Finding our footing, inside stations and beyond

We spent these four days making Adastrea feel more inhabitable: fixing an awkward arrival inside stations, shaping a home carved into an asteroid, and building the tools for a more varied cast. Alongside those merged milestones, our local menu and economy experiments gave us useful progress and some clear reminders of what still needs work. This dispatch covers 29 October through 1 November.

A steadier welcome indoors

We merged a repair for habitation entries that could leave the view in darkness. One cause was a floor query that began inside collision and repeatedly lifted the avatar out of the room; another was interior lighting inheriting the surrounding sector’s exposure. We now reject those penetrating floor hits and bound exposure to the room itself, with non-blocking exposure bounds.

For players, the purpose is simple: stepping into accommodation should leave us standing in a visible room. The work includes four native regression tests, local play-in-editor checks in the sector and connected Trade Hub, and successful Editor and game builds. That evidence supports this entry fix; broader interior traversal and packaged visual checks remain separate work.

Hollow Haven takes shape

Our editable Hollow Haven concept reached main: a five-kilometre asteroid with a 1,650-metre excavated port, recessed habitation windows, docking fittings and an external mooring truss. Warm occupied windows, darker rooms and cool approach markers help the enormous rock read as somewhere people live and work.

We kept the Blender scene, deterministic generator and rendered views together so we can continue shaping it. Both the saved scene and an independent rebuild passed 21 geometry and lighting-setting checks. At this reporting cutoff, the merged milestone is the concept and its source package; Unreal docking, collision and walkable accommodation were a separate integration track.

Building a more varied crew

We also merged a deterministic NPC appearance generator with 30 editable character bases and role-weighted wardrobe recipes. Saved identities give us a reproducible starting point for crew variety instead of losing a promising combination between iterations. The checkpoint includes one assembled NPC with editor-preview evidence, plus six imported outfit packages containing 175 assets.

We are keeping the readiness boundary visible. Thirty recipes do not mean thirty finished gameplay characters. Seven new wardrobe choices remain disabled pending fit, movement and level-of-detail checks, and the batch manifest explicitly marks gameplay readiness as false. Crowd behaviour, locomotion and packaged validation are still ahead.

What our local trials taught us

Away from main, our new-game menu prototype offers ship and avatar previews and carries the selected avatar through boarding, travel and save/load. It has local play-in-editor and standalone evidence; it remains an unmerged prototype, with packaged delivery unverified.

Our matched two-hour economy experiment increased total production from 21,697 to 23,401 units, about 7.9%, while biomass output rose from 653 to 1,183. Those gains are encouraging, but construction spent more time waiting for goods and delivered cargo units dipped slightly. More output has not yet solved supply reliability.

These results come from one deterministic headless trial with no loaded sectors, using a bundle of local supply changes. They do not establish a sustainable ten-hour economy or rendered gameplay performance. We are using those rough edges to guide the next delivery tests while keeping merged progress and experiments clearly labelled.