Astroneer, the open world survival and exploration sandbox from System Era, is now in its second year in Early Access and aiming for a 1.0 release at the end of 2018. Its trailer at E3 announced the December release for 1.0, and if you watch closely you can pick up some hints for a few things it plans to deliver. Astroneer currently supports up to 4-player co-op, but a scene near the end of the trailer shows more than four astronauts running around together.

"We want to push that player number as high as we can go," said Joe Tirado of System Era when we spoke at E3. "No specifics there, but we have a dedicated server running [in-house] and we've had as many as 10 people running around." A scene in the trailer shows nine co-op astronauts—not quite enough for a battle royale match, as System Era joked on April 1st, but it's still definitely more than four.

And while many players enjoy the self-guided sandbox experience of Astroneer, "We've also heard this call of people want stuff to do," Tirado said. "They want directed goals, they want exposition about the universe we built." These goals will be a part of version 1.0. These aren't quests, Tirado told me, and there won't be a proper campaign in Astroneer. But players interested in a more directed experience will have a path to follow if they're looking for one.

"High level goals of the game that you sort of aspire to once you've learned the mechanics of the game," Tirado said. "So, I'm really good at systems, I'm really good at deforming [terrain], so some of those goals might be using those skills to problem solve and figure out how to use deformation to circumnavigate some sort of problem that you encounter."

Those who are perfectly happy to follow their own bliss don't need to concern themselves with these goals if they don't want to, said Tirado. "The game will be telling you that those things are there, but not necessarily forcing you in their direction."

As a reward for completing some of these optional high-level goals, Astroneer also plans to introduce player customization. System Era isn't completely sure yet what the nature of the customization in 1.0 will be, though they're looking at a few different options. Above you can see some concept art of different color palates for spacesuits—some could be specific to the different planets and could be worn as a sign that you've visited them. The idea of adding mission patches is also being explored as a way to decorate your astronaut to show off where you've been and how much you've achieved.

Crossplay is currently supported between Windows Store and Xbox versions of Astroneer, but 1.0 also plans to include the Steam version in that crossplay as well. For more on what's coming in Astroneer in 1.0, you can visit its official site and take a peek at its development roadmap.

This article was originally published in PC Gamer issue 316. For more quality articles about all things PC gaming, you can subscribe now in the UK and the US. 

Until this week, my most recent conversation about Astroneer involved bumping into former lead designer Jacob Liechty at GDC in San Francisco. He was in the process of leaving the company and we had a fascinating chat about his new work in AI safety. 

Playing Astroneer roughly a year on, that chat came back to me. I meant to check in with the game’s progress and fiddle around with multiplayer. What I ended up doing was listening to a 2015 episode of The Partially Examined Life—a philosophy podcast—featuring Nick Bostrom. 

Bostrom is the director of the Future of Humanity Institute at the University of Oxford. I came across his work when I used to write for Wired because questions of existence and existential risk sit alongside areas of rapid change (like AI) and can feed into how we alter legislation. 

These questions are a valuable part of how we grapple with an unknowable future and our own culpability or control. Depending on whether you believe in the Singularity they might be the most important questions we face today. But the conversation can become paralysing—it invokes an inconceivable level of change brought about by people and tech over which you likely have no control.

Pottering around in Astroneer’s optimistic future makes those questions easier to contemplate. It helps switch off that vast shadowy powerlessness which threatens to overwhelm the topic after a while. 

Right now there’s a discussion of existential risk playing in my ears. But it’s balanced by my hands being plunged into Astroneer’s peaceful future where we figured this all out.

Utopia

In Astroneer, for example, there are no think pieces about the destruction I may be wreaking on the ecosystem, I’m not trying to navigate politics, and the tech which is keeping me alive isn’t slipping out of my grasp. There’s a wiki if I can’t remember what a filter does, for goodness sake. 

I have a functional base and a backlog of mysterious lumps which I can analyse to generate data. If I accumulate enough data, I can acquire blueprints for crafting and exploration options. I’m torn between a pursuit of the shuttle which I can use to reach new planets, or investing in rovers so I can scoot around.

I could have tamped down my existential dread with any pleasantly compelling game, but it felt like a vague continuation of that conversation with Liechty to do it via Astroneer. It also led me to this quote in his exit post on the Astroneer blog: 

“The thing I love about Astroneer is how thematically aspirational it is, both to its emotional depths and also to the sky, stars and beyond. Humanity is ceaselessly mediating the boundary between its internal existential questions and its external aspirations. These are exciting times both for age-old philosophical questions and for brand-new explorations and frontiers.”