UPDATE 1.0.9 – Astral Flux

Our first content update for STARSEEKER is now available! In addition to various improvements and bug fixes, we’ve started the new State of Flux Community Challenge with some cool cosmetic rewards to unlock, as well as the new limited time Field Ops: Drilling event to help you all make progress together.

Before digging in (pun intended), we have some updates to share on the STARSEEKER Early Access development plans. 

WHAT TO LOOK FORWARD TO

It’s now been over a month since STARSEEKER launched in Early Access, and there have been many lessons learned as well as feedback for us to take in. Creative Director Adam Bromell is tackling some of these topics in the above State of the Game video, the first in what will be an ongoing series to keep you all up to speed.

One thing we want to highlight in particular is that we will be making changes to our previous Roadmap. Much of the content we already had good progress on will still be getting added to the game, but we’re prioritizing content and changes that we think will best address what we’ve learned these past few weeks.

We’ll have more to share once we have a proper breakdown to explain what we have in mind, along with a new Roadmap. 

Region Rallies

Community Challenges as a whole will also be evolving over time compared to our first iteration with the Tangle. For starters, we’re distinguishing Community Challenges from events tied to new Regions.

These will now be called Region Rallies, and they will be geared more towards exploring the unlocked Regions rather than working toward unlocking them. Our next one is coming up not long after the State of Flux Community Challenge, so more on that soon. For now, let’s talk about the Astral Flux Update!

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NEW "STATE OF FLUX" COMMUNITY CHALLENGE

The ESS Starseeker’s Flux Drive is in desperate need of fuel, so it’s up to the whole crew to pitch in and scour the planet Tephra for Astral Flux to contribute. It may look like candy, but don’t eat it! It’s powerful stuff.

The Challenge 

Astroneers are being called to help collect and contribute any and all Astral Flux! Some of you may have already been stockpiling Astral Flux, so this is the time to use it! Don’t worry about saving more for later. Astral Flux's main purpose is fueling the engine. There are some nice rewards for all who participate, so make sure you contribute at least a few nuggets.

• Start Date: Today! July 22nd, 2026.
• End Date: August 2nd, at midnight PST, 2026.

Open the DAD menu and under "Objectives", look for the "Event" tab to track your progress.

The Flux Drive

You may have noticed that the Flux Drive, the engine at the very center of the station, has been suspiciously empty so far. The circumstances that led to this fuel drought are still unknown and being investigated, but now that the crew is rallying around the call for Astral Flux, you’ll start seeing the Flux Drive come to life with your contributions.

The Rewards

The more progress the crew makes toward completing the Community Challenge, the more reward tiers will be unlocked for all participating Astroneers!

• Participation Reward – Space Bandit Mask
• Tier 1 at 20% of the Goal – Star Wrangler Hat
• Tier 2 at 50% of the Goal – Skybreaker Visor
• Tier 3 at 100% of the Goal – Aurora Palette

And for all the go-getters out there, we’ll also have repeatable stretch goal rewards for the duration of the Community Challenge. These will award all participants with an Overachiever's Pack each time a stretch goal is completed. This pack includes: 1x Disposable Air Cannon, 5x Excavation Canisters, and 25 Credits.

New Missions 

You’ll now be able to find Ensign Blandrew toiling away at drear... I mean, doing very important work, by the bridge where Captain Jupiter is. He’ll have new Missions to assign you during the event, and though Blandrew may be difficult to work with at first, completing his Missions is worthwhile for the sweet new Get Fluxed Palette final reward.

Stellar Suit 

You may be looking now for the best suit to use with all the new cosmetics you can earn during the Astral Flux Community Challenge, which is why you can now find the brand-new Stellar Suit available at the EXO Outlet for 2,000 Credits. Like every other currency in STARSEEKER, Credits are earnable-only.

If you’re unable to acquire this suit during the Astral Flux Community Challenge, don’t worry! You'll be able to use Baubles to purchase it from Felix at the Clowder Emporium in the future. 

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FIELD OPS: DRILLING

A new limited time Field Ops activity is now available for the duration of the Astral Flux Community Challenge! Alongside other Astroneers, you’ll be able to leverage a massive drill (lovingly dubbed Drilliam by Muriel) to extract large amounts of Astral Flux, along with additional resources if you do a good job at keeping it cooled down and well defended.

Navigating to the Lagoon

After completing some of Blandrew’s Missions, he’ll direct you to use the EXO Drill Rover to help gather more Astral Flux. Once you track this Mission, you’ll have a marker during your Expedition to show you the way to the Field Ops: Drilling on a large island to the northeast of the Wetlands or northwest of the Tangle, referred to as the Lagoon. 

You don’t need Blandrew’s Mission to run this Field Ops, but the Mission marker can be good to help you navigate there the first time. Using the Air Blast Nozzle in combination with a Dash Mod can be a good way to make fast progress through the water, but you didn't hear that from me.

Overheating 

As the EXO Drill Rover drills its way through hard terrain, it will begin to overheat. A large canister in the rear corner has a meter to help you track this. Make sure to bring a Water Hose Nozzle, Water Canisters, or anything that can apply the Wet condition to the drill. This will keep the drill running efficiently, so you don't need to do repairs on the go.

Defend the Drill

There are various hazards on the path of the EXO Drill Rover that you’ll need to clear to ensure it keeps running. Things might differ from your previous run, stay alert!

• Null Fields embedded in hard terrain can stop the drill in its tracks, so come prepared! Null Fields can be dug out with Excavation Canisters, or you can Goop up the area and throw Fire Canisters to blow them up (just be careful).
• Explosive Kablooms may be growing on the path. Try grabbing or lassoing them with the Lasso Nozzle after they’re dug out to dispose of them.
• Malfunctioning Demolition Devices may also bombard the area, so running ahead of the drill to break them down can be very helpful.

The drill knows where it's going but has no regard for what may be in its path, including Boghound Burrows, angry Brutoliths, or even Carrotlings with the insane idea of bringing you Kablooms. Make sure to keep the drill defended, especially when it stops to recalibrate its path; it won’t move until nearby nests are broken down. It will take multiple Astroneers to face off against these creatures, so keep that in mind before starting the Field Ops.

Rewards 

Once the Field Ops has ended, interact with the drill to claim heaps of Astral Flux nuggets as your reward. The further you manage to keep it cooled down, repaired, and well defended, the greater the rewards. Even if the drill breaks down and the Field Ops ends, make sure to still claim the Astral Flux you managed to mine.

Doing a good job at escorting the drill can also make it pop like a piñata with nuggets of other resources. The further you’re able to get the drill, and the more Astroneers participating, the more resources will pop out every time it survives an encounter. Just like a piñata, these are up for grabs for anyone who claims them first.

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PATCH 1.0.9

This update features approximately 300 bug fixes across all areas of the game. We tried to tackle some of the most visible issues you’ve reported as well as tidy things up in areas we knew needed another pass. If you don’t see a particular issue you were hoping would get addressed, don’t worry! Some things take more than a quick bug fix to resolve, and we’re working on other UX improvements (looking at you, Stash!) alongside new content for future updates. In the meantime, here are the highlights of this patch:

Creatures

The Creatures team dedicated a chunk of time this update to addressing issues in all areas of the Creature system. Creature Spawners and habitats were a big area of focus, ensuring that Creatures spawn correctly, and their homes and nests react appropriately to interactions from Players. As a part of this, Creature behavior and their response to combat were revisited so that Creatures behave more reliably when waking/sleeping, attacking, or healing.

Player interactions with Creatures also received a pass, fixing several cases where sedation, scanning, and items like the Energy Leash, Camouflage Mod, and Spa Water would fail unexpectedly. Carrotlings won’t wake up so easily now and will also give a bit of a warning before entering their Enraged state. We even reminded Bog Hounds that they do, in fact, like to eat Life Fruit!

As this is one of the most complex systems in STARSEEKER, we will continue monitoring for major issues and improving all things Creatures.

Improvements

General: 

• Dropping an abundance of loose items in the station can cause performance issues for all players present in that instance. To address this, we’ve added a timer to remove these items after enough time has passed, 15 minutes for loose items, 30 minutes for deployable Gadgets like the Trampoline. Please be kind and don’t litter.
• • Developer Note: To clarify, trading stuff on the station is perfectly fine; the issue is dropping large numbers of items and letting them sit there. We’ll monitor to see if these times feel like they strike a good balance at addressing the issue and not becoming an inconvenience. We have a few other fun ideas on how we’d like to tackle this.
• We’ve added more triggers to respawn players into the station if they manage to exit the intended station boundaries.
• Developer Note: We’ll continue to tackle locations where players can sneak past the station walls to mess around in space and have a poke around. Even if you do manage to clip through, you should now get respawned.
• To avoid confusion, we’ve updated the names of Ooze Balls and Ooze Bushes to Boingle Balls and Boingle Bushes.  
• • Developer Note: The old name gave the impression that they might be a source of Goop, so hopefully that’s clearer now.
• Seamelon Blorbs should spawn more often now in underwater biomes.

Player Customization: 

• All owned Palettes can now be applied to Dropships!
• • Developer Note: We always intended to enable this feature; it just took us a bit longer to polish the results for all Palettes.
• Made improvements to how cosmetics preview and apply in the Customization Closet and the EXO Outlet.
• Made improvements and implemented clearer messaging for purchases and discount displays in the EXO Outlet.

Bug Fixes

General: 

• Fixed a number of crashes across PC and consoles.  
• • Developer Note: We will continue tackling the most commonly reported crashes with each update we put out. Unless there’s a crash that’s very well understood and identified by the community, we will likely keep this general line in patch notes going forward to summarize stability work. 
• Made various art improvements to address collision, spawning, VFX, animation, and texture issues throughout the game. Thank you, Art team! 
• Fixed a number of localization issues across all languages, including missing translations and corrections for clarity and grammar. 
• AG-18319 – Fixed an issue where service to Steam players would get interrupted during Steam’s regular scheduled maintenance on Tuesdays. 
• AG-17694 – Fixed an issue that could cause EXO Caches to sometimes fall through the floor of the Science Lab in the Tangle and become unreachable. 
• • Developer Note: This issue was also occurring at the Elysium Bridge in the Wetlands. We believe this issue has also been resolved, but please let us know if it happens again at either location after this patch.
• AG-18214 – Fixed an issue where the Malfunctioning Demolition Device near the Elysium Bridge would destroy itself with its own projectile’s area damage. 
• AG-18428 – Fixed an issue that prevented Spa Water from sedating exhausted creatures and would heal them instead. 
• AG-17456 – Fixed an issue where players on the Steam Deck would see a black screen after viewing the introductory cinematic for the first time. 
• AG-17847 – Fixed an issue where players without a Squad would get a “Departed Squad” notification when selecting the Main Menu option in Settings. 
• AG-17945 – Fixed an issue that was preventing vendor NPCs from displaying their vending dialogue when attempting to buy or sell to them. 
• AG-18186 – Fixed an issue that caused the Creature Wrangling Field Ops activity to display the incorrect text. 

Expeditions: 

• AG-17141 – Fixed a rare but extremely frustrating issue where players would receive a Failed Expedition result even if they successfully left the planet on a Dropship, damaging their gear and losing their items.  
• • Developer Note: We now more thoroughly examine player logs upon returning to the station to ensure successful Expedition tags are appropriately caught.
• AG-16968 – Fixed an issue where players would sometimes be unable to launch a solo Expedition due to a "Waiting For Squad leader" error message.  
• • Developer Note: This bug has been haunting us since our pre-release playtests earlier in the year. We believe we have addressed the root cause but do let us know if this is still happening to you! 
• AG-15680 – Fixed an occasional but very annoying issue where the player's Backpack would show only one slot for storage and one slot for mods after traveling down to the planet.  
• AG-18243 – Fixed an issue where Bytes, Credits and Baubles counts would show up as 0 in the player’s DAD menu while on planet. 
• AG-16956 – Fixed an edge case issue where a different mod become displayed as "Broken" instead of the mod that actually broke after Players rejoined an Expedition following a game crash.  
• AG-16947 – Made changes so that when a player is downed, disconnects the game on purpose, and then rejoins, they will remain downed instead of getting a free revive.  
• AG-18188 – Fixed an issue where the introductory cinematic played again right after landing on the planet. 
• AG-17928 – Fixed an issue that prevented players from transitioning properly out of the loading screen when traveling to the planet. 

Gear & Progression: 

• AG-18353 – Fixed an issue where Super Water Canisters would not grant progress for Missions or Tasks with an objective to use a Water Canister. 
• AG-12185 – Fixed an issue that required controls input to transition from gliding into a wall to climbing when using the Glider. This should now happen automatically. 
• AG-17510 – Fixed an issue where the Air Cannon would not bounce back projectiles. 
• AG-16874 – Fixed an issue where a player's character would crouch when running out of Power while using the Camouflage Mod. 

Stickers & Achievements: 

• AG-18425 - Fixed an issue where PS5 players hadn’t received their Trophy for completing the Tutorial during a pre-release playtest. On the next log-in, these players will receive their missing Trophy.  
• • Developer Note: Thank you for your patience while we dug around in some platform code to isolate the issue. Going forward, the game will regularly check for missing Trophies (and Achievements) to make sure that any missed awards are granted upon the next log-in.  
• AG-12954 – Fixed an issue where using the respective liquid from the Multi-Liquid Hose would not count as progress for the “Super Soaker” or “Slime Sorry” Stickers. 
• AG-18370 – Fixed an issue where using Disposable Nozzles to apply Status Effects would not count as progress for Stickers that track applying Status Effects to Creatures. 

Player Customization: 

• Fixed a number of UI navigation and input issues that were affecting presentation in the Customization Closet and EXO Outlet menus. 
• AG-17805 – Fixed an issue that would cause a player to run into another when trying to perform a synced two-player emote while down on the planet. Now you can Hug anywhere! 
• AG-9958 – Fixed an issue where Hats and Masks would disconnect from a player's helmet and bob around when moving around. 
• AG-18297 – Fixed an issue where players couldn’t directly apply a cosmetic item in the EXO Outlet menu right after purchasing it.

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KNOWN ISSUES 

The following are some of the most relevant issues that have been reported by the community and we’re already working to address.

• AG-18313 – Sometimes the EXO Drill Rover in the Field Ops: Drilling activity can stop moving at an unintended location. In the meantime, this can be fixed by deforming the terrain underneath it with the EXO Multi-Tool. 
• AG-12481 – Gliders aren’t applying Palette colors as intended. This is a bug and not intentional. 
• AG-4484 – Gliders can sometimes stay unfolded while transitioning into a climb or during the climb over animation. 
• AG-11032 – The Expedition launch screen can often repeat a Squad member’s name and make it appear as if the Squad is larger than it is. 
• AG-17103 – Player character’s right hand appears dislocated when previewing some cosmetics in the Customization Closet and the EXO Outlet. 
• AG-18354 – Controller button mapping changes are reset when closing and relaunching the game. 
• AG-18208 – Movement keys cannot be rebinded for Mouse & Keyboard controls. 

Tips & Workarounds 

• If you want to change your Display Name, you can do so at any time. Simply open the DAD menu and in the Social tab select your username under Squad Members. This will open your Player Profile where you can find the Change Display Name option. No need to contact our Support team for this.
• If you’re playing on the Nintendo Switch 2 and are experiencing connection issues, this tip will likely resolve that issue. Go to your Switch’s “Settings”, select “Date and Time”, and in that menu make sure “Synchronize Clock via Internet” is toggled on. 

STARSEEKER: Astroneer Expeditions is now available on Steam, the Xbox for PC App, Xbox Series X|S, PlayStation 5, and Nintendo Switch 2 in Early Access! 

Follow our STARSEEKER social channels to keep up with the latest news. If you run into an issue while playing the game, please send us a bug report with as much context as possible: starseekersupport@systemera.net  

– Honourael.