Greetings Pioneers,
Today’s blog brings you news of an upcoming playtest and new information about the release window.
In the time since we shared a first look at SpaceCraft gameplay in the Gameplay Overview, development has steadily progressed to a point where we have a solid core experience and foundation for our game. This means that we are ready to begin playtesting and get the game into the hands of a limited number of players.
If you would like to help us shape the game by sharing your thoughts and feedback on in-development features and content, then you should request access to the playtest via the button on the Steam Store page. Invites will be sent out via a notification from Steam when the playtest begins towards the end of this month, October.
Some important information to be aware of before requesting access to the playtest:
Servers are limited to the EU region, if you are not based in the EU region your ping could be heavily impacted.
Translation is limited to English, translating the game at this stage would lead to significant delays in our capacity to implement new features, content and change the game based on your feedback.
Texts have not been proofread or corrected, you may encounter typos or grammatical errors.
Performance hasn’t been optimised, a good graphics card is recommended to run the game as smoothly as currently possible.
The playtest will be continuous, the game will be updated with new content and features once they are ready to be tested.
Servers might only be open at scheduled times, this will concentrate the maximum number of players at one time and help us better analyse player interactions.
The playtest will have a limited player count at first, more invitations will be sent out over time and based on our needs.
No NDA is required, you are free to record and share the current version of the game.
The playtest does not represent an Early Access release-worthy game, we are looking to improve the game thanks to your feedback and testing.
At its start, the playtest will contain basic but key aspects of the game that will allow us to gather feedback on the quality of player onboarding and early-game gameplay. Over the course of the next couple of months, we will continue to add new features and systems to the playtest and will shift our focus to both the quality of multiplayer interactions and of the game’s content. During this period there will be a continued effort to improve optimisation and fix bugs.
The image below shares some additional details about the features that will be available in the playtest:
In order to fit the playtest in our development schedule, the Early Access release window has been moved to Q2 2026. We understand this news might be disappointing to some of you, and for that we would like to apologise. The playtest is a crucial part in our process of developing a high quality experience and we could not prepare for a successful Early Access launch without incorporating player feedback beforehand.
We also know that the playtest will allow us to build a positive relationship with our community that we can carry on over into Early Access and beyond the 1.0 release. Part of that relationship, on our side, means finding the sweet spot between our vision for the game, our development resources, and your ideas.
An example of what that can look like is the addition of the first person cockpit view when piloting your spacecraft. This feature has been widely requested since SpaceCraft’s reveal and we managed to implement it without compromising our development schedule.
Here’s a first look at that new feature:
We are aware that, until now, we have been fairly quiet for the past couple of months when it comes to news and updates about the game. We hope that today’s blog paints a clearer picture of what’s to come for SpaceCraft and how you can get involved with the game.
If you have any questions about what we’ve shared today please ask away here in the Steam forums or over on Discord if you’re more comfortable there, we’ll try our best to answer as many as we can!
Thanks for joining us Pioneers,
Shiro Games