Untethered

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• Announcements·12 Sept 2026Official

  Devlog: Docking System Overhaul

  Hello!It's me again, back with another devlog (I know August was a long time ago, shhh). Right after I posted my last one, I ran away to Europe for three weeks. I had a lovely time, but it's good to get back to work. So, here's what we've been working on for the past month and a bit!New FacesFirstly, if you're a member of the Discord, you might have noticed a couple of new faces under the "developers" category. They are Willby (Marketing and Community Manager) and Holly (Technical Artist), and they are lovely people who will be helping get the game over the finish line. Docking System UpgradeIn response to playtesting feedback, the docking system has received a massive upgrade. There are now distinct "phases" in a docking sequence, with different acceptance limits for translational and rotational alignment. The system communicates with the pilot in a more explicit way, telling you which axis is out of alignment both numerically and graphically. If you get too close to another station and are not correctly aligned, the autopilot will engage and move the station away to prevent a collision. The HUD has been totally redesigned to communicate all of this new information. Additional voice lines and sound effects help keep you informed when your eyes are out the window. There is also a new computer terminal at the docking console which provides a nicer interface for selecting your target docking port. However, with all that said, there's still more to do! Parts of the control panel need redoing, and there is much more to do in the way of sound design. But this is hopefully a big step in the right direction. RecruitmentWe are currently seeking a programmer, 3D artist and QA lead from Victoria, Australia. If you are one of those, or know someone who is one of these, visit our website!Thanks very much for your patience. Many more exciting things to come!Luna
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• Announcements·26 Jun 2026Official

  Devlog: Alpha 2

  Greetings!I am happy to announce that Alpha 2 testing has begun. Playtesting is now well underway, and while my wonderful playtesters are busy breaking my hard work, I figured I'd give you an update on what I've been working on over the past two months.Thermal Control System UpgradeAfter some hotfixing and some UX improvements, I decided that the system most in need of love was the thermal control system (TCS). The TCS was never really completely finished. It was left in a prototype state, and now that it had been well and truly integrated with the game's progression and validated as an effective mechanic, it was time to properly finish it off. The main thing that needed adding was a flow rate limit. I didn't want players to build one coolant control unit (CCU) and have that service the entire stations - that would be too easy. Now, the coolant flow rate maxes out at a certain point, and the electrical power draw of the unit scales proportionally to the flow rate, forcing the player to build multiple coolant loops to support stations with high thermal loads. After that, it was a matter of fixing a LOT of bugs and finishing a few other small missing features, before rebalancing the entire thermal control system of the game. FiresWhat happens when you don't manage your thermal loads correctly? Fire. For alpha 2, I made a major upgrade to the backend of how fires are controlled in stations. Fires can now spread between racks, and the alarm system is a lot cooler. In future updates, I would also like to add:Fire spread between modules with open hatchesFire should damage the player if they get to closePlayers shouldn't be able to breathe in modules that are on fireThese features will be implemented after testing the current fire systems. LocalisationThe game's localisation workflow has been completely replaced. We are now using Crowdin for our public, crowd-sourced translation system. Anyone on the internet is free to contribute by leaving comments, making suggestions, a...
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• Announcements·2 May 2026Official

  Alpha has begun!

  Greetings!I'm happy to announce that the alpha period of development has officially begun. That is, the game has reached a point where I believe all of the gameplay needed to release to Early Access is there. Now begins the long and somewhat tedious process of testing, fixing bugs, finishing art, balancing and tweaking to get the game ready for paying customers. The roadmap has been updated, and as always, it can be found on the Untethered website. I've created a short gameplay showcase video to illustrate how the game is looking as we pass this development milestone.If you are interested in supporting development in volunteer roles (playtesting or translating) or dev roles (current recruiting a technical artist), please check out https://untetheredgame.info/contribute/. The playtester pool will increase as we get deeper into alpha, but note that the wait list is quite long at the moment. There's not much to report on development as since my previous post I've almost entirely just been fixing bugs and working with my wonderful playtesters, so hang tight for more news.See you in the next one o7Luna out.
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• Announcements·6 Mar 2026Official

  Devlog: The Great Refactor

  Greetings!It's me again with another devlog. As you may know, I spent the entire month of February working on the "great refactor". This is a bit of technical discussion, so apologies if it's not really your thing, no exciting new features this week I'm afraid. However, I know there's a fair few people who are probably interested, so I figured I'd write about it anyways!The ProblemWhen I started working on Untethered over three years ago, it was a very different game. It was a raft-like survival game, in which debris floated past and you would grapple things to expand a small space station. Over time, the direction shifted, and I started choosing mechanics to encourage more complex station building, since I felt that was the aspect of the game that was the most fun. The world moved away from a more open world, free movement situation, and towards what it is now: discrete orbits that require a certain amount of fuel to transfer between, while the player sleeps. This allowed me to expand the scale of the world, with wide range in orbital altitudes, and the possibility for interplanetary travel in the future. So what's the problem? Well, when I started, I wrote all the logic for the equipment in the stations (the solar panels, racks, interfaces) within class structures that derive from MonoBehaviours. That means that any rack, say the Electrolysis Unit for example, would contain all of its logic within a component attached to the game object. However, when I introduced orbital transfers, a problem arose. All of this logic would cease to operate as soon as that Electrolysis Unit was left in another orbit and the game objects are despawned. This means that any station that isn't presently loaded just freezes until the player returns to it. That's a problem when the game starts scaling up because of all the systems that run over time:Electricals - the power should go out if the player fails to provide enough batteriesThermal Control - remote stations should overheat/catch...
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• Announcements·31 Jan 2026Official

  Devlog: Module Construction Overhaul

  Greetings!Here begins my slightly more regular devlog series. Really just changing the format of my news posts so I can make them a little more frequent. So let's talk about what I've worked on over the past couple of months! Module RotationTo begin, I started by doing a bunch of refactoring and tidying up the codebase around module construction, before I got stuck into module rotation. Previously, there was no way to change the orientation of a module when you build it. This meant that a lot of stations ended up looking fairly similar. To solve this, you can now click R to rotate a module by 90 degrees before building it. You can also use the scroll wheel to cycle through available berths on a new module. Combining these two new features allows the player to construct module in any configuration they might like, allowing for all sorts of unusual arrangements.Loopable Station LayoutsAfter I got the module rotation system working, I tackled a problem I had been dreading for a long time: loopable station layouts. The inability to make loops was another limitation of the old construction system that I felt stifled player creativity, but it's a feature that I always thought would be difficult. Turns out, it's not so bad!In the backend, I didn't really need to change much. In essence, the modules now check with nearby modules to see if they have any berths that align perfectly. If they do, they attach, and opening the hatch is permitted. One aspect that I thought would be difficult would be reworking the check for whether deconstructing a module should be allowed. Previously, I just needed to check how many attachments a targeted module had. If it was berthed to more than one other module, the player can't be allowed to deconstruct it. But as you can imagine, a module which is part of a larger loop needs to be allowed to be deconstructed, otherwise a loop of modules becomes indestructible once built.However, after thinking about it for five minutes, I wrote a recursive m...
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