Backfilled entry covering the work that came before the build log above, recorded here so the project history is in one place.
Phase 2.5 — The Pod Reborn
The landing pod was a recharge station. The plan is to turn it into a home, then a base, then a command centre, then a spacecraft — with the launch as the game’s actual ending. Specced in full: seven upgrade lines plus launch systems, a fabricator progression, comms beats running from OFFLINE to UNKNOWN TRANSMISSION, four exterior damage states, and a walkable interior entered through the side hatch.
Deliberately excluded: sleep. The pod is a survival and technology hub, not a bed.
What the second revision added
- Night is pod time — the replacement for sleep. Eight-minute days, four-minute nights, with a dusk warning. At night the surface is genuinely hostile: colder, low visibility, faster oxygen drain, a chance of storms. The pod is where you want to be. Critically, station speed is not improved at night — the moment night is mechanically optimal, players start waiting for it, and that is sleep with extra steps.
- Semi-idle stations — the fabricator works a queue, the computer analyses samples, the ice extractor fills reserves, comms listens, drones mine. None of it runs while the game is closed: this is pacing, not an idle clicker.
- Climate zones as honest gates — crash basin, ice shelf, day-side flats, deep caves, each gated by an upgrade or a crafted item. Life support tier 2 unlocks a place, not a bigger number.
- Save durability — the real risk of shipping in a browser. Browser storage vanishes silently: cleared site data, private windows, storage eviction, and iOS discarding IndexedDB for sites unvisited for seven days. The save layer uses IndexedDB with persistent-storage request, versioned schema with forward-only migrations, three rolling backups rotated before the live slot is touched, copy-on-write staging, a recovery chain, player-owned export and import, and autosave on visibility change — the only reliable “the app is going away” signal on mobile.
Two soft-locks caught by validation
Both were in the first pass of the upgrade tables, and both would have been discovered by a player rather than a developer.
- The salvaged antenna sat in the day-side flats, behind a thermal suit, behind fabricator tier 2 — but the comms array it unlocks arrives seventh of fifteen upgrades. Unreachable when needed. It now lies at the end of the descent debris trail in the starting zone: ungated, a long walk, and better fiction, since it snapped off on the way down.
- Metal and the first unknown crystal were required by the power core and early storage, but every zone that supplies them unlocked later. The crash basin now holds finite salvage plating — 42 units, against the 34 needed to reach the fabricator — and one shallow crystal seam yielding exactly the two required. After that you smelt rock, which is what makes the smelter feel earned.
Lessons taken from The Blockheads
Researched properly, because Orbit2D is modelled on it. It did not fade because of content or competition — the hosted servers were shut down in August 2022 over cost and maintenance burden, having already been moved behind a paid purchase. The lesson is that a solo sandbox dies at the hosting bill, so any social layer here must cost approximately nothing to run: seeds, exported world files, asynchronous artefacts.
What players actually loved was the semi-idle pacing, the climate and seasons, the soundtrack, and the low-combat mood — not the block breaking. What they hated was time-skip purchases and lost save data. And the most requested feature that never fully shipped was automated crafting, which is now on the roadmap as a deliberate late-game reward.
The one thing not to copy: Blockheads had no ending. Orbit2D does. That is the single biggest advantage over it, and every feature decision is filtered against whether it protects the launch.
Logged by Sean