Unobserved: Planets and Beacons

Turning planets into places

This update covers May 31 through June 1, and it moves Unobserved further away from planets as simple circles on the map. The universe now has a bigger visual vocabulary for celestial objects, a cleaner planet system underneath it, and the first pass at beacon deployment as something the player can see unfolding on the surface.

The biggest shift is that planets now have dedicated visual scenes and shader-backed identities. They also look bigger on screen, which makes them feel more like places in the universe instead of tiny markers. Dry terran worlds, gas planets, layered gas giants, ice worlds, lava worlds, no-atmosphere rocks, river planets, stars, asteroids, galaxies, and black holes all went through the same expansion pass. That means more variety, but also a better structure for spawning and configuring visuals without every planet becoming a special case.

For this pass I used Pixel Planet Generator by Deep-Fold. I still do not know if these planets will be the definitive look for Unobserved, but the set is amazing and deserves a clear kudos to Deep-Fold for making it.

A lot of this work is about making exploration feel less abstract. A planet with craters, river bands, cloud layers, lava movement, rings, star flares, or black-hole distortion tells you something before any UI appears. It makes the galaxy easier to read, and it gives future planet behavior a stronger visual foundation.

New Artifact: Colony Beacons

The planet beacon gives the player a way to target a world and deploy a beacon torpedo, which then travels into the surface instead of instantly flipping a state. That physical delivery matters. The beacon now has a launch, a landing, a breach, and a reveal.

The torpedo landing pass added runtime beacon art, surface-ratio tracking, planet tracking, smoke behavior, and breach effects. The first version had landing smoke, then that got stripped back so the breach effect could carry the moment more clearly. Later passes added configurable beacon smoke, better emission intervals, a breach lip, cleaner positioning, and timing adjustments for the full beacon effect.

The planet itself now participates in the sequence. A scan overlay and shader sweep across the surface, and the effect follows the planet's visual rotation and scroll offset so it stays attached to the world instead of sliding like a screen-space decal. The safe zone then reveals in sync with the beacon beat, which makes the result feel earned instead of just toggled.

New Artifact: Explorer Beacons

The second new beacon is the Explorer Beacon, and it is aimed at map control. The idea is simple: the player should be able to start exploring parts of the map without having to move the ship there first. It has its own item pickup, runtime scene, artifact script, UI hooks, placement cancellation, minimap representation, and a sonar-grid shader. Once deployed, it contributes to fog-of-war visibility, which means the player can push sight into dangerous or distant parts of the universe without parking the ship there forever.

The placement flow received several polish passes right away: deployment layering, travel and orientation tuning, a placement preview, an animated placement arrow, and a clearer preview radius. The beacon is fired in one direction and cannot be steered afterward, so the preview needs to make the commitment readable before the player launches it.

Explorer Beacons are also part of the targetable world now. Enemy and homing-missile behavior can recognize them, which gives the object more future design space than a passive fog token. A beacon can be destroyed at any moment, so the extra vision is useful but not free. If a deployed beacon can be seen, represented, and targeted, then it can become something the player defends, sacrifices, or uses tactically.

Fog, minimap, and readability

Because both beacons touch discovery, the minimap got a readability pass too. Reveal colors are brighter, and fog reveal now smooths instead of popping harshly from hidden to visible. That sounds small, but it is one of those changes that makes the game feel more intentional every second the player is navigating.

This pair of days turned planets from background objects into active anchors for the next layer of the game. They have stronger identities, clearer influence zones, visible beacon ceremonies, deployable exploration tools, and better feedback on the map. The galaxy is starting to become something the player can shape, not just survive inside.

Thanks for reading,

Hack the planet!

Arliax