After more than five years on the job, Kerbal Space Program Lead Developer Felipe Falanghe is moving on. In a farewell message posted on the KSP subreddit, Falanghe praised and thanked the development team and KSP supporters, but said, I desperately need to have something new, to create more than one game in my life.

KSP has become far more than the game I imagined half a decade ago. When we first set out to take on this project, I could not have expected anything even remotely close to what it ended up becoming, he wrote. To say KSP surpassed my every expectation would be, at best, a colossal understatement.

Kerbal Space Program is now conceptually complete, Falanghe explained, but its development is not. A long-term plan for the future is in place, with enough ideas to keep us all going for years, and he emphasized that his departure won't have an impact on any of it.

I need to make one thing perfectly clear: development on KSP will continue as always. No features, upgrades, bugfixes or anything of the sort are being discontinued because of my leaving, he wrote. This I say with absolute confidence, because I have complete trust in every member of the KSP team, and I know they are fully capable of handling anything that comes their way.

Falanghe, who showed us his rig in 2014, gave no indication of what he'll get up to next, although clearly he's not looking to get out of the game-making business. So while it's sad to see him leave, the prospect of Kerbal Space Program carrying on as usual, while the guy who came up with it goes off to do something new, does have a real appeal to it. And in case there was any question as to exactly how people feel about Falanghe and his game, another redditor created a word cloud of all the comments in the thread up to that point. It's pretty great.

Kerbal Space Program, aside from being one of our favorite games ever, wins our 2015 award for Best Simulation. The team discusses what makes KSP so monumental below. We'll be posting the rest of our awards and personal picks daily as we approach the end of the year, which we're collecting on our main GOTY page.

Phil Savage: Part physics sandbox; part management sim; part soaring love letter to one of mankind's greatest achievements. In Kerbal Space Program, you build rockets and send little green astronauts into space. That's the aim, but Kerbal makes you work for it. The underlying game design is based on the real-world principles of gravity, mass and thrust. It's ridiculously complex if you're targeting peak efficiency, but, as it turns out, you can simply brute force a solution by adding more rockets. Kerbal's great trick is that it's an educational game that doesn't explain anything. You learn by doing, building a working knowledge of its systems—and thus, the actual, real-world considerations required to send things into space—over countless hours of entertaining failure, revision and success. It's fun to watch your craft buckle and collapse during a maiden voyage, and it arms you with the knowledge necessary to go back to the drawing board and try again.

If we gave awards to Early Access games, KSP could have been a contender over any of the last few years. It started well, and only grew better with subsequent patches. Now, despite technically having been released this year, it enjoys the benefit of years of community feedback, iterated features, and an enormous number of mods. It's a massive physics playground that the developer and community continue to fill with new toys.

Chris Livingston: I m not so good at KSP, because I m terrible at science and thinking and planning. Even my few successes are tinged with failure, and my solar system is dotted with space capsules containing tiny astronauts who will never get to come home. Some seem happy to be floating through space, though most are horrified (and I m horrified for them). The great thing about being bad at Kerbal, though, is that it s still fun. Watching a rocket wobble, break up, and explode is almost as satisfying as watching one safely launch. Crash-landing on the Mun isn t as rewarding as landing perfectly on it, but it s still entertaining, and makes you want to keep trying. More games should make failing this much fun.

A brilliant sandbox game that simulates one of the most exciting endeavours our species has ever attempted.

Tom Senior: A brilliant sandbox game that simulates one of the most exciting endeavours our species has ever attempted. Kerbal captures the technicalities of spaceflight on a micro and a macro level. Trajectories must be planned with fine precision. Vehicles must be launched and combined in orbit with tremendous finesse, but once you ve nailed the micro stuff, you get to sit back and watch your Kerbals cross vast distances, slingshotting themselves around planets to reach faraway moons. When a mission s going well Kerbal evokes the awe of space travel, but it s funny too. When a spacewalk goes wrong and a Kerbal drifts off into the dark, the horror is softened by the stupid expression on its little green face.

I love watching the missions and builds that have been put together by much better players than I. Some players have painstakingly recreated real rockets from the space race and put them to the test. Others have created extraordinary launch sequences and docking procedures. One player made a giant robot that would catch rockets as they launched and turn them upside down, sending them nose-first into the dirt. Why? Because you can. That s the sort of freedom the very best sims allow.

As Phil mentioned, it s a great platform, too. Buy the game once and you get access to years of support and new features from modders and fans who want Kerbal to become more than a space sim. There s already a category of mods dedicated to letting you build propeller planes. The USI Kolonization System lets you build and manage complex moon bases. It s huge, and it s only going to get bigger.

You'll soon be able to land on the sea in Kerbal Space Program, an action that would have once led to a miserable, water-based death. Update 1.0.5 lets you make an emergency landing on the sea; you can also make vehicles able to take off and land from water like it's no big thing.

Other additions include a face plate for Val, the happy Kerbal on the start screen, so she can finally stop holding her breath while floating around out there in the vast expanse of space. Val, it's OK, you can breathe out now. Val. Val? Oh dear. Someone get a bin bag. Plus, the thermal system has been revamped! And lots more stuff.

There's no date for the patch yet, but it's expected soon. YouTuber Scott Manley has been given an early look:

At this very moment, NASA's New Horizons spacecraft is blasting past Pluto, snapping photos, doing science, and sending all that glorious data back to us here on Earth. Isn't that amazing? You better believe it is. It's also something you can duplicate, if you've got the right stuff, in Kerbal Space Program.

You could also, if you don't really have the patience for this sort of thing, watch astronomer, YouTuber, and Kerbal Space Program aficionado Scott Manley do the job in the "Launching New Horizons" video he posted yesterday. In it, he talks about the real New Horizons mission, while simultaneously sending his own digital equivalent into the inky void. It goes well, although at around the two minute mark he says his model breaks down a bit, and the Realism Overhaul mod causes him a spot of grief—vapor in the feed lines—at about three minutes. It's all part of the fun.

It's not a picture-perfect duplication of the real thing, but it's a fascinating exercise, and it also illustrates the capabilities of Kerbal, especially when modded to the nines, as is the case here. Along with the Realism Overhaul, Manley's mission also uses the Real Scale Solar System, Procedural Fairings, Procedural Tanks, Real Fuels, and KW Rocketry mods, plus Raider Nick's US Probes Pack and the OMSK ULA Pack.

There are (slightly) less strenuous ways to undertake a mission to the edge of our solar system: The Outer Planets Mod, for instance, offers Kerbalized versions of Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto, as well as several of their moons. But even without the rest of the mods, getting there will be a tremendous challenge, and you'll need to "be ready to travel years or even decades" before you arrive. Want more? Don't miss our latest round-up of the Best Kerbal Space Program mods.

Yes, I know. This is old. The Asteroid Day official mod for Kerbal Space Program was released for Asteroid Day, which was two whole days ago. As an act of contrition, I have consigned myself to the shame barrel. It is dark and damp in here.

Asteroid Day is a global awareness movement focused on protecting Earth from asteroid attacks, presumably because a lot of people saw the film Armageddon and—so moved were they by Bruce Willis's nuanced performance—their priorities were indelibly rewritten. In celebration for the day, and presumably because asteroids are a thing in space, the developers of Kerbal Space Program released a new official mod for their game.

The mod adds four new parts, a new experiment and a "unique contract". The contract is based around the B612 Foundation's planned Sentinel mission. The job is to position a telescope around Eve s orbit. "When deployed with an antenna and a power source between Eve and Kerbin, aligned to face away from the Sun, and activated," explain SQUAD, "the telescope will begin to map the orbit of the outer planet in a 200 vision cone for passing asteroids." Sounds like a piece of cake.

This is the second official mod for Kerbal Space Program. The first was based on the World Cup.

Without mods, Kerbal Space Program is already an amazing accomplishment—a deep, rewarding sim that captures the majesty and challenge of going to space. In 2015 we gave it our highest recommendation, and since then it's appeared in both our staff’s and our readers’ top 100 lists. Kerbal Space Program sticks around because it is everything that makes PC gaming great: freedom, creativity, flexibility, and mods. Naturally, mods make it better. The best mods for Kerbal Space Program add new ships, new parts, and small touches to keep Kerbal fun and fresh after a hundred hours of rocket science.

Whether you’re looking for a flyable Enterprise or Serenity, a recreation of NASA’s Apollo rockets or the International Space Station, the KSP community has been getting it done for ages now. Out of all of the fine work available, these are our favorite mods for Kerbal Space Program.

Comprehensive Kerbal Archive Network (CKAN) 

Get it: Kerbal Space Program forums

Don’t forget: Add Module Manager, a mod that helps other mods play well together.

The first mod on the list isn’t really a mod, it’s a program. CKAN is an open-source, community-supported mod manager. Though KSP’s mod community has moved around a lot: for a while it was officially based out of Curse.com, most of the biggest mods still live on the game’s official forums, and still others live on SpaceDock. With so many mod sources out there, CKAN aggregates modders’ submitted files and cross-references them, making sure that every mod is up to date, installing/uninstalling instantly, and warning you if mods are incompatible with each other. If a modder has recommended other mods to go along with theirs, CKAN asks if you’d like to install them at the same time. It’s a gorgeous piece of work, and it’s more essential the more mods you add.

To add a mod using CKAN, just start typing the name. There may be a few mods only hosted on Curse or SpaceDock, but almost all of them are included in CKAN.

Immersion mods

Some of my favorite mods are the most useless. Check out these mods if you want a more beautiful, immersive game. 

Chatterer

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: Quindar tone volume can be adjusted if they’re too beepy. 

In space, no one can hear you scream unless you hold down the push-to-talk button. Chatterer took real-life audio from the Apollo 11 missions, scrambled it up a bit, and chopped it into audio files that play in the background of your missions. Combined with some well-placed Quindar tones, this mod gives the impression of a bustling, chaotic mission control center buzzing with messages and cross-talk. Floating weightless in the black of space feels more real with mission control talking in your ear. 

Hullcam VDS

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: Pressing [-] cycles through all available cameras.

The Apollo missions happened before we discovered the joy of strapping a GoPro to everything, but Kerbals are much more advanced. The Hullcam VDS mod adds a variety of attachable cameras so you can watch your missions from the side of a rocket or from inside an engine housing. Launching with a down-facing hull camera lends flights a certain SpaceX kind of feel. The mod also adds a Hubble-style space telescope you can use to creep on distant planets.

Collision FX

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: Sparks kick up a soft, soothing light for nighttime crashes.

Making crashes and screw-ups look nicer might be the most “Kerbal” thing imaginable. Collision FX adds sparks, smoke, screeching tires, ploughing dirt, and plumes of snow—depending on the ground you’re crashing into. They’ve been working on it for years, and that’s why the newest version throws up soil that matches the regolith you’re slamming into. That’s quality!

Collision FX also adds an adorable little “oof” noise for when Kerbals fly into something solid during EVAs. 

RealPlume

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: RealPlume is packaged to include SmokeScreen, a mod that lets you tweak and customize engine effects.

For all the many times that my Kerbals have died in a big ball of smoke and flame, I’ve always thought to myself: that smoke could be smokier. RealPlume completely reworks the exhaust and plume effects for KSP’s rocket engines (and quite a lot of the mod pack engines, too!). You spend a lot of time in KSP watching engines burn, after all, so why not make it look great?

PlanetShine

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: Orbiting a planet with a colorful atmosphere reflects that color onto your ship. 

OK, this one is really useless. Even for this list. Still, I love PlanetShine because it exemplifies the obsessive attention to detail great modding communities thrive on. Here’s what it does: when a ship is in low orbit around a planet, the backside of the ship will be softly illuminated by the planet’s reflected atmospheric light. The mod plays well with Environmental Visual Enhancements, which adds nighttime city lights and cloud effects.

Kronal Vessel Viewer

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: Distance between pieces in the exploded view can be adjusted, from huge gap to tiny sliver.

I love blueprints. I’m not an engineer or an architect, but I have a fascination with blueprints and technical drawings. Kronal Vessel Viewer adds a view window in the VAB for you to tinker with two-dimensional sketches of your huge Kerbal ships. Using the exploded view, it’s possible to get a schematic-style look at your most historically important missions. Just imagine: this view of your ship, the Get To The Mun Please Damn It All, will be in every young Kerbal’s history books in school.

New challenge mods

Kerbal Space Program is a hard, hard game because physics is impossible and the universe wants to squish your frail, pathetic spirit. If it’s not hard enough, though—if you want new ways to fail spectacularly—then these mods bring new punishments for the most advanced Kerbonauts.

SCANsat

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: Pack plenty of solar panels; SCANsat readouts are not low-wattage.

Previous satellite mods focused on scanning and locating resources for pre-1.0 KSP. Now that resources and refineries are part of the vanilla game, SCANsat is the best precisely because it focuses on what satellites do best: exploration. With high-definition scans from a SCANsat satellite, players can target flat areas for safe landings, identify points of interest, and get a full understanding of a planet’s biomes worthy of research. Even the smallest bodies in the Kerbol system are enormous, so this mod is a great way of approaching that challenge.

Orbit Portal Technology Space Plane Parts

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: Kerbal Aircraft Expansion is another excellent parts pack devoted to aircraft, but its best parts focus on exploring Kerbin itself.

There’s nothing quite as satisfying as a single-stage-to-orbit space plane that flies smooth and lifts heavy. Once you get your arms around the peculiar physics of KSP’s space planes, you’ll have a cheap, reusable shuttle system to bring supplies, Kerbals, and even space station modules to orbit. OPT’s excellent space plane parts pack dramatically expands the tools you have to get to orbit.

Dang It!

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: Pairs so well with Entropy, a mod that causes wear and tear damage to all ships, that the two mods fell in love and decided to merge. Entropy is now an official part of Dang It!

This ingenious and mildly bowdlerized mod breaks stuff. Solar panels short out, engines misfire, fuel tanks start leaking, batteries fail. You can adjust how frequent and how catastrophic the failures, but the end result is that with Dang It!, even perfectly designed missions sometimes have hiccups. Luckily, your expertly trained Kerbals can perform an EVA and fix the problem, as long as you brought along a few spare parts.

For some players, this sounds like a hellish nightmare. I admit, though, that I find surviving a Kerbal version of Apollo 13 to be more than a little compelling. The alarm klaxon that sounds when a malfunction occurs will haunt my dreams for months.

Kerbal Construction Time

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: You can “simulate” a ship to see how it flies without waiting for the actual construction time. Simulate a few times, then when you’re happy with it, build it for real.

One of the quirks of KSP is that it keeps track of time. Every second of spaceflight is added to the overall game clock, which tells the game where every planet and ship is in space. Time is paused while you tinker with design of a new ship, and only begins when you click “launch,” meaning every ship is built instantly. Kerbal Construction Time changes that. The more complex the ship, the longer it takes to build. Why bother? Realism is a part of it. It also forces you to plan ahead, designing and sending new ships into the construction pipeline weeks or months before you’re ready to launch. If you’re building a space station in orbit, for example, you either need the cash to build multiple ships at once or you need to plan for the first module to orbit for a few months before the second module can join it.

DMagic Orbital Science: Probe and Rover Pack

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: DMagic recommends several great mods to go with this one, the best of which is [x] Science, a mod that gives you a master checklist of the experiments you have and haven’t finished yet.

Depending on what contracts you take, you might be sending routine flights up and down around the same parts of space for a while. After you’ve gotten temperature (cold) and atmosphere (none) data back to KSP central, there’s not a lot more science to be done. This mod adds a ton of new experiments for your vehicles, including a soil moisture sensor and an x-ray diffraction analyzer. Get back to work!

SpaceY

Get it: Forums, CKAN

Don’t forget: A calculator in the VAB tells you how long your Kerbals will live with the provided supplies.

Sad, but true: NASA isn’t really in the inspiration business anymore. These days, all the exciting space stuff is happening at SpaceY, the privately held Kerbal space agency that bears no resemblance to privately managed space agencies here on Earth. All of your favorite SpaceY heavy lifter parts are ready to download and head to space.

Umbra Space Industries

Get it: GitHub

Don’t forget: Umbra’s most famous mod packs are Kolonization Systems and Life Support, a 1-2 punch combo that will definitely have you leaving hundreds of Kerbals to starve to death beneath the ruins of their failed colonies.

Unlike most one-off mods, the rocket scientists behind Umbra Space Industries have established a cottage industry of mod packs. They’ve got cranes and magnets in Konstruction!, submarines for charting alien oceanography in the USI Exploration Pack, and high-speed engines in Alcubierre Warp Drive.

Almost all of USI’s projects packs are modular, so you can take a few science gizmos here and a couple of engine couplings there as you like.

Near Future Technologies

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: Near Future’s mods are basically just parts packs, so you still unlock them through the usual R&D programs. Keep farming those science points!

It’s easy to get carried away by the siren-song of sci-fi splendor: god damnit, I want warp drive and phasers and I want them now. The Near Future series of parts packs takes a more patient approach by bringing near-future sci-fi to KSP. There’s no teleportation, but there are highly refined nuclear reactors and advanced xenon engines. These mods won’t get you to Star Wars, but they will get you to The Martian.

Automation mods

KSP asks you to be a lot of things at once: administrator, engineer, pilot, scientist, micromanager. These mods automate some of these tasks, freeing you up to focus on other things.

Kerbal Attachment System

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: You can use KAS to move modules outside of the VAB, so your Kerbals can make an EVA and rearrange drilling platforms or solar panels that aren’t pointed the right way.

I once built an entire Mun base using modular pieces designed to fit a mini-rover with a docking port. The mini-rover could drive under the modules, lift them off their struts, and drive them over to their final destination. It was a horrific pain in the ass.

Instead, use Kerbal Attachment System’s network of wires, winches, pulleys, and fuel lines to connect parts of your base without actually rearranging them. Drag a wire from a solar panel array over to your habitat to produce power, or pull a fuel line from your storage tanks to your rover to refuel.

Contracts Window +

Get it: Curse, CKAN

Don’t forget: Contracts+ is compatible with the popular Contract Reward Modifier mod. 

The user interface in vanilla KSP is pretty good, but Contracts+ offers a ton of new functionality. You can sort your accepted contracts by name, due date, financial payout, and other options. Even better, you can program custom missions and track contracts that way. If you’ve got five contracts and want to fulfill three of them on a single mission, a custom mission will let you just watch those three. It’s miles ahead of vanilla KSP’s tiny scrolling taskbar window.

MechJeb

Get it: Curse

Don’t forget: If you really do think that MechJeb is cheating, try Kerbal Engineer. It gives you a ton of extra flight data so you can see all the information you need to fly perfect missions by hand.

By far the most famous and most popular KSP mod in existence is the mechanical Jebediah, or MechJeb. Allowing a computer autopilot to take over your piloting tasks is ideal for anyone with a solid flight plan and great engineering skills, but without the rock-steady hands it takes to carefully touch 80 tons of steel onto alien soil. MechJeb can do it all, from extra-planetary insertion burns to docking maneuvers.

Some purists insist that using MechJeb is “cheap” or “cheating.” To them, I say nonsense. MechJeb doesn’t let an underpowered rocket reach orbit, and it won’t give you infinite fuel. If designing missions sounds like more fun than flying them to you, there’s no shame whatsoever in handing the controls to an expert.... but since we couldn’t find an expert anywhere around here, we’re handing them to Jeb. Good luck.

Kerbal Alarm Clock

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: You can set an alarm for ideal interplanetary launch windows, letting you fast-forward until it’s the right time of year for a trip to Duna.

Throughout most of KSP’s development, you had to simply fast-forward time and hope you didn’t rocket past your burn window. In those dark days, Kerbal Alarm Clock was born. Even though KSP has made it easier to hit your windows, the alarm clock is still essential. Set alarms for certain parts of your orbit, for other crafts passing nearby, for crossing orbits, and others. You can even tie into a strange alternate universe, a planet called “Earth,” and set alarms based on the local time. 

Docking Port Alignment

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: The target window is also viewable from the cockpit view, which means you can get the immersive experience of docking from the pilot’s chair. Stressful! Horrifying!

The navball in vanilla KSP is much-maligned, but I don’t think it deserves the flak it gets. It’s perfect for most purposes. Its biggest failure, to my mind, is docking guidance. Trying to line up a three-dimensional maneuver with a one-dimensional target? That’s silly business. Docking Port Alignment adds a pop-up window with four crosshairs. Point at the target, rotate into alignment, face perpendicular to the target, and get moving gently toward it, all with the same window.

It won’t dock for you like MechJeb, but it gives you all the information you need to nail it. I went from docking in a couple of minutes to under thirty seconds when I started using this mod.

For Science!

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: If you have a scientist on board, one-use experiments will also automatically reset.

Of all the mods on this list, this one feels the most like cheating. For Science! is designed to remove the science grind by automating it. Simply taking a thermometer into the ocean will automatically record that reading and store it in the command module. Arming a plane with a few experiments and flying it across Kerbin will bring in a steady stream of new science points. No more guessing if you’re over a certain biome or trying to fly and press go on an experiment at the same time.

Multiplayer mods

For some, KSP’s greatest asset is its loneliness. For others, the only thing better than docking is docking with a friend. Vanilla KSP was supposed to one day support multiplayer, but it now seems pretty unlikely that will ever happen. The idea took off with the community, though, and there are a few solid options available.

Telemachus

Get it: Forums

Don’t forget: Telemachus works (mostly), but it’s as ugly as the dark side of a Kerbal. Install Houston, a UI upgrade that plugs into Telemachus to make it a little prettier.

Telemachus is complicated and I am but a simple moron, but the basic gist is this: Telemachus pulls flight data out of KSP and puts it into a web browser. Using magic, presumably.

Why is that cool? Well, you can use it for a bunch of things. You can gather up tablets and old laptops and assemble yourself a mission control. You can send that browser link to a friend and share real-time data as you fly. Or, and here’s where it gets really fun, you can assemble a team to play as your mission control. One player plays as the pilot in cockpit view, and mission control works to tell her when to burn, how long, and where. Add some beer and a few explosions, and you’ve got yourself a party.

Dark Multiplayer

Get it: Dark Multiplayer site

Don’t forget: Your firewall may have some issues with sharing network access. Consult the DMP FAQ to figure out which ports to open.

Dark isn’t the original multiplayer mod, the one that got the entire Kerbosphere a-twitter when it first launched, but it is the best we have right now. By combining a lot of server options with more-stable-than-not netcode, Dark Multiplayer allows you to hook up with a friend, rendezvous in orbit, and start constructing that orbital science station.

The big hurdle for multiplayer is time warping: if I fast-forward two hours to catch up to my friend and she stays put, we’re now in two separate time lines with two versions of Kerbin at different points in orbit. Without getting into Doctor Who levels of timey wimey-ness, Dark Multiplayer allows for a single master to control time warping. This keeps everyone on the same timeline, preventing fourth-dimensional weirdness and Dalek attacks.

I still remember the first time I landed on Mun—planet Kerbin's closest moon. It was on the back of many failures; of countless times where my design, planning or ability fell short. One rocket would be too heavy, another too inefficient, another too explosive. I'd mess up my landing, splattering my little green astronauts all over the moon's jagged craters; or I'd fail to break out of Kerbin's atmosphere entirely, spinning them out into a watery grave. One time I ran out of fuel 5,000 meters above Mun's surface, and, unable to slow my descent, watched helplessly as they exploded on impact. It was heartbreaking.

Out of the countless defeats and sacrifices eventually came the answer. The successful rocket was ramshackle and ugly. It was the result of a hundred inelegant solutions to unforeseen problems. Nevertheless, it held steady through the launch ritual: keeping straight through the initial 10,000 meter ascent, the smooth transition to a suborbital arc and the controlled burn at the 70,000 meter apoapsis, first to orbit, then out of Kerbin's influence and into an encounter with Mun. Before descent, I transferred my Kerbal to a lander bolted on top of the launch payload (an over-engineered solution to my earlier fuel shortage.) Then I landed, and took one small step onto the surface.

I tell this story because it remains one of my greatest achievements in a game. It was a proper achievement, too. Not a pat-on-the-back trophy, created to convey incremental progress, but the successful completion of a challenging, self-made goal. The entire process—from failure, to revision, to hope, to euphoric completion—cemented for me why Kerbal Space Program is one of the best games on PC. That this all happened two years ago is why it feels strange to be reviewing the game now.

Kerbal Space Program is about building and flying rockets into space. Chances are you already knew that, because it was first released, in alpha, back in 2011. Thanks to the strength of the core sandbox concept, its potential was evident from the start. The added tools and features of subsequent patches have only strengthened the game's ability to deliver on that initial promise of full space program management and execution. Kerbal Space Program was one of the few Early Access games that I felt comfortable giving an unreserved recommendation. It was brilliant then, and it remains brilliant now that it's updated to version 1.0 for an official release.

The latest update brings some significant improvements, but none of its individual additions dramatically change the game. KSP's major pillars have been in place for a while now. Updates were designed to extend these pillars, and over the course of years have shaped the game into what it is now. To an extent, version 1.0 is the ornamental entablature that completes the construction. It overhauls the flight model, aerodynamics and heat simulation, bringing them closer in line with real-world physics. This simulation is the key to what makes KSP so compelling, and so it's fitting that its completion corresponds with the proper release.

The other additions make for nice extras. There are new missions types, more ship parts, female Kerbal astronauts, revised graphical effects, and a new 'Engineer Report' panel that advises about obvious errors in a ship's construction. The tutorial has been expanded too, and—although it's unlikely to diminish how overwhelming KSP's first hours can be—it does a better job of teaching the fundamentals, and so arms you with the base knowledge necessary to learn from your own experiences and failings. In all, it's a solid update, but it doesn't really convey any sense of what it is that makes the game so good. To do that, you have to dive into the heart of Kerbal Space Program.

Sandbox mode is the purest distillation of KSP's essence. In it, you have an unlimited budget and full access to the game's many ship parts. Step into the Vehicle Assembly Building and you're given a list of components. What do you want to do? Well, go into space, probably. How? Er, rockets. Oh, and an engine. There are multiple different parts in multiple different categories, but you can make a functional rocket with just a few basic bits. The Vehicle Assembly Building is a WYSIWYG modular editor that lets you easily add parts until they resemble something vaguely approximating a ship's shape. Click on a component and it appears as a ghostly outline that follows your mouse. Move it towards a previously placed part and it will snap into place. If you want to get really fancy, you can rotate and offset parts, or place multiple of the same piece symmetrically around the existing build.

All done? OK, click on the launch button and your construction is moved to the launchpad. Now you're no longer the engineer, but the pilot. Your creation will wobble and shake, but, as long as you've adhered to basic symmetry, will usually stay standing. You gingerly press the spacebar to activate the launch sequence. What happens next will define which of a constantly expanding set of branching possibilities you'll be sent tumbling down. Did you accidentally activate your engine and parachute at the same time, causing your ship to spin wildly a few feet off the ground? Did you attach an engine with too little thrust, thus preventing your ship from making it even a few inches into the air? Did you forget to even fit a parachute, forcing you to watch helplessly as your astronaut suffers the inevitability of gravity? Did you successfully break out of the atmosphere?

Whether it's success or failure, what happens during the launch arms you with new information about how to proceed. Fix the launch staging; add a bigger engine; add a parachute; add more fuel tanks in the hope of achieving stable orbit. With each launch, and each subsequent mistake, you're forced to re-evaluate and respond. You'll learn to add fairings to smooth the airflow, to use stability assists to dampen roll, to more effectively pilot through the first 70,000 meters in order to maximise fuel efficiency. Slowly, as you find pieces vital to solving whatever problem that you face, that overwhelming list of components starts to make sense.

From there, the solar system is yours for the taking. Sandbox games are, by definition, without structure. Minecraft, for example, is ostensibly a survival game, but, beyond having to satisfy a few basic needs, offers no real progression in terms of mid-term goals. For some, that's the key draw; for others, a major weakness. Kerbal Space Program is—in sandbox mode, at least—similarly structureless. At the same time, it has a natural progression you can choose to follow. There's a moon, and then planets—each far enough away that visiting the next is a significant step up in difficulty. These are logical goals, but you aren't forced to pursue them. You could instead decide to become good at making space planes, for no other reason than that space planes are really hard to build.

Persistence is a crucial part of KSP, and additional goals form out of past launches. Take my Mun landing as an example. Yes, it was a great achievement, but no, it wasn't wholly successful. Most would probably agree that one of the key steps in sending an astronaut to the moon is bringing him back home again. I didn't do that. He's still up there, waiting for me to launch a rescue mission. And if you think he has it bad, at least he's more comfortable than the astronaut of a previous mission. He's stuck in orbit around the moon. It was that or crash into the surface. If something goes wrong on a flight, you can always revert back to the moment of launch. Often, it's more fun to accept the mistake and deal with the consequences.

The persistent nature of the solar system is also important for those players who aren't incompetent. After a certain point, it becomes impossible to build a rocket big and efficient enough to reach nearby planets. Through the use of permanent orbital stations and tankers, it's possible to create a series of refuelling pit stops for you to dock at along the way. In this way, KSP can be as simple or as complicated as you want. If you're happy paddling in the shallow end of the pool, it supports that. If you want to dive into the depths to chart every planet and moon, you can do that instead.

Make no mistake, whatever you choose to do, KSP is a difficult game. It's demanding from the very start, and does little to handhold you through what are, at times, some complex concepts. Its challenge is very particular, though. There's no bullshit to the difficulty—no special cases or rule bending set pieces. Through its basis in real world scientific principles, KSP's challenge is merely a bar it expects you to match. It's not arrogant, vindictive or malicious. It just is. Design a top-heavy rocket with more fuel tanks than stability, and it will fall over and explode. You're not judged for this failure, you're just left to discover it. This is physics, the game is saying. What did you expect? Its logic is grounded and real, and thus consistent and always fair.

It's intuitive, too. Again, take Minecraft—a sandbox game that grew out of a similar model of paid-for alpha access. That game hides its crafting options under layers of nonsensical design that, without access to a wiki, would be impossible to know. Physics, on the other hand, is a real and observable thing. Even if you don't know the hard science or understand the formulas, you can often instinctively tell why something isn't working. One of KSP's many strengths is that it lets the science lead the design. Progression and difficulty all emerge naturally from the forces it simulates and the tools you're given to overcome them. It's a battle of thrust versus gravity; of aerodynamics versus drag. Science makes for really good game design, and KSP taps directly into that fact.

As a simulation, it would be easy for Kerbal Space Program to feel cold and dry—like a game designed for an audience of tweed wearing, bushy eyebrow sporting physics professors. That it isn't is all down to the presentation, and the nature of the Kerbals themselves. They're clumsy, bumbling tinkerers—rated in-game for their courage and stupidity. It's the Kerbals that bring physics down to the layman's level. They're what stops KSP being about formulas and equations, and make it instead about slapdash engineering. In the context of Kerbal mission control, it makes sense that my moon lander was crudely bolted to the top of a barely functional ship. It makes sense that there's a Kerbal stranded in orbit—and that, years later, he's still wearing a big, shit-eating grin.

In a more serious game, the mistakes and failures would feel tragic, or worse, purely theoretical. The Kerbals bring much needed heart to the simulation, and also an element of slapstick. You feel bad when one dies, but not too bad. There's a consequence to the worst failures, but not a tangible punishment. KSP wants you to learn from doing, and the sacrifices along the way are emotional beats that make success more worthwhile.

If you do yearn for more structure, there's also a career mode. In it, you're put in charge of the full facility—managing every aspect from astronauts and R&D, to economics and contract fulfilment. There's a resource system that requires you to generate money, reputation and science. More money lets you improve buildings, in turn becoming more efficient and able to generate more complex ships. Reputation is earned by completing contracts, and is used to gain access to more complex missions. Science—arguably the most important of the three—lets you progress through a tech tree, unlocking new ship parts.

At the start of career mode, you're extremely limited in what you can build. The available solid-fuel booster won't get you far, and so you need to conduct experiments to unlock better equipment. A crew report will generate science, as will observing a vial of mysterious goo, or taking an EVA report on various biomes. It can be a bit of a grind, as you're encouraged to spend slightly too long repeating experiments in order to progress through to proper space exploration.

It is, however, a slightly smoother and easier start. With less ship parts available, you're given time to figure out what everything does. More importantly, the contract types can pose scenarios that can prove challenging even to those familiar with the game. I've spent plenty of time in space, but taking temperature readings at a specific height and location on Kerbin required a level of atmospheric accuracy that I hadn't previously been asked to achieve. It still feels like an area that could use some extra expansion. There are only so many contract types, and eventually I decided to abandon the career structure in favour of the continued pursuit of my own ambitions.

It's easy to see Kerbal Space Program as being about engineering and design. Often it is that: a game of tweaking a ship's centre of mass, of increasing stability, or of using the orbital map to perform a controlled burn to a distant destination. It is not, it has to be said, an especially good looking game. Planetary textures are basic and low-res. It looks utilitarian, which feels apt.

Occasionally, though, you'll be floating in space and the sun will emerge from behind Kerbin, or you'll catch the distant glint of another planet. At distance, the engine's lighting excels. In motion, KSP is fully able to sell the majesty and awe of space exploration.

It's a reminder: we did that. On the back of science, yearning and, yes, a nearly apocalyptic competition between two superpowers, we strapped people into giant combustible machines and shot them out of our planet. We did that, and it was amazing. Kerbal Space Program is a brilliant game for a lot of reasons. It's brilliant because of the robust simulation, because of the satisfying design tools, because of the variety and options, and because of the spectacular community that has generated hundreds of mods, guides and videos designed to help you achieve whatever you want to do. Most of all, though, it's brilliant because it holds a mirror up to one of humanity's greatest achievements, and only does so when you have the greatest possible appreciation for the skill, dedication and courage involved. It's a rare and wonderful game, and deserves the strongest possible recommendation.

Right on schedule, Kerbal Space Program has lifted off—and that means it's time for the launch trailer! Get it? "Launch" trailer! That's some good comedic wordplay. Anyway, for those living on an asteroid, Kerbal Space Program is a highly-detailed but not-entirely-serious simulation of a space program in which players must design and build space-worthy ships, then launch them (and their crews) into the trackless void. The first playable version came out all the way back in mid-2011, and it's been on Steam Early Access since early 2013.

"Kerbal Space Program 1.0 is what we envisioned when development of the game started four years ago," the developers wrote in the launch announcement. "We set out to make a game in which the player is given ultimate control over the exploration of space: from designing their rockets to launching and flying them to their destinations, in a universe that was modeled to be realistic, but at the same time still be fun to play in."

The 1.0 version is also the largest update to Kerbal Space Program to date, with new and improved features including a complete overhaul of the flight model, a new heating system that simulates radiative, conductive, and convective heating and cooling, user-designed fairings that protect against drag and heat, and resource mining. 

A full breakdown can be found on the Kerbal forums, while the game itself is available on Steam for 25 percent off the regular purchase price of $30/ 22.50 until May 1. We'll have a review coming (fairly) soon, and in the meantime enjoy this hands-on with the "First Contact" update from last summer.

This is, frankly, brilliant — introducing the world of Mechwarrior to that of Kerbal Space Program. First, watch:

While Kerbal already has some of the best planets in gaming, it didn't have the best walking robots of death. Now, thanks to creator of the above Allmhuran, it has.

Pieced together in classic scrap metal fashion from a selection of different mods (BD Armory, Infernal Robotics, Camera Tools, Tweakscale, Steam Guages, KOS and UbioZor Part Welding), the Mechwarrior mod has taken a long time to put together.

But Allmhuran isn't done yet — there's more to come. More mechs. More warriors. More Kerbals.

[Thanks, PCGamesN]

We're only T-minus six days away from the release of Kerbal Space Program. Last night, Squad announced the date that their excellent space sim would official exit their Early Access orbit: April 27.

Kerbal Space Program, in case you're unaware, is a rocketry sim—challenging you to design and build vessels capable of taking you to the stars. It's been in Early Access for years, and is one of the few pre-launch games that I've been happily recommending that people buy.

As for what version 1.0 will bring, Squad is teasing the release with a series of short videos. Here's one unveiling the new female Kerbals:

Also expected in 1.0 is more realistic modelling of drag and lift, an 'Engineer's Report' warning of crucial design flaws, and a game over state.