World ·
A Day on Nova Eridani
The sun now crosses the sky over an hour of real time, the lakes and the sea can be swum in, and new buildings line up with their neighbours. Plus the star system the sky is being built from.
Development update. Everything below is in current development builds unless it says otherwise. Details will change.
Until now the sun over LZ-1 stood still. It does not any more.
Dawn to dusk
A full day on the surface passes in an hour of real time, and the light changes with it, from long gold mornings to a deep blue-grey twilight. The time of day is kept in your save and is the same for every player in co-op: if it is dusk for the host, it is dusk for everyone.
You land in late northern spring on a clear morning, with about 34 real minutes of daylight ahead. That is enough to get the beacon up and make camp before nightfall, and not so much that you can ignore it.
Into the water
The plateau and foothill lakes and the sea are now deep water. Wade in from the shore and you swim, floating with your head and shoulders out. Look down as you swim and you dive. The rivers are shallow enough to wade.
It is new, and it shows: there is no underwater view yet and no breath limit, and the colony's robots keep to the land.
Building in good order
A building being placed now lines up with one already standing nearby: square to it, a walkway apart, centred on it or flush with its end. An arrow on the ground shows which way its door will face. A settlement goes up in tidy rows without any fuss, and holding Alt still lets you set a building down wherever you like.
The sky it runs on
The sun is not a lamp on a rail. It is Epsilon Eridani, a real orange dwarf 10.45 light-years from Earth, and the sky is worked out from a model of its system: Nova Eridani's orbit, its 26-hour day and its 18° tilt, at the landing site's latitude.
Some of that system is real. The star is, and so is Epsilon Eridani b, a gas giant about the mass of Jupiter that shows from Nova Eridani as a brilliant point of light. The rest is ours, built to sit inside what astronomers have measured. The world page now has the whole system, with the real and the invented marked apart.
In developmentNova Eridani has two moons, Luma and Kest, and a night sky in which the Sun is just another star. They, and the seasons, are still being modelled, and they are not in the playable build yet.
