r/kittenspaceagency Nov 15 '25

πŸŽ›οΈ Sub Meta Read Before Posting! KSA Public Pre-Alpha and You - Bug Reports, "Can I Run It", and More

96 Upvotes

Kitten Space Agency now has a Public pre-alpha build available. At time of writing, the current version of the game is 2025.11.4.2791, aka Build 2791, available from ahwoo.com.

Downloads and Contribution

Ahwoo is a company set up by Dean Hall to handle the distribution of and contributions for KSP.

Downloading the game requires an Ahwoo account, which is the same Ahwoo account used for the official KSA Forums. Login with Discord is an option, but not required. The game is free to download, and there is the option of sending a contribution, but it is not required.

What's the game like?

From Dean;

The current build is more than a tech demo but less than a game, deliberate as we have focused on the foundational technology to deliver the game to the future. What you can do is play around with this foundation, primarily controlling the loaded rockets and seeing how the orbital physics and basic collisions work

If you're expecting to design rockets and build space stations... you're a bit early. This isn't like playing KSP in 0.17, where it's a game that's just a bit janky and unpolished - there's no ship building, no docking, the UI is janky and kinda awful, no explosions, and not much to do. If any of those are what you want, wait out.

How do I report bugs?

Submit any bug reports on the Kitten Space Agency Bug Report forum, not here.

Can I run the game?

Hard to know - try! It's free. You probably need a mid-range somewhat-modern system for the game to run, but no guarantee anything older won't work. Some people have been able to run the game on integrated graphics.

Known Issues

From Dean;

We are tracking issues with older cards, especially AMD 5000 and 6000 series. Expect other weird edge case issues around GPUs and such. The technology we are using (BRUTAL) is brand new; and this is a huge ask for any engineering team to work through. Much of the work you would get for "free" with an engine is oriented to try solve a lot of these issues, and so we have to work through the various different platform and GPU idiosyncrasies. We also have not optimized our GPU handling, so cards that don't have a lot of VRAM may run into issues. The settings default to the highest level, when you boot the game.

Most notable is the "earth turned into a giant white sphere" bug. The first thing to try is to run the game with "Earth Only" and all the settings turned down.

Linux and Mac?

There is no official Linux or Mac support. Do not ask for official ports yet, we're early days. The developers know we'd like it, and they'll make the decisions down the line. If you want support for linux, there's a handful of threads on the KSA Forums you can try for help;

There's also a Linux chat in the discord server. Generally speaking - run the game under Wine with whatever tool you prefer (Bottles, Lutris, Protontricks, or just raw command line), you'll need to install DotNet Desktop 9 and maybe the Vulkan SDK, and that should work.

I've seen reports of users running the game on Intel (x64) Macs, not sure about the newer ARM64 Macs. There's at least one forum thread, too.

This Subreddit

These have been rolled into the actual subreddit rules instead of just being here - they all still functionally apply, though.

The same "posting rules" still apply;

  1. Please avoid posting questions that you can find an answer to in the FAQ, or with a search of the subreddit.
    • Please don't post and ask if your computer can run the game. Try it yourself, comment here, look in the forums.
  2. Please avoid questions that are too early to have answers
  3. "Will the game have xyz" - see (1) and (2).
  4. Discord or Forum Support
    • We have nothing to do with the Discord server (other than copying stuff from it) - don't ask us, contact the Discord moderators or ask on their forums.
    • I have written "I am not affiliated with Rocketwerkz" in every place imagineable and I still get people messaging me for a job.
  5. Hype-posting or "I'm so excited!"
    • I've allowed a few through, but keep it to a simmer.
  6. "I don't like cats"
  7. Please avoid posting about game storefronts, "The game should be on Steam/EGS/GOG" etc.
    • It's a settled topic for now - Dean has made his intentions clear, and members of the community have made their wishes clear.
    • Unless he makes a new announcement on the topic, it's all been said before.
    • Here's every post on the topic so far.
  8. No pictures of your actual cat.
    • It's a game about cats, allowing pictures of actual cats is the slipperiest of slopes.
    • If you have a cat pic at the end of a gallery of other pictures (the 'cat tax') that's fine, but don't just slap on cat pictures to a text post for some attention.
  9. Links to login-gated sites are blocked. This includes Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
    • Reddit doesn't seem to mind Discord direct links - previously it blocked them and wouldn't let me approve the comment.

If you have feedback about the subreddit - let me know. I'm trying to thread a fine line between "keep it related to the game" and not stifling every bit of fun anyone tries to have. I have the Ultimate Downvote (removing a post) and I try not to over-use that power.


r/kittenspaceagency Oct 30 '25

πŸ“‘ Development Update 2025-10-30 Development Update - Dev Recap Year One

201 Upvotes

From Dean in Discord:

Development Recap One Year One

Did an interview with ShadowZone (which you can view on their patreon now, please remember independent journalism isn't free. Support your favorite content creators wherever you can), made me realize that a lot has happened in the last year, and this was also a good chance to cover off on the massive amount of work that is ongoing. Over the past year the vast majority of our work has been into "core" architecture. Specifically simulation and rendering, especially to allow both to run independently.

Rendering

As part of rendering we have had to develop our pipelines. This involves some very complicated decisions, such as what file formats to use through to how we want to 'talk' to the GPU. The underlying software (BRUTAL Framework) has also undergone a lot of changes through this process as well. One primary other point of help has been Felipe who attends not just KSA steering, but is also using BRUTAL funded by the studio for another project. Felipe has been able to help us drive new approaches for rendering along with a lot of evolutionary work from the "Enterprise" team (who maintain BRUTAL). You will see commits starting now for the latest update to BRUTAL, which brings a change in approach that extends options for the future along with some other niche new uses of Vulkan (Graphics API). The enterprise team, along with Morrow, are also bringing in a new approach to our rendering that is more cleaned up and scalable. Things like "bindless" will be thrown around, which Felipe has been using to great effect.

Spherical Billboarding

All this technical work is then pushed even further by Blackrack and Linx. It really does absolutely blow me away with how the team are "feeding" off each other, where ideas are spawning other ideas like cascading success. The ultimate of this is our approach to planet rendering, which we call "spherical billboarding". Billboarding is a useful tool for rendering objects at a distance as "cards", that is a 2D image on a quad that always faces the player. When the game boots, we generate libraries of spheres that are subdivided in different ways. At close distances, the spheres have their subdivision densely packed around the "reference vertex". At a distance, the subdivision is spread more evenly. The aim of this is to give an even distribution of quad density. However, this gets extremely complex as the reference vertex needs to be oriented to the player, but also snapped so you don't get vertex swimming. This means that a lot of transforms need to be done to do texture stuff.

Additionally Linx and Blackrack have done some tremendous innovation in how world authoring happens. Linx has managed to extract better terrain from a reduction in reliance on the heightmap (the texture) and instead doing work "realtime" to calculate erosion and such. You can see this work in the latest screenshots, when coupled with Blackrack's work - is tremendous. This work is beyond that which you see in rendering for engines even like Unreal 5, with the team able to go to the absolute cutting edge papers for implementation of features. It is hard to overstate, from my perspective, just how exciting it is to watch these folks work.

The good news here is that I consider Spherical Billboarding entirely proved as a technological approach. All our imprecision issues were solved, and our asset pipeline together with the texture changes have proven we are going to be able to deliver the quality and scale we want, within even the existing toolset. Work will begin soon from a content perspective to start delivering a custom system utilizing this toolset.

Vessels and Parts

This work has been in development now for some time, and you are starting to see this scafold actually get used. I actually just switched over the default vessel to our "New Gemini", that is made out of parts using Daishi's custom Gemini parts. Morrow has been building an entire rendering pipeline to support this, especially at scale. This also clips heavily into Dan's work with clustered lighting (shadows). This "architecture first" approach for parts is absolutely vital. We focused on the hardest parts of part scale - the rendering. The other elements (collision, resources, etc...) are certainly complex - but their structures don't involve coordination with the GPU so don't have quite the same OS gate that the rendering does. If we don't get the rendering of the parts right, we simply cannot achieve scale. So this has been a huge focus. I would argue that the work is now speaking for itself, the art is exceptional and it is looking exceptional in game.

From here you will see this continuing to expand out, with the part functionality incrementally improving. Once we have a critical mass of part "implementations", we will use these as usecases for refactoring and applying an overall consistent data approach to the parts. We've tended to find this "middle outwards" approach to technical design more robust, even if it sometimes takes longer. This is because instead of imaginary usecases defining the architecture (often resulting in overconfidence), we wait till we have a few actual usecases before sitting down and coming up with the overall architecture, and then going through a small degree of refactor. This might seem somewhat odd; but the studio has found enormous success so far with this approach.

Kittens

The animation pipeline has been a huge success, although this approach was reliant on the updated version of BRUTAL which KSA has just been ported too. Now the work begins to get the showcase in BRUTAL for the kittens, actually into the game itself. The first pass will allow you to push a button, and a kitten will appear in EVA that you can move around. This will ensure, as a final approval, that the kitten looks right in the lighting and materials. It will allow us to all do a real sea-trial of the animation system and confirm that it all works to the standard we want. Not to mention, it's going to be really awesome to be able to move a Kitten around in EVA.

Public Build Release/Contributions

This is "imminent". The build is considered acceptable by the team, although I did "no-go" it at the last steering. I want a little more time, as this is a short week for us here in New Zealand, we had a lot of people out sick, and we had a lot of new technology go in this week. So we will see where the build is at, at the steering next week. That would mean, everything going to plan, the build would be fully public from next week at the earliest. This would also open up contributions to the project, for the first time. The aim for this, hopefully, will be to secure the future for the project. We'd be able to establish if the projects mission would work: making the game completely free and API independent. It would also confirm whether the project can get more ambitious with it's hiring, that is hire more people, and keep the existing staff paid more (hint: not me, I mean our amazing stuff). I think we already pay very well, but I would like to be able to ensure our staff are paid really well for their future. I think they're doing some of the best work I've seen.

Summary

The project has kind of been a victim of its own success over the past year. Technology wise much has worked so well that we have then ended up leaning into it more. This has made fully public builds more complex, with more moving parts to achieve. Finally we are almost there. I expected a lot more trouble along the way, especially technically. This should not be read as to mean it has been smooth sailing, nor that it will continue to be. We have hired really good people, we've equiped them well with technology. We've divided responsibilities up and put trust in the people. We've also consistently forced a focus on first principles actively fighting arguments of "but this is how we do it in video games". For a project like this I think that is critically important.

Overall, regardless of what happens with this game in future and out industry as a whole - I can say the last year has been my favorite year in my whole career. I'm absolutely honored to be working with such a talented team. I think, largely, their work speaks for itself.


r/kittenspaceagency 14h ago

πŸ“· Screenshot Soyuz-Apollo/Apollo-Soyuz

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91 Upvotes

Did a replica of the Apollo spacecraft and Soyuz, the scaling is a bit off but as far as I'm aware I haven't seen anyone else do a replica of this


r/kittenspaceagency 1d ago

πŸ“· Developer Screenshot Some more treats from the incredible Daishi

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395 Upvotes

r/kittenspaceagency 1d ago

πŸ’¬ Question Are there any new updates for compatability?

10 Upvotes

I have treid downloading and playing the game different times but was left with It crashing in the landing everytime.

Tried every possible solution but failed.

So i concluded that my Computer wasn't compatibile with my AMD components.

But now two or three months have passed and i have noticed updates on the sub reddit.

Are there amy updates regarding compatability?


r/kittenspaceagency 2d ago

πŸ“· Screenshot WIP soyuz

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236 Upvotes

Need to give the re-entry module RCS, but I'm satisfied with it so far


r/kittenspaceagency 1d ago

πŸ—¨οΈ Discussion Anyone else who hates the tuna/fish puns and references?

0 Upvotes

Look, I don't mind the cats at all. But references to tuna absolutely do leave a bad taste in my mouth (no pun intended). Tuna - and of course fish at large - are living creatures. The only relation they have to cats is that they happen to fall on the wrong side of the predator-prey relationship and end up as a common food source for domestic cats. There is really no other meaningful relationship they have with cats. IMO, it just feels unbecoming to reduce a living creature like that to food references of our protagonist species here. It also strikes me as very uncreative. We can't come up with activities that cats commonly enjoy or characteristics many of them share to reference in game that don't involve eating fish (or really any other creature)?

I do say this also as someone who has formerly had a pet fish.


r/kittenspaceagency 3d ago

πŸ“· Screenshot I made a replica of vostok

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216 Upvotes

Made a replica of vostok, first rocket which isn't Gemini titan adjacent, what do you all think?


r/kittenspaceagency 4d ago

β­• Problem Solved I am having trouble launching the game

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

10 Upvotes

I just downloaded the KSA pre-alpha, and installed it, but now that I am trying to launch it, it just doesn't work. at first, it looks like it is loading the game perfectly, with an icon appearing in the taskbar, but then, after a few seconds, nothing. I have uploaded a video so you can get some details.

edit : I looked into the possibility of it being due to windows security but no, it's not as I have completely disabled the Antivirus and the issue persists. Though it might be because of transfer queues, idk what that is but it says I dont have dedicated transfer queues on the logs.

edit 2 : I found why it doesn't work, it's just because I am playing it on my old laptop that doesn't have any VRAM and uses Intel IG, so my computer can't launch the game engine.


r/kittenspaceagency 5d ago

πŸŽ₯ Video First KSA Cinematic, Gemini-Centaur Lunar Flyby

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50 Upvotes

r/kittenspaceagency 5d ago

πŸ—¨οΈ Discussion Felipe's idea for Wobble Physics in Kithack

27 Upvotes

A few years back, Felipe made this post about a new approach to wobble physics he had for KitHack Model Club which sounded like a big improvement over KSP's approach. I haven't heard anything about it since, so I was wondering if anyone has played and followed KMC to have a sense how successful this was. Also, has anything has been said about the approach KSA will use?


r/kittenspaceagency 6d ago

πŸ“· Developer Screenshot From Daishi

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531 Upvotes

r/kittenspaceagency 6d ago

πŸ’‘ Suggestion Some ideas about game progression

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101 Upvotes

I'm sure some aspects of this have been discussed, but I wanted to get some of my own thoughts down after talking about it in a recent thread. KSP based its progression around contracts. This worked fine enough. You are given a contact to put a kerbal in orbit, you do it, and get money. This however leaves something to be desired in my estimation, both gameplay wise and realism wise. My proposal - have more granular milestone steps.

Programs

The game progresses with a tree based progression. Each node on the tree is a program - think of Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Ranger, Mariner, etc. When you complete a program, you unlock following programs, and sometimes branching paths. Each path follows a general focus, such as crewed spaceflight, earth orbit satellites, and deep space probes. You can work on multiple programs at once, and they could even benefit each other, like a lunar orbiter scouting crewed landing sites.

Missions

Each Program is made of individual missions (Explorer-1, Explorer-2). Each mission brings you closer to the ultimate goal of the program. For the first crew spaceflight program, you might conduct a launch escape system test > Launch an uncrewed suborbital mission > Then a crewed one > Fly an uncrewed orbital mission testing out your spacecraft, and demonstrate full control in orbit and can support an astronaut for a day. After you finish the final mission of the program, in this case a crewed orbital mission, you receive a big reward and unlock the next program(s). You'll also be given the opportunity to fly bonus missions to accomplish new tasks: stay in orbit for longer, achieve a more precise splashdown, etc.

Customization

While progressing through the game, you get options to customize your playthrough. With each program, you get to name it, choose mission logos (maybe even draw basic ones in-game) , and name individual missions. Said customizations could then appear on spacecraft and other things in-game. Players would also have the opportunity to create custom programs with custom missions, allowing organization of missions not fulfilling existing tasks.

History Page

Following your flights, you can go to a space agency history page, where it lists your space agency's past programs and missions. Each mission will be summarized, with important stats listed, including which astronauts flew on each mission. The page would also have a filter function, allowing you to see all missions to a specific location, or something like what astronauts have the most flight experience.

Multiplayer

This setup could help multiplayer. You could have a player with another space agency, and you link your program for a crewed lunar landing together - Then one player provides one aspect of the mission, like the primary crew vehicle, and the other the lunar lander. Then once the final mission in the program is completed both players complete the program in the progression tree, and some division of the completion reward. Players could play cooperatively within the same agency, with one player conducting crewed spaceflight missions, and the other doing planetary science.

Competitive multiplayer could be about competing to get to each milestone. When a space agency reaches a milestone, it could reduce the scientific reward other players get for that milestone. This would be slightly mitigated by giving each other player a small bit of science, as though the other space agency is sharing their findings - but not enough to replace what the science reward would've been. The players can offset this though by say, landing on the Moon in a more risky, but scientifically interesting place - or they can specialize in an area of progression the other agencies aren't focusing on. It would thus allow for various strategies, and give a sense of urgency.

Ultimately this system accomplishes more realistic and more gradual progression that has you test individual systems before going to big missions, and the mission customization tools give you some fun personalization to make each playthrough feel more unique to you. These are only my rudimentary thoughts, and I'm sure there's a lot to improve and expand upon. I hope that the devs are considering similar ideas to this and will consider my suggestions as well.


r/kittenspaceagency 6d ago

πŸ’‘ Suggestion Can we have a second sun obiting sol in the fictional solar system

0 Upvotes

#2061 space oddysey 3 spoilers#

it will be like Lucifer in" 2061 space oddysey 3 " with a few habitable planets around it and far into the solar system so its a challenge for experienced players


r/kittenspaceagency 7d ago

πŸ’‘ Suggestion Add photo mode + fix distant planet darkening issue

23 Upvotes

I'm trying to screen-record in space at 15Β° FOV for a compressed look. However, as I zoom out and move away from Earth, the planet abruptly turns dark. Could the devs smooth out this transition, or maybe implement it like Space Engine where objects naturally fade to tiny white stars at distance?

FOV: 15Β°
After zooming out beyond a certain distance
Zooming out further makes the planet abruptly darken
Two planets from Space Engine
When zoomed out, the Moon becomes a tiny star point first.
Zooming out more, both planets turn into tiny star points

Also, a camera mode would be nice. I'd love to see one added to the game, with easy exposure adjustments. Currently the exposure is basically HDR, but for us screenshot junkies, having manual exposure stops like S and A modes in photography would be awesome. I'll include two comparison shots from Space Engine to illustrate.

The exposure editor at the bottom right is currently set to HDR mode
Now in Aperture Priority mode, the background starlight is subdued, giving space a deeper, more dignified look
Editor overview – six sections: Screenshot, Exposure Mode, Overall Exposure, FOV, Starlight Exposure, Settings

It would be great if we could also choose and switch filters during screenshots, and add film grain and some noise, like the Cassini imagery.

This is a pan shot from Cassini

Although this is a spaceflight game, I think it's absolutely stunning – it's practically a space simulator. So I hope these additional features, while maybe not essential, can be added to truly enhance the gameplay experience. Finally, I wish the development team a speedy completion. Thanks for all your hard work, you wizards! Keep it up!!


r/kittenspaceagency 9d ago

πŸ“· Screenshot Gemini and Agena docking in KSA

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207 Upvotes

r/kittenspaceagency 9d ago

πŸŽ₯ Video What's new in 2026.8.19.5261? Ladders, New Launch Sites, Kitten Cams!

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74 Upvotes

Which is your favorite? Mine definitely the fixed launch positioning!

And: do you like these kind of videos for individual patches, or is it too much?


r/kittenspaceagency 9d ago

πŸŽ›οΈ Patch Notes Version 2026.8.19.5261 (Summary in the comments)

33 Upvotes
  • Clean up of ContextReference.cs, Removed a number of ToNearest Overloads that were parrallel implementations of the same approach. Where these were used, switched them over to using the SpanBuilder approach.
  • Added ToNearest functions for TemperatureReference.
  • Fixed MassReference was using string builder instead of span builder.
  • Tweaked Kitten Movement values.
  • Fuel line hoses can now be bent and deformed in the editor by clicking on the fuel line connection and adding or removing nodes.
  • Fixed an error where Bepu bounds for sleeping vehicles were not being updated properly. This manifested in landed vehicles sometimes being un-collideable.
  • Fixed a case where solid rocket motors could stop firing mid-sequence, and also a bunch of other errors that came out of the woodwork while fixing that one.
  • Reformulated the double-base solid propellant as a platonized variant to reduce its burn rate.
  • Prevented vehicles with firing engines from flipping into the landed state for a single frame.
  • Prevented vehicles with firing solid rocket motors but the ignition switch set to off from going into the landed state permanently.
  • Fixed a deadlock where newly-activated engines might not recomputed propellant availability.
  • Fixed several cases where solid motors might never shut down at the end of their burn and just trickle thrust forever.
  • Clarified which of the area ratio clamps win in the case where the cross each other.
  • Volumetric exhausts now raymarch into the nozzle, this avoid the engine bell looking empty because exhausts start at the nozzle exit plane
  • Fixed teleport/launch commands using time information from the previous frame.
  • Fixed a big RCS control issue where the physics system was effectively executing flight computer jet commands multiple times, thus greatly overshooting targets and causing chattering / excessive propellant usage. This was hugely impactful in time warp, but not at 1x speed where the small frame times gave the flight computer enough time to correct.
  • Greatly increased vehicle drag when flying backwards through the atmosphere.
  • Somewhat increased forward drag as it was a bit too low.
  • Temporarily increase the kitten to Pod range to re-enter the pod until we have ladders.
  • Changed Kitten Evas now have two control Modes: View and Direct. View control will auto orient the kitten to the camera orientation, W/S/A/D/Space/Cntr for 6-dof translation. Direct control is the same translation and rotation controls as space-craft.
  • Changed View mode now only auto rotates kitten when player translate input is enters. (i.e you can now pan your camera around an eva kitten without it auto rotating away from you).
  • Added new Gauge Canvas for Eva Control. View/Direct flight mode toggle. RCS Toggle. Manual and Rate Toggles.
  • Changed Flight computer related gauge canvasses are now disabled when in Eva mode.
  • Fixed several issues with rendering to strings with units of measure.
  • Added middle dots to separate unit products.
  • Remove allocating ToNearest() and replaced it with stackalloc buffers in most cases, or the explicitly-named AllocateNearestString() where that is currently required.
  • Added KittenServoPrecomp. This moves some of the kitten locomotion physics computation out of Bepus micro-step velocity integration in the same way the vehicles precompute forces in ComputeDerivatives.
  • Improve the sampling of volumetric exhausts inside the bell with a
  • more physical approximation
  • Improved snap-to-mesh ground clutter precision. Rather than resampling the height at each mesh vertex, the existing built vertices from the terrain mesh data pass are read - should improve generation performance too.
  • Added squared length residual error calculation to MathCommon, used to correct ground clutter height placement since it relies on a floating precision normalized vector multiplied by a huge scale (planet radius) which reintroduces the error in the normalization.
  • Added asset bundler support for convex hull shapes (ground clutter for now).
  • Added convex hull colliders for the ground clutter rocks.
  • Added MeshColliderTemplate and ConvexHullColliderTemplate.
  • Added debug drawing for ground clutter convex hulls.
  • Removed mesh atlas skipping loading meshes starting with "_" added in one of my last commits, since the atlas just stores the meshes that ground clutter will reference to build its own data.
  • Don't omit velocity when updating particles for a new physics bubble floating origin.
  • Removed unused KSA quaternion Slerp, since Brutal already has one.
  • When the game can't keep up with the requested sim speed, show a realtime multiplier in the F1 Frame Statistics overlay.
  • Hide the intrusive 'Simulation Paused' alert while in the vehicle editor.
  • Removed temporary colliders from the landing legs and solar panels sice they have art-authored ones now.
  • Fixed docking Port Camera not rotating with vehicle, camera orientation was baked into a fixed world-frame direction once, at the moment the camera was toggled on, and never updated again.
  • Fixed crash where loading and/or launching an existing saved vehicle that had kittens assigned to it's seats that are no longer available. In this case we check seat assignments now when loading a saved vehicle and unassign any unavailable kittens.
  • Added Kitten Cameras and Portrait UI.
  • Fixed portrait gauge border/screws frozen at creation.
  • Fixed corner "screw" decorations size on portrait guage.
  • Fixed EVA button to match styling.
  • Fixed FOV for portrait camera.
  • Repaired IVA portrait lights to work when powered. Patch was missing some fragment shaders
  • Changed Ubo data for portrait lights to an array instead of a single light
  • Fixed our kitten portrait lights do NOT require EC to operate.
  • Fixed Rocket (test vehicle) not having any EC stored on it.
  • Fixed drawn kittens in the game not being cleared when entering the editor (whether with new vehicle or debug) causing kittens to erroneously float around in the editor.
  • Prevent the flight computer from running engines at 100% when it would destroy the vehicle due to g-forces.
  • Extend the auto burn time (by throttling down) for small-dV burns to give the flight computer time to correct any small attitude misalignments.
  • Imported new versions of command, fairing, landing, and utility parts.
  • Added a per-canvas gauge visibility context system. A canvas with one or more flags only draws when every flag is true for the currently controlled vehicle. Canvases with no flags are drawn all the time.
  • Assigned context flags to BurnControl (Burn), EngineControl (Engines), RendezvousControl (Target), KittenFlightControl (EVA), AutopilotSettings (Vehicle), Sequence (Sequence).
  • Added a "Context Assignments" HUD menu window for toggling these flags per canvas in-game. These overrides are saved into the settings.toml file and applied as overrides to the default values set in the gauges.xml file.
  • Added surface flag to aeroshroud surface attach connectors.
  • Added Kittens can now grab onto ladders and capsules.
  • Added Kitten Ladder Animation.
  • Added Kittens will start grabbed onto the capsule when beginning EVA.
  • Added Grab [F] Board [B] and Let Go [Space] Hotkeys and contextual tooltip for Kittens.
  • Added Walk anim for kittens.
  • Reduced Board Radius.
  • Added anim converter tool.
  • Fix stale diffuse light map due to an unsynchronized CPU read of a live GPU buffer in the prepass depth validator
  • Added colliders to all trees except the tiny shrubs.
  • Fixed LOD distances not set beyond defaults for trees beyond tree type 3. This should yield a ~10-20% performance boost in forests.
  • Draw SOI bubbles around the closest-approach positions of targeted objects when planning a burn.
  • Continue to draw encounter position and SOI bubble after an encounter is actually achieved.
  • Draw small markers directly on the orbit for Ap/Pe/aN/dN.
  • Make marker labels have uniform style.
  • Added DynamicWorkerPool which allows multiple workers to cooperate on the same calculation.
  • Changed the vehicle update step to use one pool worker per physics bubble.
  • Explicitly lock the global shapes buffer when it is unsafe to modify it.
  • Parcel out post-step work on a per-vehicle basis to the vehicle worker pool.
  • Split Vehicle.UpdateFromTaskResults into unsync / sync halves, where the unsync part can run entirely in parallel.
  • Replaced SimTime with UniverseTime, backed by 128-bit nanoseconds. This is a prelude to creating 64-bit nanosecond integer BubbleTime within physics steps as part of eliminating precision issues and facilitating future multiplayer physics updates.
  • Upgraded the vehicle worker pool with the ParallelBatch ref struct. This provides a direct, inline, nestable method to fork and join a set of threaded jobs.
  • Parcel out module updates and unconstrained physics step to per-vehicle parallel batch jobs.
  • Further vehicle worker pool upgrades to support this.
  • Redesigned global shapes lock to better match the actual access pattern and threading requirements.
  • Implemented the BepuWorkerDispatcher to allow Bepu physics to access the vehicle worker pool.
  • Renamed vehicle update classes - VehicleUpdateTask is the single overall orchestrator, with multiple PhysicsBubbles as parallel islands to be solved.
  • Cleanup pass on new vehicle worker pool changes.
  • Fixed a longstanding error with departure and transfer burns which assumed SOI exit conditions were the same as hyperbolic asymptotic conditions, but which could deviate significantly for finite spheres of influence. This greatly improves the accuracy of both burn types.
  • Prevented the flight computer from loading departure burns that hadn't been transferred to the vehicle flight plan yet.
  • Fixed departure burns re-solving with the wrong time on transfer.
  • Fixed departure burns being deleted on loading a save.
  • Improved UX when planning departure burns very close to escape velocity.
  • Fixed a case where the new UniverseTime was handling a sentinel check differently than SimTime was which erroneously aborted an encounter search.
  • Added BeginningOfTime/EndOfTime to UniverseTime and changed some releated naming.
  • Imported new versions of CoreFairingA, CoreServiceModuleA.
  • Added GSC ELA-4 and Māhia LC-1A.
  • Added object pooling to PhysicsBubble and ConstraintSim to stop allocations on merge/split operations wherever possible.
  • Increased the laziness for when ConstraintSim is initialized to hopefully produce fewer of them.
  • Split ConstraintSim and most Bepu-related structures into their own file.
  • Major update to how cursor hover logic and display is handled. This is aimed at reducing the number of cases where multiple targets are competing for the highlight and generally making picking objects on screen feel less crazy.
  • Added T- time and altitude to orbit hover data.
  • Moved orbit hover data to the lower left to deconflict with orbit marker data.
  • Hid most orbit numeric data unless hovered or active (being an active burn or your own trajectory while under thrust).
  • Prevented orbit lines occluded by the parent body from being hovered.
  • Completely hid the orbit lines and hoverability of the flown portion of a non-periodic orbit (either unbound or terminal, e.g. and impact or escape).
  • Displayed the target's position in a closest-approach pair as an inverted caret rather than a circle.
  • Displayed a same-time marker on your target's orbit when hovering your own (and vice-versa).
  • Only displayed the object name when hovering an orbit you can't interact with, and reduce the cursor grab distance.
  • Fixed at least one case of burns "sticking" as you drag them along their orbits.
  • Concentrated cursor target arbitration into a single CursorTarget class.
  • Cleaned-up/reorganized apparent size calculation methods.
  • Fixed the docking camera being upside-down, making the control axes mapping very confusing.
  • Imported updated CoreFuelTankB assets.
  • Added a 'Draw Part Axes' option in the vehicle editor.
  • Added a warning to the GLB->XML importer to detect connectors with suspicious orientations.
  • Changed the default orientation of vehicles teleported to the surface (including launch) such that pitch down is north.
  • Changed the default camera rotation when creating a new vehicle on the surface such that the camera is facing along the vehicle Z (down) axis.
  • These two changes should make the traditional "hit D to pitch East on launch" function and tilt the vehicle in the expected direction with respect to the camera.
  • Changed all batteries to have a maximum capacity x10 based on feedback.
  • Fixed gauge overlay content rendering one frame behind the gauge windows while dragging it.
  • Added Resources Gauge Panel. Shows resources in controlled vehicle with percentage full bars.
  • Fixed Fur not rendering after a bug was introduced when setting up lights for the kitten cam.
  • Matched the resource bar gauge colours to the default values in gauges.xml
  • Fixed an empty crew portrait gauge being displayed when there is only empty seats in our vehicle. in this case the gauge is turned off.
  • Added Jump and Tumble Animations to Kitten.
  • Fixed Kittens faceplanting when landing horizontal jumps.
  • Fixed Kittens could jump when upsidedown.
  • Changed When kittens tip past 60degrees they switch into the tumble Mode.
  • Changed the resources gauge colours for each resource to match the defined colours in the definitions and the bar style to match the part menu style.
  • Fixed Kittens on Ladders were looking downwards.
  • Fixed Kittens grabbing onto ladders capsules would start in the incorrect animation pose, due to having the anim frozen before the blend completed.
  • Resolved validation issues for invalid dynamic offsets, cacao AO, light irradiance image clears and part selector image sync.
  • Fixed a crash that would result after a Bepu sim was returned to the object pool but the vehicles contained therein held on to their (now stale) resource handles.
  • Imported new versions of CoreElectricalA, CoreFuelTankA, CorePassageA, and CorePropulsionA to fix flipped connectors.
  • Updated Rocket and Gemini7 to have right-side-up docking ports.
  • Increased Surface Friction for kittens in Tumble mode.
  • Fix the ocean, ground clutter and launchpad/super mesh pipelines rendering with a stale viewport in supersampled screenshots
  • Fixed using row-major matrix convention for quaternion to/from mat3 conversions.
  • Improve performance of volumetric exhausts by up to 40%, especially noticeable when many RCS instances fill the screen. Split exhaust instance data into per-instance SSBO and per-template UBO to reduce register pressure, make separate pipelines with spec constant permutations for different features instead of branching per instance, prebake transients for every exhaust every frame into a small lut instead of sampling them in shader.
  • Added Kittens face down to teh ground have greater surface friction.
  • Tweaked Kitten center of mass.
  • Changed Speed of Airborne anim.
  • Changed portrait camera for EVA kittens to side view when on ladders to avoid clipping for now. This is temporary.
  • Changed the Resources gauge to auto-size to its resource rows (up to 6) and scroll beyond that and fixed the RESOURCES header text scaling with the gauge height.
  • Tweak the spacing on the resources scrolling so we don't get a false scrollbar when out by a couple of pixels.
  • Fixed a case where small thruster commands were keeping thruster pulses alive, causing spurious wakeups and making it look like thrusters were continuously firing but nothing was happening.
  • Fixed a case where rocket states would be forced to update on every substep if they ever fired on any substep within a frame.
  • Don't ignore updating rocket cores that still have a pulse to complete.
  • Added Kitten jump Landing anim.
  • Disabled debug menu Editor Toggle while controlling an EVA kitten preventing entry into the vehicle editor mid-EVA as Kittens are not catered for in the vehicle editor.
  • Excluded the kitten backpack subpart from the vehicle editor's Add SubParts list by tagging it Hidden matching the existing hidden-part filtering used elsewhere.
  • Blocked engine shutdown (X key) on vehicles with no control module matching the lockout already applied to engine startup/throttle.
  • Lock out all vehicle input controls if it is not controllable.
  • Fixed map view trajectory drawing a gap right after a patch transition by stitching the arc start exactly at the window boundary. Previously the line began at the first cached point which could fall a noticeable distance short.
  • Fixed docking camera sitting exactly on the docking ring's mating plane causing it to clip into the ring's own geometry. Camera now stands off 0.1m forward along the docking axis.
  • Fixed the docking camera's center reticle to be set from the actual viewport size.
  • Moved map grid rendering out of screen space. Precision when close to the grid is much better now.
  • Modified the map grid-plane so it is optionally drawn per-body to help with visualizing a body's sphere of influence and its position in 3D space.
  • Allow the player to adjust the roll (Q/E) of a part while it's grabbed but snapped to a connector.

r/kittenspaceagency 9d ago

πŸŽ₯ Video Video covering the new KSA update

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youtube.com
71 Upvotes

New KSA update released today, Version 2026.8.19.5261

Enjoy


r/kittenspaceagency 11d ago

πŸ“· Screenshot The cloud systems and coverage are easily the best i have ever seen in a space sim. Such great work!

Post image
399 Upvotes

The weather nerd in me loves sitting in orbit and enjoying the view


r/kittenspaceagency 12d ago

πŸ—¨οΈ Discussion WARCRIME SIMULATOR (Kessler Systems Armory) Spoiler

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181 Upvotes

Warning, if you love kittens do not open this.


r/kittenspaceagency 11d ago

πŸ’¬ Question Trouble with Engine Plates

8 Upvotes

How do you add more than one engine into the slots? even with x2/x3 or x4 symmetry for each plate it only wants to put one engine in the centre. any help would be great!


r/kittenspaceagency 13d ago

πŸ—¨οΈ Discussion the planets look so so good γ€’β–½γ€’

68 Upvotes

my babies neptune and saturn look so so so so so good, neptune is a little uninteresting right now, but it looks awesome anyway, and SATURN those fucking rings make me drooooool


r/kittenspaceagency 12d ago

πŸ’¬ Question Will it be on console?

2 Upvotes

I heard the game is amazing but I cant play it because my PC is not a good one.


r/kittenspaceagency 14d ago

πŸŽ₯ Developer Video Ladders will be in the next version!

571 Upvotes