Procedural World Generation in Stars Reach

By Meghann Bledsoe

Stars Reach is a game where there's always something new to discover around the corner whether it be new ways to interact with other players or with the environment. So how do we make huge numbers of worlds for players to explore that ensure that they always have something new to find? Procedural generation is the answer, and will be pretty familiar to those that have played No Man's Sky, Terraria, Minecraft, and many other games.

THE POWER OF THE THIRD DIMENSION

Procedural generation, when used to create 3D terrain, tends to use mathematical algorithms with different seeds to generate 2D height fields like the one below.

When these 2D images are translated into 3D, the black areas are the lowest points and the white areas are the tallest. By changing the seed that the algorithms use, we can create an infinite number of these height fields. This is so powerful, but the downside is that these are 2D images. That means no overhangs, no caves, etc. Everything has to be wide at the lowest point of the map and narrow at the top.

What we're doing at Playable Worlds though is unique and allows us to create fully 3D worlds that use these algorithms to create chains of tunnels, unique terrain formations, arches, overhangs, and ledges! This opens up all kinds of possibilities for new and exciting environments.

WAIT…THAT'S A REAL PLACE?

A lot of the inspiration for our worlds comes from the most unique landforms that occur naturally on Earth. There are truly amazing and surprising things out there!

For fun, let's grab that last image of the mushroom rock and see what we can do with our tools to make some mushroom rocks and get them into the game! The image below will be our initial shape. It's interesting for sure, but this is the limit of what most procedural generation tech would let us do.

Now! With our tool, we can scoop out the underside and leave a cool stem shaped rock underneath. Then, all we have to do is throw it into the game.

And here's another entirely different mushroom created by taking the algorithms that made the first mushroom and changing just the initial input value!

Both of these are made entirely of mathematical algorithms with our awesome tool, and we can combine shapes like these with other types of terrains and features in infinite numbers of combinations to bring new adventures to all the eager explorers out there!

KEEP IN TOUCH WITH OUR EXPLORERS

Join our official game Discord for an afternoon and read their stories, see their screenshots in the #your-wow-moments channel. Keep up with the amazing things folks are finding and doing in our first few planets and the space between.

https://discord.gg/starsreach 

We all enjoyed your video interview months ago at the announcement of Stars Reach. That was recorded in May and debuted in June. (Editor's note: it's here if you missed it.) 

What's been the most rewarding or unexpected development in your work since the June 2024 announcement?

Avi: The fact that we've been running playtests almost weekly (and sometimes even more frequently!) means players get to see our work almost immediately. Even debugging mundane bugs and crashes has become a lot more fun because I know there are folks who are really looking forward to those fixes and will notice right away. This obviously applies even more to the highly visible gameplay features, and the constant positive feedback loop we have with the tester community is so invigorating.

Light: Hands down the most rewarding thing has been getting the game into the hands of players. We've always wanted to work closely with the community while making Stars Reach, and well before we revealed the game there was an unofficial Discord with a bunch of great people who were following our progress on our unannounced game. Finally getting to the point where a bunch of those people (and many others who've joined the adventure) are actually in the game and giving us feedback has been unbelievably rewarding. Whether it's reporting issues in current playtests or sharing hopes of what future playtests may hold, it's been great hearing from everyone and I love that we're at a place where we can move forward together.

How have players in the playtest community surprised you over the past few months?

Avi: I expected to be surprised and impressed by our community from the beginning so in a way, I'm not at all surprised that I'm surprised and impressed at their creativity! Some of you have figured out neat tricks with the simulation like lithifying certain types of soil into stone and then melting it to create quartz, which is a useful gemstone for a bunch of crafting recipes. I didn't even know you could do that! I just used it recently in an internal test to craft some new tools myself and others on the dev team were like, wait, how did you do that?! I can't wait to see what other crazy things we learn from you all.

Light: The best thing about this kind of game is you can pretty much always count on players being able to surprise you. As long as you give players interesting options and a good simulation to play with, they will find ways to make it do things you didn't intend. But actually the most surprising thing to me from our community hasn't been an in-game mechanical interaction, but rather the social interactions that we're already getting. We know the big-picture vision of our game has tons of support for social interactions, but the current in-game versions are pretty limited. And yet we have people in playtests who are not just excited to play, but who are already grouping up and coordinating team efforts to try to see just how far their creativity can go. We've had people work together to try to sculpt statues or write words on the sides of mountains. We've had people group up to try to make a mountain fall by collectively carving away its base. We've just recently had a group of people start making plans before the playtest even started to try to figure out what they were going to build together. That blew me away. We knew we were building a game that would encourage those kinds of social interactions, but given how few of our planned social systems are in right now (and how fleeting some of these early playtests are) I wasn't sure how much social play we'd be seeing this early. Needless to say it's been an absolute delight to watch.

What are you most excited to show the players in the next 6 months?

Avi: Combat is very near and dear to my heart and while what we have in game today is perfectly serviceable and already pretty fun, we have some big upgrades planned that will make it feel much more polished and responsive. We've been hard at work on some of the non-combat trees and performance and stability, but combat will have its day soon and I'm super hyped for it!

Light: Building off of my last answer, I'm excited to get more of the social systems in. We have so many tools and ideas to help players actually play together instead of just 'playing separately in the same space'. In the immediate future we're adding Gifting (which is the beginnings of an actual player economy!) and the rough beginnings of Homestead Permissions, but we've got plenty more to add and we'd like to start doing so soon! This is where I have to make my obligatory disclaimer that I'm not making feature or timeline promises… But some of the features we have planned that I suspect will make appearances soon include a Leadership Profession which will start out helping groups in combat, more ways to trade with other players including trading information not just items, and possibly even the start of Player Contracts.

For someone just joining the playtest, what's your top tip for getting the most out of their first session?

Avi: This one's easy! Now that our video NDA has been lifted, the pre-alpha tester community has already been creating guides for each other. Check out Rommi Noodles' Pre-Alpha Beginner Guide on YouTube for a taste of what's in the tests so far and some of the strategies and approaches they've already discovered: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hsP7Ob4qtm0 

Light: I think Avi already hit the nail on the head: The best way to start learning how to play an MMO has always been (and always will be) the friends you make along the way. So join the Discord, during playtests join the voice chat, and don't be shy if you have questions! That said, I definitely understand that it might be a little overwhelming to be just dropped into one of our playtests. There's a lot of tools, professions, and even movement options to learn, and we're adding more all the time! So my advice would be to narrow your focus instead of trying to learn everything at once. Pick which sounds the most interesting to you between "Fighting", "Exploring", or "Gathering Resources," and start learning just the things you need to do that thing. Each of those will eventually lead to learning the other two, and the three of them collectively will lead towards Crafting, Home Building, and more. One of the advantages of Stars Reach is there's no single 'right way' to play, there's lots of playstyles so if you know what your personal playstyle is just focus on the things you know you usually enjoy. We're planning to add more in-game onboarding for First Time Players very soon, so that should help as well, but one more time for emphasis: the best resource for any MMO is its community.

Thank you to Avi and Light for taking the time to ask questions. 

If you wish to join us in the playtests, please sign up here.

If you are signed up to playtest but haven't taken the Solsten survey, that is here. 

If you wish to help us built momentum and keep our investors happy, please wishlist us on Steam here.

By Carneros & Rod

TEST ONE!

We gave players several new tools to play with and very little information on how to use them. The players split up and started to test out the game in various ways. Some of them explored the new Ranger skills and exploration game play. 

We got a lot of great feedback on the exploration part of the game. Several players managed to completely map the planet. Those players found a trophy labeled "a sense of pride and accomplishment" in their inventories. They then usually lost it when they next died, oops.

Other players equipped a weapon and proceeded to hunt the creatures around the map. And a few players were content with setting the trees on fire and watching the world burn!

In the screenshot you see below, every tree is the equivalent of a mob in a traditional MMO. They can each run individual behavior scripts, they grow and die and burn and can be chopped. They even throw off seedlings so the forest can spread. 

As you can see, it was a pretty dense forest! One of the topics of discussion on the Discord afterwards was that the forest fires don't spread enough, so we will work on tuning that up so that it spreads more and feels more dangerous. During every test, the dev team hangs out on a Discord voice channel with the testers, talking through what testers are experiencing. Feedback like the above is exactly why we run tests.

TEST TWO!

Not long into the test we ran into an issue where large groups of players near each other were being disconnected all at the same time. On top of that many of the players that were disconnected were then facing a crash bug on trying to log in. The development team jumped into action and began to dig through the server and crash logs as they came in to start to identify the problem.

By Monday morning, we had identified some possible fixes and built them into a new hotfix client. The problem we faced is that the issue was hard to reproduce and required more players then we could muster in house. We turned to our faithful testing Discord for help. With a simple announcement in Discord we were able to get 30 people to log into the game with only short notice. This allowed us to validate our fixes and help us identify some of the remaining ones.

The bug itself was elusive, only showing up during combat and often hiding from single-player sessions. But with enough players fighting monsters at once, it became far more frequent. We asked the community to dive in and engage in as much combat as possible. After 30 minutes of intense monster-slaying, we were thrilled to see the bug squashed-Discord saved the day!

Of course, the players had one additional note for us: "The monsters need to be much deadlier."

This test showed that we were successful at fixing the crash that we had originally identified. Sadly, the test also resulted in reports of players crashing on login to the game. In fact, it was severe enough that it affected the dev team, who couldn't even log in to end the test! (We did eventually get in, and close the server down, to the dismay of those testers who had planned to just keep playing…)

TEST THREE!

Once again, the development team dove into  crash reports, player and server logs to research the issues. Everything pointed to an issue with our visual effects and how they  interacted with DirectX and Vulkan. We quickly came up with some potential solutions and turned to Discord for help – pulling off two tests in a single day!.

The third test in three days brought more insights, and while we're still working through those fixes, it's clear how valuable these quick, spontaneous Discord tests have become. We'll keep leaning on our community for these unscheduled playtests, and though we can't promise instant fixes every time, the progress we're making feels great—and sometimes even faster than expected!

If you'd like to be part of the journey, register for the playtest und join our Discord to help shape the future of Stars Reach. We'd love to have you with us in the next round of testing!