Stars Reach Shows Off Player-Made Maps, Homestead Packing, and Swimming

Stars Reach has shared a new fireside chat covering several sandbox features in development, with cartography, homesteads, water tech, and swimming taking the spotlight.

The biggest addition is mapmaking. Players will be able to craft maps, add waypoints, and sell those maps to other players. Equipping a map in a utility slot also adds a minimap element to the HUD. Maps won’t last forever, though. They’ll have durability and eventually break, but the team says they should hold up for “hours and hours” of real time.

Homesteads are getting some practical changes too. Players will be able to expand a plot’s lot size, and buildings on a lot can be packaged up and placed somewhere else. The feature is partly meant to deal with abandoned plots. If an inactive player comes back after their homestead has been cleared, the bundled version should be waiting in their in-game mailbox.

That system also opens the door to player-made prefab lots, since someone could build out a plot, package it, and sell it to another player.

Water is another focus. The team says it has improved water performance and how quickly water effects update, which matters for a game where water from one planet can be moved to another for terraforming. Swimming is now working as well.

The chat also touched on cleaner battle comms, humanoid enemies with new tactics, updated terrain textures, a new bo staff weapon, and more skin tone options for character creation. The Q&A covered points of interest, treasure maps, and timing for the cosmetics shop.

Stars Reach is a massively multiplayer sandbox RPG from the designer of Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies. It’s currently in Early Access on Steam, with its pitch centered on a single shardless galaxy of persistent planets.

Further reading: Official Stars Reach site