PAT33 Exterior Decorating

Posted Jul 19, 2026

By hooby

views 27 min read

The patch update 8.1.5 “Exterior Decorating” for the Stars Reach pre-alpha playtest landed this tuesday, just before midnight (in central European time, that is). Ever since the developers announced the start of Early Access was planned for later this summer, they’ve been working hard on getting the core gameplay loops come together. As of right now, the game’s core gameplay is not ready for EA yet, and the developers know that. There’s a lot that still needs to be done, before EA can start - and the decision to launch into EA at this point in time, seems to be born more out of financial necessity, than anything else.

The game industry is still not doing well. Microsoft Game Studios announced a record cut of 3,200 jobs just a few days ago. This is a very tough time to be looking for more investment money as a fresh startup. And that’s why Playable Worlds is no scrambling to get as much game into the game as they possibly can - before they simply have to start EA and sell founder packs, to be able to keep the lights on. And that’s why they’ve told testers to expect updates with massive changes, and potentially more bugs and issues than usual.

After two “smaller” updates mostly aimed at addressing server stability issues - this is the first real heavy hitter. There’s a lot of stuff getting into the game all at once. The big headline feature is of course character customization. But more pertinent with regards to core gameplay loops are the additions of tons of new creatures as well as various re-balancing changes to combat. Smaller creature spawners (called “Makers” according to the lore) are now visible “Dens” in the world, both creatures and makers come with greater difficulty scaling, and more. We also get to see the first pieces of the improved planet generation. Apart from that, there’s also some major UI improvements - and the player guidance saw a number of additions as well.

The update ran pretty well for the first 15+ hours, with testers reporting no stability issues, no crashes, no disconnects and not even any major bugs. Then - right when player numbers thinned due to it being late night in the U.S. - we saw a return of login and loading issues. Two zones (the starter zone “Haven”, and the new planet “Veloglas IV”) became completely inaccessible - and characters trying to load into those got stuck. That situation remained for hours, until things got restored during early U.S. morning - only to return almost exactly a day later. This time the response was a lot faster though.

The biggest impact for us testers though, was the wipe. Due to the change to characters and the new planet generation, this update came with a full wipe. New characters, new planets, and everyone starting over from scratch. It’s been more than half a year, since the last full wipe - only some planets have been sunset and replaced with new ones since then. I did create a ton of new characters for testing Haven, Crucible and the initial starting experience - but I never took any of those new characters all the way to becoming a master crafter or anything. Now - with everyone having to start over - we see the entire fresh-new-game experience playing out again.

Character Creation

This is a work-in-progress early prototype version of the character creation. Several new player species (“races”) were supposed to get added as well, but then did not make it into the character creation due to being far too incomplete. That same word “incomplete” is still the best way to describe the character creation for all the old species as well. There’s a few different haircuts to choose from - but many other things have only one single option to choose. We’ve also been told, that the min and max to various sliders are still intentionally more limited, to prevent clipping issues and whatnot.

Several things, including hair, and some body parts, as well as clothing - don’t even have textures yet, and no color options either. This definitely feels like an early prototype, meant to test the underlying systems. It does showcase the potential though - you get to see what the tech is capable off, and it’s possible to imagine what this could be like, once there’s a lot more options to choose from for everything, and the sliders can be pushed just a little further, and you have options for different patterns and colors and everything. The body morphing between different shapes is really smooth - and when playing with the sliders, you can feel that the underlying 3D models are really malleable to a large degree.

I feel that he potential for some great character diversity is definitely there - even if not realised yet, in it’s current, rather limited state. But see for yourself:

Character Customization

And to me personally - character diversity in an MMORPG is a very important feature. With thousands of players all sharing the same universe, you don’t want everyone to look the same. And you do want to enable people to use their characters as an expression of their own individuality. You do want players to be able to make character truly their own. And it seems to be a repeating pattern for many games, that while they do offer you an near overwhelming number of sliders and options - they actual results of what you can create from that, still look all quite samey. No matter what you do, the changes you actually can make are often quite superficial only - and all the possible resulting characters look like they could be siblings, for they all share some sort of “family resemblance”. You know what I mean, don’t you?

As of right now, to me personally it would seem like the character creation in Stars Reach (in it’s current, limited state) does show exactly the same symptoms. But - and that’s what I want to emphasize here - the underlying tech feels flexible enough to make me think that this is only because of those current limitations. I do strongly get the impression that the character system underneath can handle a lot more - and we will be able to access that, once more options are available, and the sliders are allowed to got a little further. The way the 3D models smoothly morph, makes me believe that there will be a lot more possibilities in the future.

Other Changes

I’m not gonna go into everything this update changed, and definitely not in a lot of detail, but I definitely do want to mention the new target reticle.

While your tools are holstered, it’s only kind of crosshair with a circle and dot in the center. But it does change rotation on the crosshair from 90 degrees to 45 degrees, when whatever the dot is pointing at, is within grapple range. That’s quite helpful - but the reticle really starts to shine, once you pull your tool or gun out. Now you have a hexagon shaped display around the crosshair. The crosshair itself get’s green when in tool-range, or red when in shooting range. To the left side, there’s a bar showing the battery state of the tool. Two little tabs - one on top, one at the bottom - show whether you’re Q and E assigned specials are ready. And the bar on the right side can have different purposes. On the Terraformer it shows how full the hopper is, on a pistol it shows charge state of your shot.

It’s hard to convey just how much convenience that adds. Seeing your battery state right then and there helps a lot. Yeah, sure, we already were used to glancing over to the side to see the ring around the tool there - so it might not seem that huge, just very convenient. But I’m telling you, for a new player who does not know about batteries yet, and is still in the early phases of figuring out how stuff works, this helps to clear up things massively. And that clear feedback does a lot to make things feel more intuitive and easier to understand. People can just grasp what’s going on - much better than any Galactopedia entry could ever explain it in text. And imho that’s the thing - once you already are used to how things work, improvements like that might only seem like minor convenience to you, but to a brand-new player, those could make the difference between just intuitively understanding the game system - or needing to ask or look it up somewhere, after getting confused by it. And that has a huge impact on how “good” a game feels. It’S easy to underestimate stuff like that.

There are many more UI improvements that came with this patch. More Hexagons, more visible battery state, the keys/shortcuts to use more clearly shown, etc. - and many elements can be individually resized as well, allowing you to adjust how much screen space real estate get to use. Quite a lot of quality of life stuff added there, and also some stuff that should help newer players learn the game faster.

There’s also been a ton of changes and adjustments to combat. Many new creatures roam the worlds now, and they got a lot more challenging and difficult than before. Balance is probably a bit off right now - but developers already are working on adjusting things for the next patch. There’ve been some complaints about imbalances and difficulty spikes - but I’m glad that things are happening, and I think it’s normal to see some teething issues with big changes like that. Main issue I see there right now, is that all the new creatures aren’t setup yet to drop any special creature loot. That special loot though is needed to make better weapons - which in turn are needed to deal with the more challenging mobs.

I joined a maker hunt to get a closer look of combat - but things did not go very well for me. Between having to restart the game many times, because of various glitches, like not seeing myself, or not seeing others, or not seeing dead creatures and picked up loot disappear - I also repeatedly ran into the problem of getting a blue interaction window stuck on the center of my screen, or item/toolbar state getting stuck or out of sync. I also had some struggles with reviving fallen players. You seemingly have to target some imaginary spot slightly above the downed player, rather than their visible body, to actually get them highlighted and be able to press G.

We also got to see the first little bits of the new planet generation - albeit only to a limited extent. The two new planets we got, are both using exactly the same template, making them geolgocially identical, even if the maps are slightly different. They also lack most resources - both being made mostly of just basalt and nothing else. That had a ton of knock-on effects, like some items (gravmesh, reflection shield, trailblazer) not being possible to be crafted at all. We did get a third planet (locked for settling, meant to be replaced for bringing in fresh resources) to help alleviate the issues a bit, which at least gave us access to some sand (the lack of which would have made much more crafting impossible).

The Window Discussion

The UI changes also sparked - once more - discussions about making every UI element a window that players can move around themselves. And I do have a potentially controversial opinion about that: I honestly don’t like it. Yes, I have played games that had this feature, where it came in extremely handy - where being able to move things around and put them wherever you want them, was a real life-saver. Mainly because the default-positions of everything sucked really hard, and many windows were just center of the screen, overlapping each other, with no real position at all. Basically, instead of designing a comfortable layout, the designers went “eh, screw that”, and now every player has fiddle with it themselves. But I’ve also played games, that put a lot of thought and testing into their default layout, and it was so good, I never wanted to change it. And often those games had fixed layouts that you couldn’t change anyway.

Here’s the thing: I’m a lazy bum, and prefer to have a well-paid professional design a perfectly laid out UI for me. One that reflects all the state of the art knowledge and expertise about interface design, and human psychology. I don’t want to have to fiddle around with millions of windows only to end up with something that’s never gonna be half as good as what an expert could do. Something where I only bother to place the most important, main things - and the rest of the windows just stays a jumbled mess anyways. I also don’t buy into that idea that players really need to re-arrange their UI elements, because of addressing individual differences and preferences. I claim that if it’s a well-designed, good UI-layout you can easily adapt to it. After decades of playing games (and starting to do so with the atrocious UIs of the early 90ies), there isn’t much you could come up with, that isn’t similar to something I already had been adapted to at some point.

This was considered good UI designed in the 2000’s - but not anymore

I believe that a lot of those player whishes to have it individual, come down to not wanting to adapt. People just want exactly the same bad design they laboriously got used in the first game they played. That’s now their “gold standard”, not because it was easy to learn initially - but because it now requires zero re-learning. In other words, it’s just baggage from the past. And so are movable UI windows. As a design-trend, they peaked during the early to mid 2000’s - and were mostly found on PC-only titles running on Windows (where the idea was taken from). The biggest contributor to their then-popularity being of course World of Warcraft (and it’s many clones). Which is weird, because Blizzard used to be one of the best companies when it comes to UI-design, and ahead of their time with that. Going “do it yourself” and presenting you with a very sub-par design by default (and expecting you to mod it into something actually usable) feels out of character for them.

Window-UIs for games have been mostly if not completely discredited by later UX research, and honestly I don’t like the many-movable windows approach in applications like Gimp either - where I strongly prefer to keep every tool window docked in it’s designated position - rather than have them all float around on my screen. Even Windows itself is now more into snapping and docking windows - than resizing them and dragging them around. And it’s better for it. That doesn’t mean I don’t want versatility, and adjustability. Being able to scale and adjust things is great - as is being able to decide which information you’d like to show or hide, depending on whether you’re doing combat, or crafting, or roleplaying, or whatever. But you really don’t need everything to be a floating, movable, resizable window, to achieve that.

The Wipe

One Topic I want to look into more closely, is how the economy is starting back up, after this complete wipe. We haven’t have a full wipe in half a year - and this wipe with everyone starting completely from scratch did bring back several testers who’d been taking a break. The developers have no plans for any further wipes, until EA launch (which will include a wipe of course). It might still happen, if something goes wrong, or if upcoming changes mandate it in a way that can’t be worked around.

The guild I’m member of (and pretty much the only guild that’s already actively organizing stuff in-game at this point in time) did plan for a city build ahead of the wipe. My contribution to the planning was to work out what we would need at the very start, to get things going. There are a limited amount of starter tools available to purchase at a kiosk - half of which are rather crappy to use because of low PQRV values. Other tools cannot be purchased at all - but must be crafted from raw materials. The thing here is, that you need working tools to access these materials. I checked the recipes of all the tools we were going to need, and tried to boil things down to the smallest possible set of base resources needed to make all of them.

And it turns out, that - with the current crafting recipes, many of which are place-holder - you can’t craft most of the things, from only a small handfull of resources:

iron and chromium from deep space
gasses and salts from two specific types of mushrooms
wood (best harvested from besom scrubs)

Now there’d be a few extra requirements for certain specific items - like some sand and animal hides for terraformer, and some bones for harvesters. We’d also need chert to make gravmeshes, reflection shields and trailblazers - but there’s not chert to be found anywhere right now. For the most part, things can be boiled down to those few ingredients, because many tools still use these old place-holder recipes. But there’s also some trickery in there, like using the same input material and refined or recombined versions of it, various different capacities. Like, you would use iron as very common metal and chromium as common metal, but also to make an alloy (chromium steel). Or you’d also use wood to make oil and plastic.

We further figured out, that the besom scrubs and both types of needed mushrooms can be found on Haven and Crucible. We mapped out locations of those (and a third mushroom), to get before leaving the starter tutorial area. But in order to farm the scrubs and ‘shrooms we have to plant them of course - which requires a trowel. And the trowel is not avaiable for purchase, but must be crafted. That means, we have to get enough material by hand, to do everything needed to unlock and craft trowels. Once we got those, we can build farms and then we have access to plenty of materials - which are also needed in vast, grindy amounts to unlock GovBot to be able to get access to the zoning lots we need for building a city.

The Farm

Equipped with that knowledge, we were able to get started pretty quickly. Get all those needed seeds/plantlings from the starter areas, craft a trowel, and start building farms. Without that preparation, things might have ended up a bit more of a struggle, especially given that the planets we got ended up in this low resource state. I gave away a lot of tools in the guild for free - but I was also given a lot of materials to use in crafting. I still spend the majority of early playtime, gathering materials.

I also setup a vendor again, right in front of the TPL station in space. As soon as I could, I put up reapir kits there, selling them at the lowest possible price the game will allow. Since item decay is in effect now, you really want to always repair your stuff, before it reaches 15% durability or below (because that’s where you start getting a %-chance to break on repair). As long as you stay above 15%, the repair is guaranteed to proceed - but will reduce max durability.

The effect this has on tools varies dramatically. Right now, it’s implemented such that each “activation” of an item can cause durability loss. On a terraformer that means that shoot out the beam and hold down mouse until you run out of batter - thus having only one single activation, while mining a bunch of ore. With a good terraformer you can get 10k+ of iron without need for a single repair. Terraformers last very long as a result. On a trowel - each single plant you plant is one activation, putting this tool at a more average durablity loss. On a fabricator though… you place the item, press Q+E multiple times to rotate, then Q+E multiple times to move around - easily ending up with 20+ activations for the placement of one single item. As a result, fabricators eat repair kits by the dozen.

On a harvester, how long it last varies depending on whether you click each plant individually - or if you have farm with lot’s of stuff growing next to each other, where you can just hold down the mouse button and sweep the cone over multiple plants at once. Similarly, decay on a fabricator varies wildly depending on how you use it: place down a 20x20 floor made from 400 blocks - 1 single activation. Place down 400 blocks one by one: 400 activation events. Your mileage may definitely vary.

The other thing I noticed (again), is that despite completely disregarding PQRV values, and making all my items from whatever materials are the easiest to get - the results are pretty good. The items I made all end up having three stats around 600-700, and the fourth one maybe as high as 800+. For an item that needs repairs and decays over time, that’s perfectly good enough - and as of right now, it feels completely pointless to invest the time and effort to record PQRV values, compare them, figure out which materials to use to optimize for your favorite stats and then craft them. You’re basically spending tens of hours on getting a result that’s maybe 5% better - a difference you might not even be able to notice in a blind test at all. So yeah, that’s gonna need some re-balancing as well.

Another problem we ran into, is that Magnetite is specifically made from chert, and none of the planets we ended up with, has any chert. This is not a recipe that asks for generically “metal” or “wood” - but specifically needs Magnetite, respectively chert. And that affects multiple recipes, like those for grav meshes and reflection shields. Those need anti-gravium which can only be made using magnetite, which can only be made using chert. And we got none of that. Similarly it does seem currently impossible to make a trailblazer - because that needs a rare gem, and none of the planets spawned with rare gems present. You could refine them from certain rocks (like chert for example) - but none of those rocks are to be found either.

Recipes are not supposed to be asking specifically for chert (or magentite) - but for the most part use more generic categories, which then can be filled with one of multiple potential candidates. Like, none of the tools require specifically iron or chromium to make. They just require common metal and very common metal. And maybe an alloy. It’s just that out of all metals available in space aplenty, iron and chromium can fill all those roles - making them the most readily available candidates.

Conclusion

This is the first substantially big update we’ve seen, since the announcement of the EA launch and the development focus being put on completing the core gameplay loops. The result definitely feels and plays a lot more like a full game now, than it still did a few months ago. But in part that’s also down to the full wipe forcing everyone back into the initial skill training phase. Which is not a loop that repeats - and not new in this patch either.

While the new additions and changes brought by this patch seem to be mostly working fine, the servers are still having stability issues, crashes and rollbacks. And ongoing issue that’s now following us around for more than three patches. Each patch brought additional fixes and stability improvements - but other than reducing or partially shifting the issue around, none of these patches were able to actaully fully fix the problem.

I went into this patch with the resolution of reporting a lot more bugs. Even things that aren’t new and probably already known. Even things that aren’t that big or show-stoppers or anything. Even things that I’m perfectly able to deal with. And apart from the server stability issues, there wasn’t anything I’d consider highly dramatic. Most of it is minor stuff, that - once you know how to navigate it - barely impacts the playing experience. But there is a lot of jank that you do need to ignore, and I think the sheer volume of reports I have created, does show, that a newer player, during their first two or three days, will be confronted with quite a lot of jank. And even if it’s all small things that don’t do much harm individually, taken alltogether they do add up. And for a new player who’s basically confronted with all of that simultaneously at once - while still trying to figure out the game - there is definitely some jank-tolerance required.

As mentioned in a previous report - the game has been shown to the press during the Games Fest weekend in L.A. - and the response was very positive. The journalists - who are used to dealing with still unfinished, incomplete games - are fully capable of seeing past the jank, and recognizing the potential. With the big wipe, we’ve also seen somewhat of an influx of new and returning players in the game. Plenty of new faces in the Discord as well. And to my personal surprise - there’s more of them who are understanding of the jank, because it’s “early” and “pre-alpha”, and they get that more often than I would have guessed.

But I still feel that things might be different for the EA launch. Where the journalists and these fresh testers are able to see past the jank and do recognize the potential - many EA players might be unable to see the still unrealized potential, because they simply can’t get over the jank. And the big reason why I feel that things might be different there, is not because it’s EA, or because many publishers use EA as paid betas, or because the devs will officially switch status from pre-alpha to just alpha. To me, the main reason why things probably might be different, is the price tag. People pay to get into EA, and as soon as real money is involved, expectations change. As a buyer of a game, you are entitled to something. There might be little consensus on what exactly you are entitled to - but you paid money, you expect something in return. And that changes the situation.

In yesterday’s video stream the devs have said, that they are planning on a bugfixing and polishing phase - right after they’ve done with the features they want to add before EA still. So, we’ll see a final wave of gameplay and content being added - followed by a phase of de-jank-ification. And they have put out a call - a request for lists of small inconveniences that players are currently faced with while playing. Because a lot of that stuff could be low-hanging fruit that’s easy to fix. And the goal is, to cram in as much of that low-hanging fruit before EA, as possible.

I’m not going to do a full list here - I’ve already spammed a large number of reports, and hope there’s a few useful things in those - but I do want to pick out one thing, which I’d like to champion for a really good fixing up. And that’s the toolbar. More specifically the toolbar state.

It’s getting messed up all the time. I’m shooting mining beams out of my trowel. I’m seeing the compass on my terraformer. I got the harvester equipped and unholstered, but can’t use the specials or tab-select. I get the fabricator tile-select window stuck on my screen - even after switching tools. Sometimes switching back and forth between tools fixes things. Other times, switching just doesn’t work at all. The toolbar is such a central thing that you use all the time, regardless of whether you’re doing combat, or crafting or building. It really should reliably show you the current state - and that state should be internally consistent. Not a random mix of two different tools, or a combination of toolstates that’s not even supposed to exist like that. This needs to work reliably and consistently. The toolbar needs to be trustworthy - and not something that causes you to constantly try swap tools just to see if that fixes the weird behaviour you’re seeing.

I can typically tell if it’s messed up. I know what things are supposed to be like, when they work correctly. I know to switch tools to get things working again, or to relog when that doesn’t work. I can recognize a broken state and deal with it. But how is a new player supposed to learn the game and understand how things are supposed to be - if their main source of information is untrustworthy? This might just be another one of those things that are easy to underestimate. But what’s just an annoyance to a player who’s used to it, can be a major roadblock to understanding for a new player.

And with that, I’ll come to an end. I’ll leave you with two screenshots I capture from yesterdays live-stream. Those are upcoming planet generation templates, that are currently being worked on.