Stars Reach 8.7 adds paint tools, carpentry, and mission board changes

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Stars Reach is getting a building-focused update with Crafted in Color 8.7.0, adding a new appearance system for placed objects, craftable finishes, and a Carpentry profession. The update is “on the way,” according to the notes, though no release date was listed.

The biggest change is the Fabricator window, which now has Style controls for editing how objects look after they’ve been placed. Players can preview finishes directly on an object before spending supplies, copy and paste styles between compatible surfaces, reset custom appearances, and toggle the building grid without it following the cursor around the homestead.

  • New craftable finishes cover metal, stone, wood, plastic, and rubber surfaces.
  • Paintable finishes are tied to Crafting skills: Basic Painting, Detail Painting, and Advanced Painting.
  • Carpentry gets its own XP and recipes, including hardwood, softwood, plywood, decorative grains, joinery, parquetry, and painted or coated variants.
  • The starbase Tool Shop now sells 12 paint and dye colors. Each purchase gives 50 uses for 1,000 klaatu.
  • Nearly 100 new generic building pieces are being added, built through Construction recipes and compatible with the new finish system.

There are limits at launch. Fabrics and wallpapers aren’t in yet, players can’t craft paints or dyes, and the team says some textures still don’t stand out enough from each other. The UI is also described as dense, and the added recipes may put more pressure on inventory space.

Update 8.7 also touches missions and creature behavior. Mission Boards will support multi-step chains, player-choice branches, better fallback handling, and kill missions that can ask for multiple creatures. Boards will restock randomly, with periodic full refreshes, and players will be able to carry three Mission Board missions instead of one per mission type.

Elsewhere, creatures are getting extra pathfinding so they’re less likely to leap off cliffs, plus basic melee attacks are returning. The F9 performance monitor is being expanded with ping, packet loss, and server load info, party UI gets a compact roster for up to 10 members, and homesteads now have an optional terrain shield to help keep materials from flowing in.

Further reading: Official Stars Reach Crafted in Color update