Star Circuit 0.3.0 is out. – Tiny Bit Adventures

Star Circuit 0.3.0 is out. Download it now. See the game page for everything else.

Star Circuit goes multiplayer and comes to Windows. Join a friend's server to explore, dig, dive and fight together. Step into your Homespace from anywhere, fight through pirate ambushes in hyperspace, race an erupting volcano and grow cultures in the Micro Lab. Whole planets now look hand-drawn from afar. Saves from v0.2.0 carry over.

Multiplayer

Press P (or pick Multiplayer in the pause menu) and join a server by LAN address (192.168.1.20), public IP or domain (play.example.com), or wss:// behind HTTPS. An optional password keeps it private.
Everyone plays their own save. Other players' robots walk the same planet and fly in the same system, painted the way they styled them and with name tags. The player list shows where everyone is ("Diving the Deep Sea on Thalassa").
Chat, and give items straight to another player. Upgrades stay with your frame.
Drop a crate on a planet for anyone to pick up. Whoever grabs it first gets it, and crates survive server restarts for three days.
The server is a single small Go program with builds for macOS, Windows and Linux. It now lives in its own repo, star-circuit-server: this release pairs with server v0.1.0.
Shared caves: go down the same Cave Mouth as a friend and you're in the same dig: you see each other's drill pods, every tile either of you cuts disappears for both, and tunnels you dug on your own visits merge when you meet.
Shared Deep Sea: dive anywhere on a world where a friend is already diving and you join their sea. Cut rock, kelp and opened clams show up for both, and salvaging the wreck pays everyone.
Shared fights: players are one party. Anyone within 80 m of a drone kill (600 m of a pirate kill in space) gets the XP, credits and their own loot roll. Where you both have the same drone (like the camps around the Cradle), your shots and its death sync, so you wear it down together. A kill only ever pays once.
Gifts and crates can't lose items any more: anything the server turns down (more than 9999 at once, more than 20 kinds in a crate, sending too fast, the other player just left) comes straight back with a reason, and nothing leaves your hold if the connection has dropped.
When you and a friend finish off a drone together with your shots, you both still get the kill.
Clams a friend opens stay open next time you dive there, and friends' pirate kills in space can't pay twice.
Safer servers: a friend's cave map can only open tunnels that connect to ones you can reach, oversized or garbled robot styles are ignored, chat and style changes are rate limited, idle and excess connections are dropped, repeated wrong passwords make that address wait, names can't hide invisible characters, and a password-protected server doesn't list who's online. Game and server must both be this version.
The game and the server must be the same version to play together; this release pairs with server v0.1.0. Open http://your-server:7777/ to see how many are online.

Windows

Star Circuit now ships for Windows too: one self-contained StarCircuit.exe (64-bit). Mac and Windows players can share a multiplayer server.

The Homespace

Press Y anywhere to step into a small 2D digital home inside your robot. The world pauses, and you step back out exactly where you were.
Vault: 300 units of cloud storage (expandable to 1500). Moving items costs energy based on your uplink: cheap where a relay is lit, weaker in unlit systems, and weaker again underground or underwater.
Inbox: letters and parcels, including a welcome from the Archivist, and trader orders from towns you've visited. Fill orders remotely from the vault for 30-70% over market before they expire.
Trophy Wall: gems, relics, species holograms, milestone badges and the Crown pedestal. A window shows where you are right now.
Dispatch Bay: compile up to three subroutine workers (the first is free, then ⌬ 900 and ⌬ 2800). Send them to visited worlds to Gather, Survey, or Haul & Sell goods from your vault, on 5, 15 or 30 minute play-time jobs. The risk of coming back damaged depends on the world's danger and the worker's level (1-10). Reports and payments arrive in the Inbox.
Decor: 14 pieces to buy and arrange in wall and floor spots, 5 room themes, and two wings to expand into: the Observatory, showing your lit relays as a constellation, and the Garden. The Defrag Pod fully restores you once per in-game day.
An unread count on the HUD when mail arrives, and the room scrolls as you add wings.
A cozy lo-fi home theme, plus enter and exit sounds.

The Micro Lab

A new station in the Homespace. Load ingredients from your hold or vault and drop into a bowl of primordial soup under the microscope: a warm, swirling broth with fat droplets, flecks and bubbles, tinted by what went in.
Every ingredient becomes a strain of cells with its own habits: some drift, some dart about, some blink from place to place, some swarm, and some wear shells you have to crack first.
Steer a tiny probe with WASD, aim with the mouse and zap a cell to tag it, then zap a different strain to fuse the two. Fused cells divide on their own, but red corruption phages drift in to eat them, so zap those on sight. Now and then the soup gets stirred and everything swirls.
Reach critical mass before the culture goes off. The faster you get there, the better the grade: Stable, Refined or Pristine. A lost culture gives back half its ingredients.
Eight formulas finally give the rare finds a use: Medic and Warp cultures (more Repair Kits or Warp Cells at better grades), plus six graded upgrades: Mycelium Mesh (cargo), Living Hull Graft (hull), Ember Heart (energy), Growth Lattice (harvest speed), Lustre Symbiote (sell prices) and Void Symbiont (energy and hull). Grow an upgrade again to improve its grade. The top formulas need Engineering 70 and 85, which gives Expert and Artisan training a purpose.
A new quest, "Primordial Soup", after "Into the Fire", the "Cell Biologist" milestone, a bubbling lab theme and eleven new sounds.

Hyperspace

Warps and relay jumps now fly you down a hyperspace tunnel. Calm jumps last a few seconds and can be skipped.
Pirate interdictions: swarm drones that telegraph and dive, raiders and gunships firing from ahead, and mine fields. Aim with the mouse, fire cannons and homing missiles, and dodge with WASD. Clearing every wave pays a salvage bounty; getting knocked out drops you at the destination with some cargo lost.
Getting knocked out drops you at the destination with 25% hull. Quitting mid-jump is safe: you load in at the destination.
The first warp always shows you an interdiction; relit Circuit jumps are rarely attacked.
A driving hyperspace combat track and a rushing tunnel ambience.

Volcanoes

Volcanic worlds and moons now have three Volcanic Vents (one within walking distance of the landing, all on the compass) leading into the Eruption Run: a 2D cutaway of the volcano from the crater down through the Lava Tubes, Obsidian Galleries, Magma Chamber and Deep Mantle to the glowing core.
Volcanoes are solid mountains with a glowing lava-tube doorway at the foot of the cone (or jetpack up and drop in from the rim). What you mine only becomes yours once you're out: quit mid-run and it stays in the volcano.
The Eruption Run starts with a briefing, and the clock waits until you press a key: dive for crystals, mine them, climb back out the rim before it blows. If it erupts while you're inside you're blasted out with 40% hull and lose half of what you mined.
Once the clock starts, magma rises and the volcano erupts after 2.5 minutes. Dive for crystals in the side pockets, ride geysers back up, and climb out at the rim in time.
You can drill now: push into rock to cut through it, hold S to drill down, jetpack into a ceiling to drill up. Deeper rock is tougher, black basalt won't budge, and deep rock sometimes gives Obsidian.
Under the timer: what you're carrying and how far up the rim is, flashing "GET OUT!" in the last 45 seconds.
A heat meter and jetpack fuel, plus new materials: Obsidian, Fire Opal and Core Ember.
"Into the Fire" points the quest star at the nearest vent (and at the volcanic planet from space), and names the nearest volcanic world when you accept it.
The "Into the Fire" quest, the "Firewalker" milestone, an Obsidian Heat Plating recipe, and a rumbling ambience.

Illustrated planets

Whole planets now look hand-drawn wherever you see them in full: the title screen, flying through a star system, and sister worlds hanging in the sky. Each is drawn from the world's real terrain: inked coastlines, a shallow-water band with a dashed wave line offshore, contour lines up the hills, flat painted land colours, a single crisp sun glint on the sea, halftone dots across the terminator, a violet night side and a clean two-step halo. Clouds become separate puffs with inked edges, lit on top. Lava worlds glow with a cracked crust.
The rest of the game looks exactly as before. Settings > Display > Planets from afar switches back to Classic.

Skies and ground detail

Skies are a deeper colour overhead and only hazy near the horizon, with a soft glow around the sun and orange and pink dusk colours on the sun's side. Deserts now have a dusty blue sky over the sand, and glacial, crystal, volcanic and storm worlds get their own skies too.
Fog is tuned per world (clear on green and icy worlds, thicker on dusty and volcanic ones), matches the sky's haze, glows warm when you look toward the sun, and turns grey in storms.
Grass is much fuller near you, with colour variation and drier patches, and it parts around your robot's feet as you walk. Deserts have sparse dry tufts.
Pebbles and small stones are scattered across every world.
The ground drifts between dry and lush patches with darker soil, and dunes, snowfields and storm worlds show wind ripples.
Low quality now shows a lighter layer of grass and stones instead of none.

Art style (preview)

Settings → Display → Art style: Classic (default), Illustrative (banded light, cool shade, warm rims, painted terrain) or Storybook (Illustrative plus ink outlines). Planets only for now.

Quality of life

Scanned resource labels are one short line: "Cobalt Vein L15" (still coloured by how hard they are for you).
Rename your robot any time from Cargo & Systems (I). In multiplayer you rejoin under the new name.
Selling (or buying) one at a time no longer jumps the trade list back to the top.