Do you remember Starship Simulator? It’s been a long while since we heard any sort of major news out of this one; the devs at Fleetyard Studios stated plans for early access this December while the last major update to its available demo was made all the way back in November 2023. But now with the latest tech demo finally available, lead dev Dan Govier has finally come back to discuss the game’s progress in “a long overdue” video address.

“It has been a year and a half since our last public demo update,” Govier admits in the opening. “Now the reasons for this are many, but it’s mostly my fault for trying to cram too much content into a single update and then massively underestimating how long it would take to actively develop those features.” To that point, he promises that “really hard lessons” were learned in regard to scope creep and managing dev timetables.

From here he outlines the genuinely immense series of updates applied in Tech Demo 3: The exterior and interior design of the Magellan-class ship has been completely redone, star system and galaxy generation has been overhauled with new data and science, sensor gameplay has been expanded and overhauled, NPC bridge crew has gotten some of its first implementation, several tutorial additions have been made, and a long list of bugs have been squished. The patch has also added the first alien civilizations for players to discover.

The video below provides a significant deep-dive into many of these features as well as some other smaller additions, so whether you want to see the functioning in-game YouTube player or the newly updated sensors gameplay, the footage below has got you covered.