heightened now.

Achievement oriented players truly love the GovBot though, and happily compete for the best spots on the leaderboard - as to who contributed the most. And the most efficient way to do that, is to do the most lucrative donations first (to get as much of that pie as you can, then lock it for others). And the most lucrative donations are Klaatus - so, mission running. People do even save up Klaatus, so that as soon as GovBot reaches the next level, they can immediately reserve as much of that next pie for themselves as possible.

Herastag on day one

The rest of the time is spent grinding farms for thousands and thousands of salt and gas and wood from mushrooms and besom scrubs. And that’s why I’m calling this the gind update. It’s all about who grinds the most, and gets the top-spot on the grind leaderboard. I’m not against grind per se - I’m perfectly fine with doing some heavy grind to achieve my own goals - but this specific kind of induced/mandated grind, I personally don’t like very much.

The tree issue

Already back in early September, I ran into issues with the amount of root stocks that drop from logging trees. Back then I was making terraformers for guild-mates, which - with the then-new more complex recipe and the introduction of PQRV values - was a lot more involved than in previous patches. In order to make the terraformer with the PQRV I was aiming for, I needed a specific kind of wood, which I found on a wild wormhole planet. I did harvest both as much wood and as many root stocks as possible, when the planet still was around - and then created a protected tree-farm in a homestead to produce more of the same wood.

What I noticed back then was, that when I planted, grew and logged 20 trees, I’d end up with just about 18 root stocks after that. Which means, that my stocks of stocks constantly diminished, and there was a limit to how much wood of the same stats I could possibly get. I had been of the assumption that minerals and ores were meant to run dry - but that plants were supposed to be renewable. But the only way to actually achieve that, was only via the rather low natural reproduction rate of fauna. You’d have to protect a forest and give it time to create it’s own offshoots to get more of the same wood.

Space on day one

There was some quite discussion about this - with some testers taking the position that everything should be limited and run out, thus tree’s dropping root stocks below the replenishment rate was a good thing - and the natural growth a bad thing, because it could counter-act that. I kinda disagreed with that view. Ores and minerals were kind of plenty - especially space offered a TON of metals in it’s asteroids. But even on the planets, minerals and ores were mostly plentyful (often in the tens of millions) - and their rarity could be tweaked with the planet generation rules. Via deposting you also could - albeit in a very lossy fashion - create more of any planet’s ores/minerals, even after those were mined dry. Trees on the other hand, came in the thousands - and the amount of wood you’d get from logging a single tree isn’t very high. So, the amount of wood that’s around is far less, than minerals and metals.

Up until now, that was perfectly fine, as materials were mostly used for crafting - and most of crafting used a lot more minerals and metals, than it used wood. In fact, most crafting needed barely any wood at all. But not so the GovBot. The GovBot needs just as much wood as it needs other materials: tens of thousands for each level. So much in fact, that if you logged all the trees on all the planets, you’d probably not get enough wood, to level up even just a single GovBot for multiple levels. As things were, this test should have ground to a complete halt rather quickly. With players mass-logging trees for XP-gain and wood - and not all players replanting their stocks - trees would have run out and created a major bottleneck almost immediately. That is, if it weren’t for the mighty besom scrub.

Still so many Baobab trees back on Thursday - those are endangered now

The besom scrub doesn’t look like much - just a few twisted roots sticking out of the ground. No leaves, no branches, nothing. But unlike trees, you can harvest them for wood without destroying them. They will grow back and be harvestable again - and you’ll also occasionally get seedlings, allowing you to grow ever more scrubs. I discovered those back when I was still struggling to get the right wood for my terraformers - and shared my discovery in the Discord. Today we have big besom scrub farms on almost all of the planets - and they provide the vast majority of wood used to upgrade GovBots across the known universe. Hundreds of thousands of units.

That is the only reason, why thing haven’t completely collapsed yet. But trees and forests are still disappearing at an alarming rate, with several planets appearing increasingly barren, and having Servitor edicts on multiple variations of trees. Akacala’s Blue Veil trees are all but extincts. Herastags large Baobab’s are heavily endangered. Baracatis - which remained well forested the longest - is now seeing declining numbers as well. Even with the abundance of wood provided by besom scrubs, trees are going down way faster than they can replenish.

Trees are the first thing to give right now - but with how things are currently progressing, metals, ores and minerals might follow.

My personal experience

If you’ve read some of my previous posts, you’ll be aware that I’m very excited about the dynamic, player-driven economy. Now, running missions for fixed payouts and donating pre-determined amounts of stuff to the GovBot is not part of the player-driven economy. That’s a scripted/static/fixed-price economy, where money and resources go straight from faucet to sink. The player-driven part of the eoonomy though - and thus the interesting part to me - is the circulation of money, goods and services that should happen in between fauced an sink. Which is currently not the case, as stuff goes from the faucet direclty into the sink. See my recent post on economy for more on that topic.

As with previous wipes and updates, my intial goal was to get tools made and distribute those for free among guild members, and now that vendors exist also to sell some to others. People do yearn to upgrade away from the initial starter tools - a fact that some tried to leverage by selling items with mediocre stats at inflated prices. I tried to always use the best materials I could get reasonably easy.

My shop (WIP), outside

While some tools (fabricators, instaformers, etc.) need neither much materials nor good PQRV and are exceedingly easy to make. Others like Xyloslicers need a few goods stats, others like Harvesters are made of subcomponents at need a lot more materials. Terraformers are the king of difficulty, needing all 4 stats high and being made of the most input materials of all.

In order to get to making all those tools, I need to unlock a number of skills, earn a bunch of crafting XP and stock up quite a few materials. In the past I could just run a few missions on the side while doing all that and also figuring out what materials with what PQRV each planet had available. That’s no longer possible, because the price of training skills has increased tenfold, and Klaatus are now the limiting factor and main slowdown. In the past, the best crafter used to be who did the most crafting to earn the most crafting XP the fastest. Now the best crafter is, who get’s the most monetary/chit gifts from friends, so they have to spend less time grinding missions.

While crafter is my chosen playstyle - that is just not economically viable at the moment. So, I have to run missions and double in that other playstyle (which is not my cup of tea), just to be able to afford the playstyle that I actually want to be doing. Having neither Klaatus nor materials to spare, contributing to GovBot is exceedingly difficult. I did drop off a few materials like all the wood I don’t need for crafting - but the exchange rate for that was so low, I didn’t get enough CP to be able to afford any reward at all. At that point, Klaatu requirements were already met, and GovBot did no longer accept Klaatu donations. The most lucrative rewards had already been claimed by others.

My shop (WIP), inside

I did manage to setup a homestead and put some shared boxes onto that, giving permissions to other guild members. That allowed me to just drop crafted items into those boxes, where others could then just take what they needed. Very useful, since I’m playing in a different time-zone than most others in my guild. I also managed to setup a vendor and put some items onto that - but that immediately got deleted again by a server rollback. It wasn’t until Sunday that I finally had a vendor up and running - and it wasn’t until Sunday night, that I had my first sales. Overall I earned roughly 50,000 Klaatus selling tools - but I spent all of that + some extra money from missions on buying materials (at the 10 Klaatus minimial costs) from other player’s vendors. For comparison: the top mission runners in my guild can earn those 50,000 money in just 2.5 hours, with zero material costs involved.

Overall, playing as a pure crafter is currently not possible. Playing as a crafter with a bit of mission running on the side, is completely economically sidelined. Mission running is absolutely economically dominant - and in fact so much so, that I honestly fear we might be facing hyper-inflation very, very soon. With new money being so easy to print, that it becomes basically worthless. No other playstyle is anywere near economically feasible right now. It’s mission running all the way.

GovBot is insatiable!

Only by Tuesday I managed to finally donate some Klaatus - about 10 or 15 thousand - and that gave me so many CP, that I could get a whole stack of skill chits. I now unlocked the entirety of the toolmaking and architect trees. Started to build a shop around my vendor kiosk, playing around with the new building tiles a bit. Next steps: make some popcorn, because chances are I’ll get to see an economy burn pretty soon. Governments are setting up rules, to forbid all mining on their planets. If they stop selling resources as well, because they can always get more Klaatus from missions - but resources are really running dry, and thus will become the bottleneck to upgrading GovBot, making tools, building houses and everything else. That’s where the economy might just collapse. Klaatus are endless, everything else is just gone. Including the trees. Bringing in a new planet probably won’t be enough to fix that. Most likely people will just descend upon that, like a swarm of all-devouring locusts.

Conclusion

I find it very exciting, to see a little bit of an early economy spring up - and even some low-level supply chains forming. Some people selling raw materials, others buying that and selling crafted items made from that. Without item degradation there’s no way this economy can last though - as demand will just get saturated, and then nobody needs any new tools anymore.

The GovBot progression - while really grindy - is great fun for the player type of achievers and those who enjoy mission running as a playstyle. It is a bit of a hindrance on the economy though, as less materials get sold - they all go into the govbot. Between missions providing infinite money printing capabilities, and trees and minerals running low and mining getting restricted by governments, we are currently heading towards hyper-inflation. And fast.

Exploiting timezones to make it onto the leaderboard (temporarily)

The imho best thing about GovBot are the zonings lots. These help a lot with player city planning, public spaces, parks, infrastructure and thelike. Combined with the ability to set custom permissions within them, these are very powerful and flexible tools.

I’ll do my best to enjoy this very basic economy while it lasts - and keep the popcorn ready for when it inevitably goes up in flames - and pyrotechnic spectacle. With money faucets like that, economic collapse seems unavoidable - the only question is how quickly it will arrive. If worst comes to worst, we might find ourselves in need of another wipe a lot sooner than expected.

Early offerings on my vendor

See you next patch!