Adam here. What a day.

The first 24 hours of Astroneer in early access have been great for all of us on the team and for the game itself. Brendan will probably talk about the details of our launch in the future, but for now I wanted to talk about the overwhelmingly supportive response to Astroneer.

No one on our team ever expected this:

I woke up to this, this morning. Somebody pinch me. Astroneer #1 on Steam Top Sellers today. pic.twitter.com/4pt9DplP9H — Adam Bromell (@adambromell) December 16, 2016

Leading up to December 16th 2016 we could tell there was some excitement for the game and that people were ready to jump in to the early access experience with us. Twitter, Facebook, Steam, and Reddit all had responses to our game that seemed really positive and helped encourage us along the way. We wanted to be – and will continue to be – transparent with you about the game’s development so that should you want to share your bugs, feedback, or ideas you’ll be transparent with your thoughts and opinions on those things with us, too.

As I write this we’ve received 3800+ Bug reports, crash reports, comments, cheers, and suggestions for the game on our Steam and SES Forum alone.

That’s incredible.

Seriously, I stopped writing this blog post to laugh to myself at this number because its just so not what I had expected.

The first fixes to the game

Needless to say we’ve all been really busy improving the game experience with your feedback and the information you’ve shared. We’re reading every place we can for bug reports and crashes to gather as much information as possible. A few of the common issues we’ve found and patched (on Steam) so far, are:

Users may not have necessary Windows Update, causing crash (KB2670838). Older AMD CPUs didnt support an instruction we were using, causing crash (PSHUFB). Older Intel CPUs didnt support an instruction we were using, causing crash (POPCNT). Reverb implementation in UE 4.12.5 using XAudio causes horrible FPS drop. (This is why -nosound improved things for so many ppl). (Experimental Fix) VR Plugins are enabled by default, thus users with those headset would automatically get headset turned on.

On our priority list now are issues related to tether lines, save games, overall game stability, and ironing out the multiplayer experience. Expect Xbox to receive these fixes next week.

My face hurt

I personally couldn’t wait to see what other players started to do in the game once they had their hands on it. I was not disappointed. A few times in the first day my face would hurt from laughing or smiling at some things that’ve been shared.

The bases being shared on our Forum are great. There’s a lot more organized based out there then I’ve ever attempted, like the one above from Ashar.

I’ve tried to build a large tower to space before, but nothing quite like this. I so want to roll a black and white sphere down something like this.

Watching as on Twitch while Lirik, GiantWaffle, and crew dealt with a sandstorm was hilarious. onizuon’s clip captures the moment perfectly.

Day 2

All day today the team has been focused on improving the game with the bug reports and feedback you’re sending us. If today and yesterday are any indication building Astroneer while in early access is absolutely the best thing for the game. For the next couple of weeks expect the game to stabilize and become even easier to enjoy as we release patches to Steam, Xbox, and Windows Store. As things improve on that front we’ll also begin to update the game with new features and improving on existing ones.