It's the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, the first mission to take humans to the surface of the moon. Space sandbox Astroneer is paying tribute to that momentous occasion with some themed in-game items and the chance to listen to audio from the historic flight.

For a limited time, Astroneer players can travel to Desolo, the game's Moon equivalent, to search for the Apollo Lunar Module. Finding it will unlock a "vintage-themed spacesuit palette and visor," System Era Softworks says. 

Additionally, there are approximately an hour's worth of audio logs taken directly from the Apollo 11 mission, featuring radio conversations from mission control and astronaut Mike Collins.

The tribute comes alongside a patch for the game called the Lunar Update that adds in new platforms and storage options.

After two years spent in Early Access, space survival sandbox Astroneer has launched into 1.0 today – there's a trailer to celebrate below. It's a co-op focused experience (though you can play solo if you want), with neat interplanetary travel across a handful of handcrafted (ie, not procedurally generated) planets. There's crafting, resource management, base building, and most importantly – planet terraforming, which actually looks pretty cool.

System Era Softworks won't stop working on the game, though. Post-launch plans include cross-play with the Xbox One version, as well as dedicated server support. Meanwhile, the four-player cooperative will rise to eight-player cooperative in the future.

Check out the trailer below. The game is currently 20 percent off on Steam.

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.”

Hot on the heels of its "biggest update to date", Astroneer is going cheap on Steam this week now through March 16. Its latest developer diary explores the latest iteration of splitters—heading to the sandbox adventure 'em up next week—and the power system skill ceiling.

First off, Astroneer's 20 percent discount sees it drop to £12.59/$15.99—a price developer System Era Softworks reckons will be the lowest this side of Early Access, and "possibly the last time" the game is on sale before version 1.0.  

"If you have been on the fence, there has been no better time to pick up the game," says this Steam Community update. "We just updated last month with our biggest update ever, and as mentioned in our stream, will be adding more items in an update [this] week."

As for splitters (due in this week's update) and power system skill ceilings, here's engineer Elijah O'Rear and designer Samantha Kalman with the skinny: 

System Era says tells current and prospective players to expect more information on all of that this week. More information can be found via Astroneer's Steam page.   

Astroneer got a big, free update today—its "biggest update to date," developer System Era Softworks reckons—that makes significant additions to its base building and power systems.

New base platforms are the high point of the update. These "freestanding, movable" platforms can be placed and rotated individually and then connected to power sources. New fabricators—think little portable printers—were also added. You can use a small fabricator to print medium platforms straight from your backpack, or print a medium fabricator and plop it down if you need larger objects. 

Base modules and platforms are also now modular. When you print them, they'll start as prepackaged crates, which you can easily place wherever you'd like before deploying them. System Era says existing bases will automatically be updated to fit these new systems, but advises that you "use old saves at your own risk." 

Further fleshing out these base changes are yet more additions to power grids, following up on last December's big power and research update. The gist is that you can now create shared power pools by joining generators together, and use new extenders to better allocate that power. 

The official patch notes are a laundry list of details, bug fixes and smaller changes, if you want to read them for yourself. 

System Era also outlined its development roadmap in the update. With research and base building in-progress, the studio hopes to release weather and terrain improvements, as well as dedicated servers, in early 2018.

The patch note is an underappreciated art form. Among the dry details of damage buffs and bug fixes are occasionally brilliant puns or revelatory details about the absurd complexity of videogames. Dwarf Fortress is the undisputed king of unintentionally hilarious updates ("Cleaned up the bear situation"), but we've also written about some of the all-time greats from Ark: Survival Evolved, Rust, and World of Warcraft.

Absurdity is always with us, though, and the good gods know we've needed every laugh we could find in 2017. To find the very best ones, I dove through the 2017 community updates and patch notes from all kinds of games. Deep, open-world survival games are always good for a laugh. After all, they model systems like pooping and sleeping, and a mention of "shitting the bed" is already 90 percent of a joke.

H1Z1

12/13

• Blood effects have been changed back to the classic mist effect. 

12/7

• Toxic Cargo Pants have been updated to be more consistent 

11/15 

• Shooting from a passenger seat should no longer result in hitting a teammate in the backseat. 

8/29 

• Old rocks have been removed and replaced with new, varied rock formations.
• Players should no longer fall out of their parachute. 

7 Days to Die

via reddit user u/nettech09

10/26 

• Some general improvements to zombie jumping
• Fixed: Snakes are fireproof

8/31

• Fixed: Businessman Zombie when killed can have his head dislocated when he falls backwards 
• Fixed: Vultures can fly underwater
• Fixed: Bears and wolves walk on water 

8/04

• Fixed: Wrong open sound on eviscerated remains
• Fixed: Dysentery description does not mention that it is lethal 

6/06

• Added: Moldy Bread is a science crafting item
• Changed: Fat zombie cops are bigger
• Changed: Zombie soldiers are less generous with the rocket launchers
• Fixed: Breaking down a car on the sloped road will create a hole in the world 

Oxygen Not Included

10/5

• Stress vomiting Duplicants infected with Hypothermia should no longer vomit "Hypothermia germs" 

8/31

• Fixed a crash that could occur if a Duplicant died while using a wash basin 

3/02

• Algae distillery has a much longer conversion interval
• Duplicants no longer use the massage table during red alert 

Ylands

12/9

• Horse is no longer perceived as a threat when sleeping 

Medieval Engineers

via reddit user u/zacrynix

12/12

• Fixed a crash when you walk on the exact north pole. 

11/28

• The Janitor will now clean up any static grids in the center of the planet. 

PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds

via reddit user u/beerye 

12/27  

• Fixed the issue where the falling speed meter text was showing abnormally in Portuguese 

12/11

• Fixed the issue where player's footstep sound was silenced when player moved diagonally or wore particular shoes 

12/8

• Fixed the issue where while vaulting in FPP, player could look inside own body 

Lone Echo

8/30 

• Repeatedly punching the dummies will no longer result in a crash. Swing away. 

Prey

via reddit user u/everypostepic 

8/2

• Fixed crash when mimicking bass guitar in the Yellow Tulip.
• Player can no longer bypass ceiling collision by mantling GLOO. 
• If the player manages to fully GLOO the greater mimic while it is in mid-lunge toward the player's face, the facegrab animation will no longer play and trap the player. 

5/31

• Superfruit no longer appears shrunken and flat when fully grown.

As I slogged deeper and deeper into the year, dozens of tabs open across three monitors and a laptop, I started to get a little delirious. It was in this moment that I fell in love with the long-suffering community managers and blog writers who compile patch notes. These poor people cry out for help with little quips, "just to see if anyone is still reading this." My friends: I see you, and I love you. 

Astroneer

12/18

• Fixed a few other instances of Client players getting stuck in a wheelie while driving a Rover in Multiplayer games. 

10/12

• Fixed an issue where Rovers would fly into space when loading a save from a rover seat 

9/15

• Fixed a rare crash, that according to engineers was “super weird, and something that should never occur,” involving the game trying to access non-existent Rover wheels.
• Fixed an issue where items would go on a beautiful journey into space if not collected from an dead Astroneer before a second death occurs. 

Hitman

via reddit user u/newbzoors 

7/13

• We've fixed an issue that could cause the toilet in the Marrakesh school to behave erratically after 47 kicks it onto Zaydan. This could occasionally result in 47's death. Seriously. 

Total War: Warhammer

via reddit user u/flavahbeast 

10/25

• FIXED an issue with the AI proposing peace right after entering a war with the player
• FIXED a staircase in Lothern Siege battle map which would cause chariots to spontaneously combust
• FIXED CA Cinematics Team’s obsession with slaying High Elves. May require further testing…
• FIXED Spearmen unit in Tor Elithis Rogue army T-Posing
• Skavenslaves: more salt added to diet; now 25% more delicious 

8/9

• Under-Morking no longer automatically leads to over-Gorking, and vice-versa. The waxing or waning of Morrslieb may affect this. Or it may not. 

Astroneer, you may recall, is a crafty little survival game set in space. Chris gave it a look earlier this year, and developer System Era Softworks has been plugging away at it in Steam Early Access ever since. Its latest update is a doozy, and brings sweeping changes to the research system. 

Under the new system, when you research item using a research chamber, you receive accumulated data in the form of 'bytes' rather than a random item. From there, you spend bytes on new blueprints via the new backpack catalog. You can earn bytes by researching research chests and resources, with more researchable items due in future updates. 

The updated research chambers are at the heart of the new system, so System Era singled them out in the patch notes, saying: 

"The Research Chamber uses the new streaming power system to operate. That means rather than having base modules use a power bar that has to continue refilling, modules using the new mechanic search the network for sources of power and then stay connected to them as long as the power keeps coming in." 

Thanks to this new power system, players can also overclock their research chambers to improve their output. However, you can't stop the research process without destroying the research subject. 

The research update also brought a few usability tweaks to the UI, an improved tutorial which keeps up with old saves, and automatic crash reporting to help with ongoing bug stomping. You can read the full patch notes, and a roadmap of upcoming content, here.