My second stop at the Snail Games booth during Gamescom 2026 took me considerably farther from home. After checking out Honeycomb: The World Beyond and its rather unusual approach to alien biology and experimentation, I sat down with Calix Reneau for my first proper look at To the Stars, a third-person sci-fi survival game built around exploration, automation, planetary bases and a much larger multiplayer world connecting them.
You can also read my Gamescom 2026 interview about Honeycomb: The World Beyond if alien ecosystems and bioengineering are more your kind of science.
To the Stars was being shown in playable form for the first time at Gamescom, and there were plenty of work-in-progress elements in the build. What interested me was the scale behind those unfinished pieces. You land on procedurally generated planets, establish bases, gather resources, research technologies, automate production and eventually connect those planetary operations to infrastructure in space. Multiplayer sits across that entire structure, with factions, guilds, trade, cooperation and PvP planned as parts of the same galaxy.
Some of this felt surprisingly familiar to me. I used to play quite a lot of Elite Dangerous: Odyssey, although somewhat perversely I spent most of my time exclusively in its boots-on-the-ground gameplay. Walking across an alien planet, scanning for resources and deciding where to establish an operation immediately brought some of that experience back. To the Stars approaches the larger structure differently, however. Instead of a ship being the center of your existence, you eventually have an orbital station above the planet and a network of bases below it.
And somewhere between those two layers, the game wants to figure out how to let thirty strangers share a world without immediately turning it into a demolition derby.
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Thirty Players, Until You Actually Meet Them
This was easily the most interesting idea Calix explained during our presentation, and also the one I am most curious to see survive first contact with actual players.
A planet can accommodate around 30 players, but arriving on the same world doesn’t immediately give those strangers the ability to interfere permanently with everything you are doing. From your perspective, other unconnected players behave almost like NPCs. Their actions can exist locally for them without necessarily becoming permanent reality for you.
The relationship changes when players begin establishing actual social connections through repeated encounters, conversations, trades, friend invitations or guilds. Once two players become connected, their worlds begin to matter to each other in a much more tangible way. Calix used construction to explain why this is necessary. Building something in a persistent multiplayer world is inherently capable of creating conflict. Put a structure over a resource deposit somebody else wanted, block a route with your base, or simply build something hideous in precisely the wrong place, and your creative decision has become another player’s problem.
In To the Stars, an unconnected player can find your structure and destroy it, but that destruction isn’t necessarily persistent for you. You continue living with the building you made while they continue through their version of the world without it. Once you establish a social connection, those actions gain consequences for both sides. That extends to PvP:
“You could go out and seek it out,” Calix explained when we pushed on whether players could deliberately pursue conflict. “But you can’t have it forced on you.”
His wonderfully concise description was “PvP with friends much more than it is PvP with enemies.”
It sounds strange at first, but the reasoning becomes clearer when you think about how persistent survival games tend to evolve. A player who wants conflict can still build relationships with others interested in the same thing, join factions and eventually participate in that side of the game. Someone who wants to explore, build and automate isn’t automatically volunteering to have several evenings of work flattened because a stranger was bored at three in the morning.
Calix put it another way: getting trolled by your friends can be funny. Getting trolled by a complete stranger may simply make you quit the game. I really like the concept. I also have absolutely no idea what will happen once thousands of players start touching it. That uncertainty is probably part of what makes the idea interesting. Players are remarkably talented at finding edge cases developers never anticipated, especially when diplomacy, limited resources and the ability to destroy somebody else’s work are involved. To the Stars is effectively trying to make social connection itself part of the permission structure of its persistent world. If it works, players who want fundamentally different experiences could occupy the same planets without requiring completely separate PvE and PvP servers.
Your Planetary Base Isn’t Your Real Home
The multiplayer system becomes easier to understand once you look at how To the Stars treats progression.
You begin planetary exploration with a Genesis Pod, an early base structure containing the basic systems needed to introduce crafting, research and construction. From there, you expand outward, build more specialized facilities and gradually automate jobs that initially require your direct attention.
Drones are an important part of that transition. Early on, they follow you around and can gather resources or carry more material than your personal inventory allows. Your suit has limited bandwidth for controlling them, but that capacity and the drones themselves can be upgraded. Later, the same machines become part of automated production chains, gathering resources and moving materials between facilities without requiring you to personally haul everything home.
Vehicles and larger storage modules eventually expand that logistical capacity further. Calix explained that the game tries to maintain believable mass and volume for inventory, so your backpack isn’t intended to become a magical warehouse containing several tons of industrial equipment or ore. That led to one of my favorite questions from the meeting, because survival players know the truth: sometimes the most dangerous raid boss isn’t a monster. It’s inventory management.
The more important distinction, however, is between your planetary infrastructure and what sits above it. Resources and manufactured materials can be sent into orbit, where your station becomes the persistent center of your broader progression. A planetary base can succeed, fail, become obsolete or simply turn out to be badly designed without wiping away everything you accomplished. Calix was particularly relaxed about the possibility of a player’s first base being terrible.
“Well, yeah, of course you made a bad base!” he laughed. “Go make a new one, now that you know how to play the game.”
I like that philosophy. Survival and automation games often make early construction surprisingly stressful because dismantling your first mistakes can become expensive enough that players either tolerate an awful layout forever or start the entire game again. To the Stars expects those first settlements to be temporary learning experiences. Important resources move upward, and once you understand what you are doing, you can establish something better elsewhere. Later in the game, there will be reasons to invest much more heavily in a particular planetary base and keep expanding it. Early on, however, experimentation appears to be encouraged.
Building a Factory When the Planet Hates You
Those bases ultimately exist because To the Stars is also an automation game. Resources are finite, although Calix explained that deposits can extend much deeper underground than their surface appearance suggests. A useful deposit should last long enough to justify building extraction and processing infrastructure around it, but eventually you will exhaust it and have another reason to explore.
The crafting system is being designed around the same uncertainty. Because players can travel in different directions and land somewhere with a completely different selection of resources, basic items can have alternative recipes. You may technically be able to manufacture conductive wire using iron, for example, but doing so inefficiently consumes far more material than finding copper and using the better recipe. The important part is that an unlucky landing shouldn’t completely block your progression.
Research adds another layer. Scanning objects and using them in different ways generates insights, while experimentation asks you to expose materials to particular conditions and discover how they behave. Early experiments are deliberately simple introductions to the system, but Calix described later research as moving from trial and error toward something resembling Mastermind, where partial clues help you determine the conditions needed to unlock the result you are chasing. It also provides somewhere for all that factory production to go. Automation games eventually need reasons to manufacture a hundred copies of something beyond admiring the conveyor belt that made them, and research can become one of those resource sinks.
Tutorials follow a similarly loose philosophy. The Genesis Pod introduces mechanics step by step, but quests are intended to point toward possibilities rather than dictate a fixed sequence of chores. Once you understand a system, the game should largely get out of your way.
Survival Without Dying Because You Forgot Lunch
To the Stars has hunger, thirst and oxygen, although Calix doesn’t want those systems to dominate every expedition. His description was that survival mechanics exist to “keep you honest.” Starvation, for example, doesn’t immediately begin chewing through your health until you fall over dead. Instead, neglecting your needs creates what the team calls gray health. While you’re weakened, taking actual damage becomes considerably more dangerous. Eat before anything hurts you and that potential damage disappears.
The distinction is small, but I find the philosophy behind it more interesting than another hunger meter. Food and water remain relevant because exploring while unprepared leaves you vulnerable, yet the game isn’t constantly punishing you simply because enough real-world minutes passed since your character last ate a sandwich.
More exotic planets add environmental hazards on top of those basic needs. Toxicity, radiation, atmospheric pressure, gravity, weather and temperature can interact with creatures and environmental effects. Calix gave examples such as cold slowing venom or electricity becoming more dangerous under certain conditions.
The reward for accepting those risks is access to better materials. Your starter planet is relatively comfortable and consequently offers fairly ordinary resources such as iron and copper. More dangerous worlds introduce rarer materials, including fictional elements required farther into progression. Eventually, the environment itself becomes another problem for your infrastructure to solve. And local terraforming is planned as part of that progression. A base area can potentially be transformed from one biome into another, allowing an established player to make hostile territory more manageable. Full planetary terraforming was much less certain during our Gamescom conversation, and Calix was careful not to promise that the technology or design would support changing an entire world.
By the time you can substantially reshape the area around a valuable deposit, however, surviving the original conditions is supposed to be a challenge you have already overcome. Terraforming then becomes part of the reward for mastering that environment. I also find it rather amusing that the two games I saw at the Snail Games booth approach nature from almost opposite directions. In To the Stars, you’re eventually reshaping the environment to suit your needs. In Honeycomb, the developers are so committed to leaving a minimal footprint that you can’t even cut down a tree and have to collect fallen branches instead. Apparently, Snail Games has room for both schools of environmental management.
Procedural Planets That Players Can Make Their Own
The planets themselves combine procedural generation with developer curation, but To the Stars also intends to put some of those tools into players’ hands. Calix explained that players should eventually be able to configure planets, choose biomes and incorporate story elements, with support extending toward privately hosted and community servers and mods.
His concern with relying entirely on procedural generation was simple: it can create enormous amounts of terrain without necessarily giving those places an identity. Giving players access to some of the same ideas offers another route toward creating that identity. A generated planet provides the raw landscape, while communities can leave their own mark through construction, modification and custom content. That ambition also circles back to the larger multiplayer structure. To the Stars isn’t presenting its galaxy as a sequence of isolated survival maps. Planetary settlements feed resources into orbital infrastructure, space connects operations across different worlds, and players can eventually organize themselves into guilds and factions capable of influencing larger regions.
How much of that larger vision will be visible when players first arrive remains something we’ll have to see as development continues. The Gamescom build was openly work in progress, and several interfaces, animations and systems were still represented in relatively early forms. For me, the more interesting question is whether all those layers can remain connected without one swallowing the others.
From the Surface Back to Orbit
My Elite Dangerous habits probably explain why this structure immediately clicked with me. I spent an unreasonable amount of time in that game walking around planets rather than behaving like a sensible commander and flying my spaceship. To the Stars scratches a similar itch when you’re standing on the surface, looking for resources and establishing an outpost, but it gives those excursions a different purpose. You’re building an industrial foothold that feeds something larger above you.
The orbital station is where the progress from those expeditions ultimately accumulates. One planet might provide the materials you need today; another might contain something rarer but require better equipment simply to survive there. Eventually you’re connecting those operations through space rather than treating every base as the permanent center of the game. At Gamescom, we only saw the beginning of that loop. The Genesis Pod, drones, early research and resource gathering were much further forward in the demonstration than the grander ideas of galactic factions and diplomacy. That is probably appropriate for a game being shown publicly in playable form for the first time.
The team was targeting a closed testing phase in January, followed by Early Access at a later point. Calix wasn’t ready to give us an Early Access date, only confirming that the closed test would come first and that the team expected to talk more openly about release plans afterward. If the idea of building your way from a planetary outpost into a much larger galactic operation sounds interesting, you can check out For the Stars on Steam and add it to your wishlist while the team works toward that next stage.
Of everything I saw, however, I keep coming back to those 30 players sharing a planet without necessarily sharing the same consequences. Survival multiplayer has spent years trying different answers to the same problem: how do you put builders, explorers, cooperative groups and players who enjoy conflict into a persistent world without one group inevitably ruining the experience for another? To the Stars is trying something considerably stranger than another PvE toggle or designated safe zone. It lets those worlds coexist until the players themselves decide to connect them.
Perhaps everyone will politely build a galactic civilization together. More realistically, I suspect the first friendship request will eventually become the most dangerous button in the game.
Will see!
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