Forging Satus Into a Real Voxel World (2018 → Now)

We’ve been building Satus since 2018.

That’s a long time to keep a fantasy voxel colony-sim dream alive—especially with a part-time, volunteer-heavy team, real-life curveballs, and a genre that punishes you for every weak system (chunks, saves, pathing, networking… all of it).

If you’ve followed our yearly updates, you’ve seen the arc:

• Early years were heavy R&D

• We chased big technical answers (including the Rust/Unity hybrid “Saturn” era)

• We learned what was too complex for a part-time pipeline

• We made the hard call to refocus on Unity-only so we could actually move forward

2025 was the year that pivot finally paid off.This wasn’t a “big promises” year. This was a “lay bricks, test them, and keep stacking” year.

If 2024 was the sketchbook, 2025 was the forge.

The Meat of 2025: Three Big Wins

1) The World Stops Lying

In a voxel game, your brain is constantly doing a trust test:

• If I walk over this hill, will the terrain still be there?

• If I dig out a wall, will it actually stay gone?

• If I place a slope, will it look correct from every angle?

• If I spin the camera fast, will stuff pop, flicker, or change shape?

  
  

Early on, worlds like this can feel “haunted.” Not in a fun way—more like the world is second-guessing itself.

A big focus in 2025 was making Satus feel reliable and consistent, especially when you’re building, sculpting, and moving around fast.

What improved:

Terrain editing got tougher. Placing and removing blocks became more dependable, with lots of edge-case cleanup so sculpting doesn’t randomly misbehave.

Slopes got real attention. Not just “slopes exist,” but actually making them place well and behave when you’re shaping terrain.

Higher-level tools arrived. Flattening areas, replacing blocks quickly, and making edits without feeling like you’re doing surgery one block at a time.

Terrain visuals got cleaned up. The annoying stuff—flickers, faces that shouldn’t show, weird edges, slopes that look fine from one side but wrong from another—got targeted. Added shadows and other visuals to make the world more interesting.

What this means for you: Building and terraforming starts feeling like a skill you can improve at—rather than a system you have to babysit. When the world behaves the same way every time, you naturally start playing faster, experimenting more, and trusting your own plans.

2) The World Starts Feeling Alive

A world can be huge and still feel empty if nothing has rhythm. Colony sims especially need that sense of “time is moving” and “things are happening for a reason.”

So in 2025, we leaned into the systems that make Satus feel less like a terrain sandbox and more like a living medieval world.

What improved:

A stronger day/night loop. Lighting and time flow became more of a real “world rhythm,” instead of a static scene that always feels like noon.

Better multiplayer consistency. When multiple players are in a world, time needs to agree—otherwise everything feels off (it’s day for one player and night for another, or timing doesn’t line up). We made real progress here.

More momentum on moving characters and creatures. Spawning, movement, and selection got more solid so living things can exist in the world in a way that feels controllable.

Foundations for colony behavior. The core idea—units can move to places, follow objectives, and do multi-step work—got stronger. Not “full colony sim finished,” but a much better platform for it.

What this means for you: This is where “a world you can edit” starts turning into “a world you can manage.” The moment characters can reliably move, be selected, and follow intent, you can start to feel the colony loop coming into view: routines, work orders, and the slow growth from camp to settlement.

3) The Game Holds Together

This is the part that’s not flashy, but it’s the difference between a quick clip and a real test build.

In 2025 we did a lot of work that’s basically saying:“Okay. Let’s make sure this thing survives contact with real play.”

What improved:

Multiplayer foundation got sturdier through Steam. Less fragile setup, better reliability, and more room to build features on top.

Less noise across the network. Instead of everything shouting everything all the time, we improved how information is shared so multiplayer has a better shot at feeling smooth.

Saving and loading got safer. Fixing the kind of bugs that can ruin a session: worlds not saving right, loading into broken states, or getting stuck in weird “half-loaded” situations.

Better flow into the game. World-load UI and build UI improvements mean less friction getting into a world and doing what you want.

Better internal debug tools. Not player-facing, but huge for speed: when something breaks, we can see it faster, reproduce it faster, and fix it faster.

What this means for you: Longer sessions feel less risky. Testing feels more real. And the build starts acting like something we can hand to players without it collapsing the second you push it.

The Real Theme of 2025: We Built the Foundation to Go Faster

Satus is a big world with a lot of moving parts. 2025 was about making sure those parts:

don’t fight each otherdon’t drift out of syncdon’t vanish when you look awayand don’t fall apart when you save

And now?

Now we get to stack more game on top of a world that can finally hold it.

If 2025 was the forge… 2026 is when we start swinging the sword. Stay tuned for Creative Alpha news. We'll be announcing our Creative Alpha Roadmap in March 2026.