PAT31 Into The Clouds

Do you remember the Hidden Fog Update for the Stars Reach pre-alpha playtest last December? In case you’re a bit foggy on the details: It completely removed the fog that was added to the game previously in the Skies & Seasons Update back in March ‘25 - and replaced it with a brand new volumetric fog implementation.

Well, this week we got a new update patch called “Into The Clouds”, which completely removed that volumetric fog implementation from December, and replaced with a brand new CASIM-based fog implementation. Now you can stick your head in the clouds as much as you want - because this newest implementation is a lot more performant then the previous one was. It’s random for now - but it is designed to, and will be integrated into the CASIM (the cellular automata simulation that the game’s ecology is running on). That allows for fog to be dependent on temperature and humidty, and also for gas clouds that actually affect the player, etc.

And if your glasses aren’t fully fogging up quite yet: underwater rendering has been added to the game as well. Just visually - there’s no swimming implementation yet. On top of that we also get new speech bubbles for chatting, that represent more of the available character moods! For some reason, chat bubbles are not currently showing up for me at all, so I wasn’t able to get screenshots of that. I haven’t the foggiest idea why that’s happening.

Biggest reason for this update landing now, might have been the server-rollback issues though, which got introduced with the previous update. And while the new patch did include a fix for that - server rollbacks are still happening, seemingly less severe though (less time being rolled back). At the same time, it seems that the frequency of server-crashes has increased though - as have issues with the login, loading of the character and loading of the planets.

Also, despite the declared development focus on gameplay loops - there’s none of that in this update. Don’t fall out of the clouds just yet though, because there might be a good reason for that: there’s a lot of upcoming stuff being currently worked on, that needs to be released all together at once. Go check out the last fireside stream for more information on some of the upcoming changes!

For now, I’m gone in a mist, and leave you with a bunch of screenshots of the new visual stuff: