The construction phase has hit a new milestone 🧱 and is ready to be tested.
A quick recap: after that first early demo on Steam, it was important to us to work your feedback into the game. Because you had some genuinely great suggestions.
And now you can test it. You can join the Playtest on our Steam page and try out the new changes. (Store Page) For now, the Playtest only covers the changes coming to the demo version, which will then go live in the demo itself, provided they don't contain any major bugs.
So how are we imagining this testing works? If you're in the Playtest pool, you get to play a new, unstable version ahead of time. If you run into any ideas, bugs or things that feel off, there are two ways to send them our way:
Option 1: The built-in report tool, available in the individual scenes and in the settings. Bugs via the bug report, ideas and comments via the other form. You stay anonymous there, which also means we can't come back to you with follow-up questions.
Option 2: Send us an email at:
That way we can stay in touch if we have questions or need more detail.
How we'll be making announcements to the group is still up in the air. We'll try a few things and see what works best. You'll get a sign. ;^)
Right, enough admin. Here are the expected release notes for the new version:
Empluna 0.1.3 — Release Notes
Previous version: 0.0.2 (demo, June 2026)
This version came almost entirely out of your feedback on the demo. We focused on the three points that came up most often: road building was too fiddly, mistakes couldn't be undone, and the interface was cluttered. All three were tackled from the ground up.
🛣 Road building rebuilt
The most-mentioned criticism of the demo. The mechanic was rewritten, not just patched up.
Terrain adapts to the road: as you lay a road along the spline, the terrain deforms automatically. This also applies at junctions, when moving existing roads and with tunnels.
Multi-snapping: a newly placed junction connects automatically to every snapping point already lined up correctly. No longer just to one. The preview shows you up front what will actually be built.
Angle limits for splines: roads can no longer be dragged into extreme curves that nothing can drive through.
Twisted road sections (twist along the spline) are now resolved correctly.
Fixed:
When splitting a road, both halves wrongly took on the road type currently selected in the menu instead of their own (wrong material, wrong traffic).
Terrain smoothing at junctions dropped out when moving things and only applied to new construction.
↩️ Undo / Redo (Ctrl+Z)
Completely new. In the demo, every slip was final.
You can now undo (and redo):
Shaping and texturing terrain
Placing, deleting, moving, rotating and scaling objects
Building, deleting, moving and reshaping roads and junctions
Building, deleting, reshaping and rebuilding walls
Colouring building parts
🏗 Building & Editing
Much easier rotation: hold the key and move the mouse, that's it. You no longer have to grab the rotation ring precisely. The yellow angle arc still shows how far you've rotated, and Ctrl snaps in 11.25° steps.
Building plots can be rotated. The interior layout is saved and loaded relative to the rotation, and old saves are migrated automatically.
Conveyor belts can be moved vertically (Shift + drag on the spline).
Magnet for spline handles on roads and conveyor belts — endpoints find each other instead of sitting just slightly apart.
Procedural buildings recognise entrances and destinations and hook into the path network correctly.
Building selection at BuildingHubs: eligible buildings are highlighted, hover tints them, Esc cancels.
Terrain deforms to match when you place objects.
🌍 World & Terrain
More organic terrain generation with erosion. More natural ridgelines instead of uniform noise.
Better coastlines and procedural rivers.
Reworked horizon: ocean and sky blend cleanly into each other, with matching distance fog.
Brighter nights in built-up areas. Building at night is no longer flying blind.
🖥 User Interface
Almost every panel was reworked. The second-biggest block in the demo feedback.
Main menu redesigned, including a terrain preview.
Playstand selection (biome scene) rebuilt: resource filters, selection panels, dropdowns.
Build menu reworked — clearer structure, collapsible categories.
Completely new icon set (hundreds of symbols unified).
Tooltips consistent throughout, with reliable triggering.
Windows can be moved and maximised, including the day/night window.
Loading screen with preview images of the scene.
Economy, politics and innovation panels adjusted.
Fixed: sliders in the settings (including volume, now correctly in dB); a bug when maximising panels.
🎮 Steam Integration
Steam integration newly added.
Achievements — 5 achievements for the demo content.
Steam Cloud sync for saves (respects the user's cloud setting).
🗣 Tutorial, Voice-Over & Languages
Intro rewritten and re-recorded
New tutorial steps for rotating, repositioning and conveyor belt height — exactly the actions nobody found on their own in the demo.
Over 180 lines of text corrected or added in German, English, French and Spanish; a bug that stopped individual translations from loading at all has been fixed.
⚡ Performance & Stability
Noticeably lower memory usage when loading a save.
Main menu slimmed down — faster startup.
General rendering optimisations (shared renderer across levels of detail).
Switched to the official Unity AI Navigation package — more stable pathfinding, no more custom fork.