PAT30 From A Certain Point Of View

The 30th pre-alpha test update for Stars Reach went live on Wednesday the 27th of May - just two weeks after the previous update. We haven’t seen a two week update in nearly a year, with the Brave New Worlds Update in July ‘25 being the last one, before testing switched to a three week cycle (and later abandoned fixed cycles entirely).

Given the short timeframe, and the size of the previous six week update - there is of course less meat on this one. But I’m by no means opposed to doing more frequent but smaller updates. In some ways a constant trickle of new stuff might be more efficient at keeping people playing more regularly - while larger but more spaced out updates, might foster more of a “take a break and check back later” approach.

UI Improvements

The main visible parts of this update are all about the UI. There is a…

• new login screen New login screen

• new profile/self tab New profile/self tab

Showing your title, editable character description, character stats, status effects and stomach (which has three slots for consumable buffs).

• new profile/social tab New profile/social tab

Which shows your friendslist, planetary citizenship status and in the future also guild memberships (which you will be able to have multiple of). The friendslist is technically already in the game, but for now you can only add friends through commands in the chat window. UI support for doing that will follow soon. Guilds are - according to the roadmap - currently being worked on.

• new highlighting for interactive objects New highlighting for interactive objects

This includes terminals, other players, targetable enemies and such. Some testers are reporting that those outlines don’t appear 100% reliable though. There seems to be a bug where under certain circumstances they don’t appear yet.

• new inventory tabs New inventory tabs

These don’t show anything yet, but in the future will allow you to keep your

• waypoints
• crafting recipes
• pets
• addresses
• keys
• maps

seperately from the items in your backpack - and without using up slots there.

• Waypoints are already in the game - but right now you can only set one waypoint yourself, and have some mission waypoints on top of that, as well as waypoints to your homestead(s). In the future, waypoints will be name-able and tradeable and selectable from that list.
• Crafting recipes will eventually be limited in number, thus making crafters choose exactly which things to specialize on in a quite granular fashion. Maybe there will be skills to unlock more recipe slots? I don’t know. But this is the place where you keep and manage them.
• Pets should be pretty self-explanatory.
• But addresses is not something I know of yet. I am assuming this probably might be planet coordinates, allowing you to travel to different places in the galaxy? Homesteads are already covered by waypoints right? But maybe addresses are like a special kind of waypoints for remembering your favourite vendors? I don’t know.
• Keys are new as well - but we do have a hint there: Mayor Bob on Haven hands you your space ship keys after you’ve done the tutorial missions there. So, my guess would be, that “keys” is for all kinds of vehicles you can have - spaceships, ground vehicles, grav sleds, etc.
• Maps are what you already can get from surveying a planet. They just aren’t tradeable (and sellable) objects yet - but they will be eventually. In the future these might also provide additional benefits over just being a visual map of the place.

Object Optimizations

Hard surface objects got an performance improvement pass, bringing us one step closer to having the new shader system everywhere. I believe the landscape and plants have already been moved over - and players and creatures might still be to do.

This change should not be visible, it’s just performance optimizations happening in the background. If you have a trained eye and look very closely, you might notice some building objects maybe having less polygons than previously, or something along those lines. But for the most part, you shouldn’t be able to really tell any difference at all.

This is part of a long-running series of ongoing optimizations, that should ultimately improve framerates and framerate stability. I’m already seeing some improvement there on my machine - but so far, test updates have repeatedly brought optimizations increasing framerate, and new features and visual effects (or increased plant density) that would bring framerates down again.

Planet Jotania

On a 2080 Ti, I’ve been mostly been seeing averages around 30fps at 4k, and around 60fps at 1080p - with 1440p sitting somewhere inbetween. I’m now seeing that again, after it’s been worse for a while. But variability has always been very high, with framerates not only potentially changing from one patch to the next, but also fluctuating wildly in the game, depending on where you are and what direction you are looking. Also, the last time I upgraded my PC, I kept my old graphics card, because of the crazy price situation - and therefore I do have a newer and more powerful CPU than what was available at the time when I bought that GPU. So, there might also be CPU bottlenecks that are mostly invisible to me, because of how my CPU and GPU don’t match.

Hard surface objects are mostly the building tiles, that players can use to build their homesteads. And on the roadmap, there is a quite interesting change to the building system coming up as well. If you’re interested in building, you might want to check that out. Have you seen that new picture they got for that?

Better structure building system

Assuming that using different materials (instaformer blocks) will change the appearance of these pieces, we are going to see a true explosion of visual diversity in buildings. And given that we will be no longer limited to building pieces sized 4x4 blocks, this might allow for much more intricate builds than before.

In Conclusion

Not the biggest patch - but hey, it took only two weeks, and for that it’s plenty of new stuff. Nothing of super high impact, but I personally do like the new UI look as seen in the new login screen. Style preferences aside, it also feels quite a bit more polished and smoother than what we had previously. You might easily underestimate how much that can contribute to whether a game feels janky or not.

Looking at the roadmap, there are some more UI things coming up for probably the next update, like showing player descriptions on inspect, lore bits on loading screens, new player-to-player trade window and new login flow with more lore. The corruption (also known as cornucopia) has also recently been moved from “being worked on” to “in internal testing” (the last stage before getting released in an update).

And then, there is the “currently working on” column, which contains the already mentioned “Better structure building system”. But also hard grouping, guilds, various combat improvements including weapons, creature attacks, creature difficulty, and then character customization and clothing system. There’s definitely a lot of stuff to look forward to.

Until then, have a good time!

P.S.: If you got nothing else to do - check out the maze I built (and rebuilt, after last update erroneously deleted it) on Jotania (yellow wormhole). It’s challenging - if you get lost, you might have to use /stuck repeatedly to make it out again.

The maze while being constructed