Hello, Engineers!
We wonder – how many of you were caught off guard by this moment?
This week we brought you a series of hotfixes and several new options to help you tweak your worlds to your liking. You can now switch existing saves between Creative and Survival (in World Settings on the save-file list), the classic Creative scenario has been updated to include planets and the full Almagest system, and we’ve added a new Vallation Station Start scenario for those who want pure survival sandbox without story or tutorial contracts.
We’ve also made our internal debug menu easier to access with CTRL+F12. Please treat this as a power tool: it’s developer-level access that can bypass limits (like PCUs) and can easily break or permanently modify your world. For this reason, sessions and worlds touched by the debug menu are automatically tagged and excluded from our crash reports, and if such a world is shared, other players may see a warning that it was created or modified using debug tools.
Releasing the full debug menu is a bit of a controversial area for me. On one hand, it gives you more freedom to experiment and poke at the insides of the game you bought. On the other hand, we will probably lose some valuable crash and bug reports when players use these tools instead of playing normal gameplay. And there is always the risk of players not understanding that we cannot guarantee game stability when debug tools are active.
VS2.2
Works on VS2.2 are already in full swing. Here you can see a rocket launcher model evolution.
And the finished Rifle model
And some first concepts of SE2 gatling turret
We are introducing new helpful internal tools to VRAGE3 – player heatmap – mainly for tuning out our LODing systems.
VS3 – Byblos
Let me reveal the design and first shots of the water planet Byblos, coming to the Almagest system in VS3. A “just water” planet would be pretty boring. Yes, Byblos will be a water planet – but under the surface there will be an entire water world, with deep crags and canyons, underwater travertine cave systems and small volcanic islands rising above the waves.
With the coming of water, the underwater layout of planet Verdure will be improved as well. We already know that water will be such a monumental change for the game that you will need to start a new world when VS3 arrives. We try to minimize situations like this, but during the alpha stage of development they are sometimes unavoidable.
That is why we started to keep previous versions of the game available after major updates. So you can return to an earlier version at any time and, for example, save your blueprints or creations. You can find these builds in the Steam Beta tab.
And here are some first WIP screenshots. You can probably tell that seeing Byblos at this stage is a bit like digging through the old planet files from VS1 – barren terrain, temporary textures everywhere, testing materials, and very early water visuals. It is all still rough, but this is exactly what real development looks like.
Not many studios share raw production screenshots like these, and players are not always used to seeing such an unfiltered snapshot of the process. But for me, showing you our real progress and the way we work is a core part of Early Access. That is the whole point of these dev diaries – open development, without hiding the messy parts.
Full Blog Post: https://blog.marekrosa.org/2025/12/mareks-dev-diary-december-11-2025/
Please join us tomorrow for the Space Engineers 2 Music Competition Livestream!
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