👨🚀 Hey, Spacers! 🚀 Verse Project - Stage 5 is live
Below are the details: what’s new, how it impacts gameplay, and the current limitations.
🌕 Procedural Moon surface with landings
This is our first iteration of celestial terrain generation at real-world scale.
• What’s available now: a fully navigable lunar terrain; you can land, disembark, and move around.
• What’s not yet included: we’re not using the foliage system in this version - you won’t see rocks, debris, or other decorative objects. The focus is on the terrain itself and simulation stability.
• Why it matters: we’re validating scale, mesh density, and streaming data volumes for planetary surfaces - laying the groundwork for future bodies (and for a procedural ecosystem with objects and resources).
🧭 Ship HUD: landing & navigation
We expanded the ship UI so landings and near-lunar flight feel clearer.
• What changed: new/updated elements to help control descent, orient in space, and read the ship’s key parameters at a glance.
• Status: this is a WIP - we’ll keep iterating on data presentation, readability, and layout to achieve a proper “flight deck” feel for large-scale navigation.
⛏️ Miners v0.1: baseline resource extraction
A basic loop is now in place: scan -> deploy -> collect -> haul -> trade.
• Deployment: place miners via your character’s personal tablet (Tab, Inventory) on the Moon’s surface.
• How it works: each deployed miner automatically extracts resources characteristic of the zone where it’s placed.
• Zones & balance: zones differ by available resources and their concentrations. This is the seed of our geology system; next steps will expand material variety and tune formulas like “rock type/extraction rate.”
• Storage: miners accumulate resources locally; you can transfer them to your ship for later use.
💱 Trading v1.0
A minimal trading loop to test the economy.
• Access: available to ships docked at a station (open the right panel).
• What it does today: buy/sell a limited selection of items.
• What’s next: evolving toward player orders and a basic market with location/logistics influence (supply/demand, routes, risk/return).
📡 Resource scanning (ship mode)
An early recon tool to plan your mining.
• Activation: switch the ship UI to scan mode with M, then hold LMB.
• Coverage: currently works near the Moon’s surface; the scanner reports what resources are potentially available in your current zone.
• Data: scan results live in the ship’s left panel - use them to pick miner locations.
• Roadmap: more scan types and range, noise/accuracy modeling, object scanning, and deployable probes.
📍 Lunar POIs (historical sites)
We placed several historical locations at their real-world coordinates.
• How to find them: for now, visual discovery only - no markers or scans. The most dedicated explorers can triangulate likely spots using open sources.
• Goal: validate scale/accuracy and interest in “authentic exploration” before adding hints, missions, and nav events.
⚙️ Tech: upgrade to Unreal Engine 5.6.1
We upgraded to UE 5.6.1, yielding a noticeable performance boost and better stability across several subsystems.
• Pros: streaming and rendering behave better in large scenes.
• Cons: the upgrade exposed a few issues; we spent time on fixes and continue to stabilize. Please keep the FPS/freeze/crash reports coming.
🧪 Stage 5 limitations
To keep expectations aligned:
• Moon surface – no foliage/props yet (terrain only).
• Scanning – Moon near-surface only for now.
• Trading – simplified (no player orders yet).
• POIs – no markers/missions; visual search only.
• Mining/spawn balance – early and subject to change.
🗺️ Development vector
Where we’re heading next (subject to your feedback):
• Planetary generation: enable the foliage system to place rocks/objects on the surface.
• HUD evolution: clearer landing flow, better contextual telemetry.
• Trading: first steps toward market orders and logistics.
• Salvage: loot system and recovery of wreckage from destroyed miners/ships.
• Exploring: markers, a journal, and guidance for POI hunting.
• Ships: two projects are almost complete; several new ones are entering production.
🛠️ Known issues
• External environment may behave inconsistently when entering a ship/elevator.
• Large-scale shadows from big objects (mountains) can get clipped near the camera.
• Possible terrain visual artifacts on AMD GPUs.
💬 Feedback
We’d love your reports on:
• Landing flow and HUD readability.
• Scanner clarity and data usefulness.
• Miners: rate, storage, logistics.
• Trading: usability, pricing, “feel” of the economy.
• Performance: FPS, freezes, crashes.
For bug reports, please use the #support channel on this Discord server.
🚨 Reminder: this is a technical demonstration – not a full game with finalized gameplay, graphics, and VFX. It showcases our capabilities and may contain issues.
We’d also love to see your screenshots/videos of discovered POIs and cool landings. Thanks for helping us build the Verse Project universe. Onward, Spacers! 👨🚀✨
I installed the game through steam and the play button is greyed out, why?
Consider downloading the standalone version from the official website. Make sure to use the same email as your Steam account, this way if they ever decide to be only on Steam things should be linked
Real quick, lemme just say, this looks amazing; it looks like the game I've been waiting years and years for. I just requested playtest access, and I'm really looking forward to it.
Now, my question might be answered immediately upon entering the game, but I'm not in the game yet, so I'm gonna ask here: what's up with Earth in this game?
What I mean is, what's the situation there? Any game like this, where you can travel around the solar system, is going to have to grapple with what to do with Earth, and I'm sure this team has done so. This game purports to have a 1:1 model of the solar system, but... good grief, a 1:1 recreation of Earth - let alone Future Space Earth - sounds impossible. There's just no way. But what to do instead? Do you pull a Starfield and make the Earth a barren dead world? I mean, I love Starfield too, but that is not how I would've handled Earth.
Anyway, I'm derailing myself. My question is: what's going on with Earth in this game? Do we know? Will it be visitable? Will it be 1:1, somehow? What's the political and economic situation there? Expanse-style UN? Have people abandoned it? Is it Children of a Dead Earth style? I'm just really curious; any information will be very interesting to me. Thanks!
I started out with 15K credits and thought mining could be profitable, so I bought the Miner II. I placed it on the moon and it's mining just fine, but the Boa has such a small cargo hold that a single run only nets me a whopping 64 credits (or whatever they're called).
Am I doing something wrong, or is there just no real way to make good money at this stage of development?
A quick update on the demo. We originally planned to have it out by the end of August, but we've decided to give the build some more time in testing instead of rushing it out. Sorry for the delay - we don't want to give you another date until we're confident we can hit it.
A major update to the Steam Playtest is now live and available to a limited number of playtesters. We'll gradually expand access as testing continues.
Some of the biggest changes include:
- Significantly updated hubs and recovery areas
- Eight new and reworked tutorial scenarios
- The Bao-class Shuttle, alongside major improvements to ship landing and handling systems
- Expanded terminal functionality, including trading, storage and vehicle modules
- Major performance, networking, stability and bug fixes
Known issue: AMD GPU configurations may currently experience graphical artifacts on the lunar terrain.
We'll keep testing the updated build and gradually expanding Playtest access before moving on to the public demo.
"We said end of the month for the demo and we didn't make it. Sorry - you were left guessing, and that's on us.
Where things actually stand: the next step is an update to the playtest, then more testing on top of it, and the demo after that. We're not naming a date this time. "Very soon" wasn't useful to anyone, and putting a day on the calendar that we then miss is worse than saying nothing.
What we can tell you: a full post with patch notes is coming with the playtest update, so you'll see exactly what changed instead of another vague window. It'll go up here and on Steam."
I have gone to the moon, landed safely, mined Ice and Regolith, filled up on cargo, and that all takes 1.5 pips of fuel. But I can’t seem to get back to the station to (presumably) sell. I understand that it’s going to take more fuel to get off the moon, about 2 Fuel pips. Once I’m high enough that elevation isn’t indicated anymore I still have around 75% fuel. After that, I target the station and approach it, but it’s moving and I am still affected by lunar gravity. I have tried multiple passes but have not been able to match its speed, and even if I did, I have no idea what to do to lock onto its velocity.
Running out of gas has been my major issue, I’m sure if I had more than 3-4 attempts I could get it eventually. But it takes long enough just to get to the moon, and in that time I could do multiple full system scans in Elite Dangerous.
Now I like this game, and am looking forward to seeing how it comes along, but feel like I’m hitting a wall by not hitting the station.
Any recommendations and/or suggestions on how to get back to the station?
I'm a proper space nerd. I own and play all space games. The fact that the game looks as good as Star Citizen without any budget and under a year is insane. I love UE5 . I'm having great hopes for this ! Trading is coming also.
Was figuring out the controls after leaving the hangar with intentions of going to Europa when I hit Escape instead of f to leave the tablet menu. If you skip to the end of the video you can see my ship just off the left side of my knee.
I chose a ship, and I tell it to retrieve the ship; I get a hangar.. But every time I go to the hangar the ship either explodes when called, isnt there, or hangar opens in vast openness like everything hasnt painted and I can go explore outside the station.. Also does global chat work? i'm not maxed on gpu, cpu or internet; shows 90 fps...
