Drastically increased collision fragments and framerates, overhauled planetary water distribution, plus dozens of improvements come together in Update 26.3.

Water fills a tub from its lowest point - why not on a planet? Oceans now start at the lowest elevations and fill valleys like you would a bathtub, creating more realistic-looking continents and oceans. (Previously liquid water would “precipitate” evenly across the surface.)

Major performance improvements have resulted in epic collisions with double the particles. Fragment generation is substantially more consistent across various simulation speeds. Collisions now perform much more smoothly: in many cases we’re seeing as much as triple framerate increases.

• Fixed the “annoying bug” that darkened customized planet surfaces
  
• Ice & Snow, which are simulated separately, now have color options
  
• Avast, Matey! Change an object’s Sea Level in the properties panel
  
• Cleaned up the object property panel and added new action buttons

Please report any issues on our Steam forum, on Discord, or in-game via Home > Send Feedback.

• “Stabilize Temperature” and “Stabilize Phase” are two new surface simulation functions in an object’s Property panel. Instantly set the temperature of the surface or the phase of the water (gas, liquid, or solid ice) to their steady state. This is useful to see how a planet will settle over time, rather than needing to speed up time.
  
• Added an editable “Sea Level” property to an object’s Surface tab. Use this to raise or lower the water level on an object’s surface by “filling up” the oceans from the bottom up. This is a much more intuitive and engaging way to add water to an object’s surface than was previously possible. Previously, water was added as a uniform sheet across the entire surface.
  
• Added a toggleable “Fusion Power” to the Simulation Settings

• Major performance and optimization improvements to surface simulation, collision heating, n-body calculations, and fragmentation. Collisions in particular perform much more smoothly than before.
  
• Improved the consistency of fragment generation during collisions at a variety of simulation speeds.
  
• Light energy is now correctly conserved when scattering off the surface of objects, resulting in more realistic, less shiny surfaces.
  
• Improved the simulation of light absorption in water, yielding darker deep water and greener shallow water
  
• Revised default water color to be a more saturated blue, reflecting how satellite photos of Earth are often represented
  
• Improved the water generation on random rocky planets, resulting in more planets with defined continents and oceans
  
• Added relativistic kinetic energy to collision calculations. Only relevant at speeds near the speed of light
  
• Revised the initial size of Earth’s ice caps

• Fixed an issue where many fragments created during a collision would immediately re-collide with the colliding object. This now results in much higher particle count in the aftermath of collisions.
  
• Fixed an issue that was causing a error in momentum transfer during collisions
  
• Fixed in issue where newly created objects could adopt surface elevation information from other objects
  
• Laser previously affected an area slightly larger than the intended size. Now the laser affects the correct area size, as designated by the visual laser tool reticle.
  
• Venus will no longer produce volatiles after opening "Planets Between Earth & Moon" sim
  
• Fixed an issue where objects could be heated prior to being added to the simulation
  
• Fixed an issue where objects could still lose mass to fragmentation with “Create Fragments” turned off
  
• Fixed an issue where the heated area on an object’s surface after a collision would jump to a different size
  
• Fixed an issue that was causing exoplanets to generate with too much water
  
• Fragments that were spawning slightly oversized are now corrected

• New styling of many action buttons in an object’s Property panel

• Major improvements to saving. This should reduce the occurrence of corrupted save data, and overall improve the stability of saving and loading simulations.
  
• Zooming on surface data maps now zooms at the cursor’s position
  
• Snow is now correctly visually represented on top of ice
  
• The distance at which Surface Lock enables when moving close to an object has been revised
  
• Improved object selection logic, preventing the selection of mostly-invisible gas clouds when they are too close to the camera
  
• Improved the colorization of objects when using non-realistic Color modes
  
• Improved the visibility of the Laser tool reticle, and added a missing reticle on gas giants
  
• Improved color rendering of heated gas giants
  
• Revised styling of expanders in the Property panel
  
• Revised styling of the scrollbar on surface data views
  
• Reorganization of the Property panel Overview and Surface tab
  
• Reorganization of tabs in the Open panel, notably moving My Sims to the front
  
• Habitable zone visibility can now be toggled by the hotkey H, which is editable in the keybinds.
  
• Removed the English-only abbreviations from non-English languages that could sometimes cause awkward translations. Cleaned up the abbreviations used in English.

• Fixed the behavior of “Auto” selection in dropdown menus with auto-selecting options. “Auto” can now be correctly toggled on and off.
  
• Fixed an issue where atmospheres and clouds would be incorrectly tinted darker when customizing the underlying surface colors
  
• Fixed the sorting behavior for simulations in the Open panel
  
• Toggle buttons added to the hotbar will no longer incorrectly switch state when loading a new simulation
  
• Particles now move smoothly when exiting Chart mode
  
• Fixed an issue where an unplaced object hologram could be selectable
  
• Atlas Resolution now correctly resets to default when all settings are reset
  
• Fixed an issue where an empty sim would report having 1 object in the Stats panel
  
• Fixed an issue where Slowest Body wouldn’t be reported correctly in Simulation Settings
  
• Fixed an issue where it would be possible for the mouse wheel to zoom in Universe Sandbox while using the mouse in a different application
  
• Fixed an issue preventing Surface Lock from working during a guide
  
• Fixed an issue where the strongest attractor in a simulation could be given an orbit parent (26.3.1)

• The color of ice and snow can now be customized in an object’s Appearance tab

• Revision to Collision simulations to ensure the impact collision consistency across various simulation speeds

Craters from impacts, lasting surface damage, and voluminous explosions all come together in Update 26.2 to close out the year!

Molten and heated areas on an object’s surface will appear scorched after cooling, with visible craters in the aftermath of collisions.

Rocky objects more accurately vaporize into hot, dense gas clouds when exploded. The simulation of gas particles, which slowly expand over time, is more realistic, and results in dramatic debris clouds after impacts. We’ve also added a Detonation Delay setting to the Explode tool.

Move, scale, and rotate the universe using intuitive gestures with both hands and the grip buttons.


Please report any issues on our forum, on Discord, or in-game via Home > Send Feedback.

Check out our full list of Update 26.2 changes.

Brown Dwarf Transitions
We’ve made significant improvements to the simulated transitions of gas giants into brown dwarfs and stars, driven by a newly simulated Fusion Power energy property. Learn more about fusion power and brown dwarfs in our new guide: Guides > Science > Are Gas Giants Failed Stars?

More Color Customization
The color of water on all planets, and the color of vegetation on Earth, are now customizable via Properties > Appearance.

Laser Improvements
Laser presets have been reorganized, and we’ve added a new Push Water setting in the Laser panel. While not entirely realistic, this is a fun way to play with the water simulation on an object’s surface. Try out the “Wave Maker” laser preset to create massive waves in a planet’s oceans.

Please report any issues on our forum, on Discord, or in-game via Home > Send Feedback.

Check out our full list of Update 26.1 changes.

Update 26 brings the full Universe Sandbox desktop experience to virtual reality (VR). We redesigned the bottom bar and made visual improvements to collision fragments, rocky planets, and liquid water.

Full Desktop Experience in VR
Universe Sandbox VR now matches the desktop experience and will maintain feature parity moving forward. You can now use virtual hands to manipulate planets, edit properties, or use separate tools in each hand.

Reimagined User Interface
Featuring a customizable bottom bar, our improved user interface makes Universe Sandbox easier to use, more discoverable, and improves support for extra small screens.

Improved Visuals
Collision fragments have new, high-definition graphics and lighting. Elevation maps for rocky planets have more detail. Water graphics now show waves and better light reflection. Asteroids and collision fragments have new highly-detailed dynamic models with better lighting.

This update includes 20+ additions and 50+ fixes and improvements.

Please report any issues on our forum, on Discord, or in-game via Home > Send Feedback.

Check out our full list of Update 26 changes

Our first ScienceLog explained how the flow of energy into and out of an object is responsible for heating or cooling the object. If you look at the sources of energy in a simulation, listed in the Energy Flow section of the object’s Surface tab, you’ll see Tidal Power listed. Unlike some of the other heat sources, like stars or impacts, tidal heating originates inside the object itself.

Tidal heating has been a part of Universe Sandbox for some time, but after the release of our new Surface Grids feature in Update 24, we noticed that tidal heating wasn’t changing the temperature of planets the way we expected. We traced this unusual behavior back to some errors in our tidal heating calculations, and then we fixed those bugs while we prepared the energy flow tools for Update 25.

Now that we’re more confident in our tidal heating simulation, we thought that for this ScienceLog, we’d dive a little deeper into tidal heating, where it comes from, and how it works in Universe Sandbox. It may not be as flashy as other heating sources, like supernovas or lasers, but tidal heating can create some unexpected and interesting effects, and even determine the habitability of a planet or moon!



As usual, it all comes back to gravity. The force of gravity depends on the distance between objects. For example, the strength of Earth’s gravitational pull on the Moon is stronger on the side of the Moon that’s facing the Earth than on the far side of the Moon. This difference, called the tidal force, can stretch the Moon out of its normally spherical shape. If the tidal forces are strong enough, they can even rip an object apart through a process called Roche fragmentation.


Caption: Jupiter’s moon Io orbiting the gas giant in a simulation with just Jupiter and its moons. Io’s eccentric orbit creates tidal friction inside the moon, and the graph of Tidal Power on the left shows how the incoming rate of tidal energy changed over time. In real life, astronomers believe this tidal heating is the source of energy for Io’s many volcanoes.

Smaller tidal forces will leave the object intact, and the “squishing” of the object’s spherical shape is usually too small to see. But if the tidal forces change over time— say, because the object is spinning, or its orbit is non-circular (elliptical)— all this squishing and un-squishing will create friction inside the object, which will add heat energy.



As the simulation runs, Universe Sandbox is constantly calculating the gravitational forces pulling on every object. We use these calculations to determine where each object will move next, and how fast, but we can also use them to calculate the strength of the tidal forces inside the object. If these forces are strong enough, the simulation produces fragments to simulate Roche fragmentation tearing the object apart. It also calculates how much heating is produced by tidal friction, and sends that information into the energy flow calculations that control the object’s temperature.

With the improvements in Update 25, we’re now much more confident in our tidal heating model. We even made a new simulation to show it off: A Tidally Heated Habitable Moon. This sim demonstrates a scenario predicted by some astronomers: a moon orbiting a gas giant outside of its star’s habitable zone. Normally this distance would make the moon’s surface too cold to support liquid water, but tidal forces from the gas giant heat the moon’s surface to a balmy, habitable 14.9°C.



Caption: A tidally heated habitable moon located outside of the habitable zone. The warmer surface temperature, due to tidal heating, allows liquid water to flow on this moon.

Try creating your own tidal heating simulations, and experiment with the masses and orbits of objects (especially the orbital eccentricity) to see how these properties affect the amount of tidal power added to an object. Can you make a habitable moon or planet outside the habitable zone?

Note: You may have noticed the odd looking spike in the “Jupiter’s moon Io orbiting the gas giant” graph. One of the challenges that comes with simulating complex features like tidal heating in Universe Sandbox is that when you increase the speed of the simulation, accuracy in the calculations can decrease. These abnormalities occur because there are less points of data to reference. The graph could be smoothed out by estimating data points in between, but that would introduce inaccurate data, and we’re all about accuracy here.


This blog post is part of our ongoing series of ScienceLog articles, intended to share the science behind some of Universe Sandbox’s most interesting features. If you would love to learn about the real-life science powering our simulator, please stay tuned and let us know what you would like to read about next.

To join our community discussions, please join us on our Steam Forum and our official Discord community. 

An all-new VR experience, new desktop user interface, and collision fragments makeover. We are so excited to share our work-in-progress build and get your feedback!

1. If it’s open, exit Universe Sandbox
   
2. Right-click on the game title in your Steam Library
   
3. Click on ‘Properties’
   
4. Select the ‘Betas’ tab
   
5. Set the dropdown menu to ‘*community-test’
   
6. Close the Properties window
   
7. Steam will now update Universe Sandbox to the experimental build
   
8. Once updated, launch Universe Sandbox

• A completely new, fully-featured VR experience
  
• A brand new user interface, and a customizable bottom bar
  
• High definition object fragments, collisions got a makeover
  
• Countless smaller experience improvements and bug fixes

Leave your comments here in the thread, or come join our Discord server. We would love to see you there!

The purpose of a Community Test build is to help us learn what our users are most excited about, what’s working, what isn’t working, and gather valuable feedback about our new changes for Update 26 before we make it official. Find a bug? Let us know! We’ve also set up a survey for your feedback, if you would prefer that.

This is a work in progress, and features may be changed before we officially release Update 26.

Check out the full details of What's New

One of the many important astrophysical processes that Universe Sandbox simulates is the changing temperature of an object as it is warmed by nearby stars and other sources of heat. Thanks to our new Surface Grids feature, introduced in Update 24, Universe Sandbox can now simulate the heating of each point on an object’s surface, to create a 2D map of a planet or moon’s surface temperature.

In addition to the Surface Grids simulation in Update 24, we also added new properties and tools related to heat and temperature in Update 25, so we wanted to take this opportunity to explain what makes planets get so hot (or cold!), and how you can use Universe Sandbox to explore the flow of energy through your objects.


So what makes the temperature of an object change? It all comes down to energy. An object like a planet or moon is continuously absorbing energy from its surroundings (like the heat from nearby stars) and radiating energy out into space. If the object is absorbing more energy than it is radiating away, that extra energy is used to raise the temperature of the object. On the other hand, if the object is radiating more energy than it’s receiving, that lost energy causes the object’s temperature to drop.

Universe Sandbox simulates the temperature of an object based on the flow of energy into and out of the object. You can see the data related to this “Energy Flow” in the Surface tab in the object’s properties panel. The first two properties, Energy Absorption Rate and Energy Radiation Rate, show the speed at which the object is gaining and losing energy. The Heating Rate tells you how fast the object’s surface temperature is expected to change based on this energy flow. If the object is absorbing more energy than it’s radiating, the Heating Rate will be positive, and the object will heat up. If it’s radiating more energy than it’s absorbing, the Heating rate will be negative, and the object will cool down.

Try experimenting with properties like the object’s Average Albedo or Surface Heat Capacity to see how they affect the energy flow rates and surface temperature (or check out our Energy Flow guide in Home > Guides > Tutorials > 14 - Energy and Heating).




What are these sources of energy that can heat an object in Universe Sandbox? Energy from stars is the major source of heat in most simulations. These heat sources are directional: they only heat the part of the object’s surface facing the star. Heating from supernova explosions is also directional, not to mention extremely powerful.



Other sources of heat come from all directions at once, or from inside the object, so the heat energy is evenly distributed over the object’s surface. For example, objects with atmospheres are heated by energy that the atmosphere radiates back down towards the surface. (This is the mechanism that causes the greenhouse effect leading to the climate crisis here on real-life Earth.)

All these contributions to the heating of an object are listed in the Energy Flow section, and can be seen by expanding the Energy Absorption Rate property (by selecting the list icon on the right side of the property).



The properties in the Energy Flow section are used to estimate the change in the object’s Average Surface Temperature, a single value that represents the temperature of the object as a whole. The Surface Grids feature also allows us to simulate this energy flow and heating process at every point on an object’s surface. You can see the object’s 2D temperature map at the top of the Surface tab. Hovering over a pixel on the map will display the temperature at that point.

This temperature map is especially useful for seeing the effects of directional heating. For example, selecting Tidally Lock in an object’s Motion tab will change the object’s rotation period such that one side of the object always faces its star and the other always faces away from the star. If we tidally lock the Earth, the hemisphere facing away from the Sun will get so cold that the ocean freezes over, while the side facing the Sun gets uncomfortably warm. Even though the Earth as a whole is receiving the same amount of energy from the Sun, the conditions on the surface, simulated by Surface Grids, have changed a lot!



This blog post is the first in our new series of ScienceLog articles, intended to share the science behind some of Universe Sandbox’s most interesting features. If you would love to learn about the real-life science powering our simulator, please stay tuned and let us know what you would like to read about next.

To join our community discussions, please join us on our Steam Forum and our official Discord community.

Update 25.2 is a minor update that brings even more appearance options, this time to clouds, galaxies, and asteroids. We’ve also improved energy transfer calculations, laser settings, asteroid visuals, and provided various other bug fixes.

Most of the team has been hard at work on our upcoming major updates, but we didn’t want you to wait for these features and bug fixes. Keep an eye out for Update 26 (Coming Soon™) which will bring major improvements to our user interface and VR implementation.

Cloudy with a Chance of Purple
Change the color of clouds, galaxies, city lights, and asteroids. Toggle snow visuals on or off to help distinguish snow from sea ice.

Asteroid Makeover
Asteroids received a complete visual overhaul and color correction.

Improved Energy Simulation
Energy Flow calculations now including lasers, explosions, and impacts. Learn more about Energy Flow from Home > Guides > Science > Energy and Heating in Depth.

Featured Fixes

• Simulations with broken surface data can now be opened
  
• City Lights no longer appearing incorrectly on some rocky objects
  
• Black hole radius can now be manually changed as expected

Please report any issues on our forum, on Discord, or in-game via Home > Send Feedback.

Check out our full list of Update 25.2 changes.

Universe Sandbox has improved significantly since our first Early Access release in 2015. We plan to add features and fix bugs for a long, long time to come (we even removed the “2” from our name for that reason). Here’s a look into what we have planned for 2020 and beyond.



Last year saw 3 major feature releases (and a handful of minor, but still important, updates):

• Better Galaxies (Update 23)
  • More stable and accurate galaxies and better collisions
  • New and improved Introduction tutorial for helping new users
• Surface Grids & Lasers (Update 24)
  • Surface Grids is a huge, complex feature that simulates the surfaces of planets, moons, and other objects
  • Vaporize entire planets with the new Laser tool
• Custom Object Colors (Update 24.1)
  • Customize colors for just about every object including planets, moons, stars, and black holes
  • Dock graph windows alongside the other panels added with Surface Grids

View our “What’s New” for a chronological list of changes.

The following list are all things we are working on currently. We’re aiming to deliver on all of this in 2020, but when they’ll be ready is difficult to predict, and priorities can change.

With its ability to simulate localized surface temperatures, water level, vapor content, and more, Surface Grids (Update 24) perfectly sets us up for a multitude of new features. Localized temperatures enabled us to create the mighty Galactic Empire Superlaser, but that’s only scratching the surface…


We’ve been saying that Surface Grids is the foundation for many things to come, so it only makes sense that we start the year off by further improving it. 

• Improved Temperature & Atmosphere Simulation
  
  • Surface Grids improvements started this year in January (Update 24.1.2), continued with Update 25 (March 2020), and will be a theme all year long
  • Update 25 introduced a major rewrite to Tidal Heating and Vapor Flow calculations
• Better Performance & More Power
  
  • Not only have we accomplished localized surface simulations on your everyday computer, but we continue to make performance improvements
  • Shader Model 5.0, a graphics card technology, became a requirement in Update 25 because it will give us some legroom for current and future enhancements
• Detailed Surface Manipulation
  • We are in the early stages of designing tools that allow for directly manipulating temperature, elevation, water level, vapor, and more on the surfaces of objects
  • We plan to add the ability to view and edit the properties of individual surface grid "cells". Take your planet customization and terraforming to a new heights with a level of precision you never thought possible

Building off of the localized materials (water, CO2) in Surface Grids, we’re working to rebuild our material composition in a more robust way. 

• Better System to Unify Materials
  
  • Every point on the “grid” will better contain a mixture of various materials, in various material states
  • Complicated calculations of, for example, when some liquids become heated to a gas, should be handled more efficiently in our new simulation code
• A Universe of Possibility
  • Better terraforming, more realistic cloud and climate simulations, tidal waves, easy ways to manipulate the surface topography, and more detail on the surface view could all be the results of this new Material Composition System
  • Who knows, maybe our planets could one-day support life?

 

We have embraced a seemingly impossible goal of having a unified Universe Sandbox release no matter how you play. Whether you are on a powerful gaming PC, a laptop, a phone (coming soon), Virtual Reality, Mixed Reality, or a console (maybe soon? who knows!) the experience should be undiluted and awe-inspiring.

• A Magic Leap Forward
  
  • With our recent Magic Leap 1 release, we were able to bring the full Desktop experience to the world of Mixed Reality
  • Hard work pays off: the bulk of our Magic Leap 1 development helped unify our Mixed Reality, VR, and Desktop experience into one single vision
• Get Your Hands on it
  
  • Enjoy Universe Sandbox in VR without limitations and with the full Desktop User Interface
  • Grab planets with your hands, shoot lasers out of your fingertips, and watch galaxies collide as if you were really there, floating in space (but a bit less cold).

 


Creating the user interface (UI) for Universe Sandbox is a fun challenge. How do you give someone full control of the universe? As we add features and complexity to the simulation, keeping the UI accessible, discoverable, and easy to use becomes a constant challenge.

Over time, some portions of the interface can start to feel cluttered or outdated and are ready for a redesign. We’ve been working on some of these design changes for a long time, and it’s exciting to move closer to improving everyone’s experience with Universe Sandbox.

• Redesigned Bottom Bar
  
  • Our current bottom bar has been collecting new buttons over the years without a cohesive vision for how it should all work. So we’ve rethought how everything should be organized and how we can make it work on really small screens.
• Improved Add Panel
  • Like the Bottom Bar, the Add Panel is due for a makeover. We’re targeting a single shared UI for all platforms (desktop, touch, VR/AR, and consoles), so the new Add Panel is being built with that in mind.

 



Enjoy Universe Sandbox on your phone or tablet! Sign up to get notified about our mobile version.

• Is that Universe Sandbox in Your Pocket?
  • Our mobile version is in development right now for both Android and iOS. It’s no easy feat to simulate the universe on a smartphone, but we’re doing it!
• A Pure, Unadulterated Experience
  
  • Some of the breakthroughs we made with both Surface Grids and Magic Leap have paid off and will allow for the full desktop version on your pocket-sized device

 
Create the right conditions for life and watch it grow, or end it all with a major impact.

• Turn a cold, lifeless space rock into a vibrant planet
• Many details are still TBD, keep an eye out for a DevLog when we get started

 


Smoothed-particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) will help create more detailed, realistic simulations of collisions, fragmentation, and formation of different types of objects. Read more in our SPH Fluid Simulation DevLog.

 

This is firmly in the realm of experimentation at the moment, but we're looking at new and interesting ways we can use our tools within a simulation. Driven by a need to automate testing of features, we're working on ways to programmatically activate tools. By automating and attaching different tools to objects, we discovered that we can enable some pretty fun scenarios. The above clip is what happens when we attached a bunch of lasers to moons and tell it to automatically fire at the nearest object. Awesome stuff, right?

 
Do you want to sit back on your couch and play Universe Sandbox? So do we! We’ll be experimenting with full gamepad support. Who knows where that leads us, maybe even a console version in the future.

 
We are currently hiring a Spaceship Physics Developer, join us!

Update 25.1 includes a host of bug fixes and lighting improvements, as well as a fun oft-requested feature to add customizable city lights to any rocky planet or large moon.

City Lights on Any Planet
You can now enable City Lights on any rocky planet or large moon by going to Object Properties > Appearance > City Lights. Select from Earth’s city map or a randomized procedural map, and define whether the lights will turn off if the surface is deemed uninhabitable.

Lighting Improvements
The interaction of multiple light sources has been reworked, particularly with how they reflect off an atmosphere.

General Fixes
We fixed a bunch of miscellaneous issues, including improving how supernova clouds impact objects, star temperature instability, orbit previews, shadows, and more.

Please report any issues on our forum, on Discord, or in-game via Home > Send Feedback.

Check out the full list of What’s New in Update 25.1