# 4XCiv: full text of the Devlog and What's New > Real-physics solar-system civilization sim led by agentic AI officers. Generated from the site's content at build time, newest first: 12 devlog posts and 48 What's New entries. The site overview is at https://4xciv.com/llms.txt. ## Lanes - 4XCiv Explore: Public, no login. The whole solar system in your browser, from the orbit of Pluto down to the surfaces of planets, moons and asteroids. Real orbits, real imagery, real light: 37 tracked bodies rendered from real mission data, Lagrange points and barycenters, eclipses and shadows, and surface descents at Apollo 15 Hadley, Jezero Delta and Mount Everest. - 4XCiv Play: Crew access (in crew testing). The 4X game on top of the real solar system: survey a hex plot on Mars, build a colony, craft from a 173-item catalog in 15 categories, design ships that have to shed their own heat, fly real transfer windows, and fight in the real system under real gravity. Agentic AI officers are locked in the canon and partly in development. - The Canon: The design doctrine and the world: a founding thesis, eleven locked design pillars, and about 1.17 million words across 246 indexed files, searchable through the Bibliotheca and Ask the Magistra. Excerpts are public on this site; the full corpus is behind the crew door. - Devlog: Week by week from the team channel: what shipped, what broke, and what it cost. Drafted from the record, reviewed by the people who built it. Paired with What's New, the changelog of features, art and fixes across Explore and Play. ## Devlog ### Build hexes, hull-and-berm claims, and colony lights at night Date: 2026-10-04 | Authors: Erik Bethke | Lanes: Play, Canon URL: https://4xciv.com/devlog/build-hexes.html A claimed cell now holds several colony buildings packed edge to edge on a 9 m build-hex lattice. Each claims only its hull and berm, finished neighbours share crews and grading, and at night every building carries its own lamps instead of a lit hex. Until this week a claimed cell held one colony building. Now the ground inside a cell is a lattice of build hexes 9 m across the flats, and each building's footprint is a flower of those hexes that packs edge to edge with its neighbours. The landing pad is the exception: it takes its whole cell on its own. #### What a building claims The first pass sized each flower to the whole building model, pipe racks and masts included, which left a Luna landing pad too wide for its cell. The ruling that followed is now ratified canon: a building claims build hexes with its pressurised hull and its berm. Racks, aprons, masts and figures may overlap a neighbour's ground like shared paving. On Mars the plant house went from 6 rings to 4 and the landing pad from 12 to 9. On Luna the pad went from 15 rings to 11, which fits a Shackleton cell. #### Neighbours Touching buildings pay off. A free pressurised connector crosses every shared edge between pressurised buildings, a merged bench is charged only the cut it adds, and each finished neighbour takes 10% off a new building's on-site time, capped at 30%. Only finished neighbours count, so a throwaway building placed for the discount earns nothing while it is still under way. The adjacency numbers are still proposed and may move after playtesting. #### Lights at night By night every building used to sit in a fully lit hex. Each finished building now carries a lamp rig read from its own model: door lights, strips along the connectors, red obstruction lights on masts and towers, amber lamps on anything still under construction, and the magenta grow light through the greenhouse glazing. A plot also stopped drawing only its first eight structures. A test plot with 48 plant houses now draws, grades and lights all of them. ### The sky fills up: satellites, Everest, and 27 leap seconds Date: 2026-10-04 | Authors: Michael Conard, Erik Bethke | Lanes: Explore URL: https://4xciv.com/devlog.html#sky Satellites phase 1 plots a real October 3 snapshot of every tracked satellite, color-coded by type. Everest and the Alps become the first real-Earth terrain sites, and the clock now renders every historical leap second. ### Lagrange points, a Europa eclipse, and sunset on Jezero Date: 2026-10-02 | Authors: Michael Conard | Lanes: Explore URL: https://4xciv.com/devlog.html#lagrange Barycenters and Lagrange points land for the inner system and Earth-Luna. Then a black dot on Jupiter turns out to be Europa's shadow, and Jezero gets a sunset with real scattering. ### Radiators, thrusters, and the Iuventius Pup Date: 2026-10-01 | Authors: Stormy Emery, Erik Bethke | Lanes: Play URL: https://4xciv.com/devlog.html#ships Stormy's ships get folding radiator vanes and a full drive cycle. The lore: liquid-metal coolant at 1000–1800 °C, because real spacecraft have to shed waste heat. ### Fifteen days of night, then this: the Moon walkabout trailer Date: 2026-09-30 | Authors: Michael Conard, Erik Bethke | Lanes: Explore, Devlog URL: https://4xciv.com/devlog/moon.html Six cuts in one day: a sunrise-to-sunrise walk through lunar night at the real Apollo 15 Hadley site, a narration bake-off across five local voices, and the logo that came out of the same week. The week started with two trailers and ended with a logo. In between, the Moon walkabout went through six cuts in a single day. #### A sunrise, the long way round The first draft was a sunrise-to-sunrise sequence through a full lunar night. On the Moon a day lasts 29.53 Earth days, so night runs for about fifteen of them, and with no air there is no twilight: the Sun drops below the ridge and the light is simply gone. Shadows at a low sun run five times longer than whatever casts them. …beautiful, I want to cryMichael Conard, on the sunrise draft The re-cut anchored the whole thing to a real place: the Apollo 15 landing site at Hadley, 26.16° N, 3.60° E. The terrain is LROC NAC elevation at two meters per pixel, and the site has 3,322 meters of relief from its lowest to highest ground. [Video: Descent to Apollo 15, Hadley, on LROC NAC terrain at 2 m per pixel. Earlier: descent to Hadley, September 7. Hover to play.] [Image: Crescent Earth and the Sun from the Moon. Crescent Earth and a tiny Sun from the Shackleton crater rim.] #### Five voices, one model, no cloud Narration came from a local text-to-speech model, Kokoro, with 82 million parameters, running entirely on local hardware. We auditioned five voices against the same script and asked the channel: better with narration or without? Heartcandidate Adamcandidate Michaelpicked Georgecandidate Emmacandidate The Michael voice won the narrated cut. The final pass also fixed the far-field sunlight so the long shadows read correctly. A no-narration cut ships alongside it. #### Choosing a mark The same day, logo work started. Michael's first draft was a minimalist, scale-accurate Hohmann transfer: two orbits and the arc between them. Erik took it into a full exploration, four directions built from the same Earth-to-Mars transfer. [Image: Contact sheet of logo directions] Contact sheet. Left to right: the original draft, A trajectory plate, B engraved pewter, C mission patch, D knife-cut. A · Trajectory plate B · Engraved pewter C · Mission patch D · Knife-cut Illia and Riley Greer joined the critique, pushing for the type to sit outside the orbit rings and for a real embroidered-patch feel, citing earlier Million on Mars patches. The mission patch won: a copper double ring, 4XCIV across the top, the Earth-to-Mars Hohmann arc around the Sun, and EARTH · 264 DAYS · MARS along the bottom. It is the mark at the top of this page. [Image: 4XCiv mission patch] Primary mark. C, mission patch. [Image: 4XCiv trajectory plate] Secondary mark, for technical contexts. A, trajectory plate: TMI Δv 3.05 km/s, TOF 264 d. #### Also this week - The first **4XCiv: Explore** trailer and a separate game trailer, whose tagline is "the first game that could not have existed without strong AI." - A **Blender-driver ship pipeline** produced four hulls in a day: Tower, Cannibal Heavy, Spine & Truss, and Lance. "So so easy now." - Seven **combat VFX** variant grids (heavy, lance, missile, PD laser, PDC, salvo PD, ship death) to narrow the look before committing. - Autopilot flew its first full **Mars-to-Jupiter** high-orbit transfer. It took almost six years of sim time. ### Choosing a mark: four directions, one mission patch Date: 2026-09-30 | Authors: Erik Bethke, Michael Conard, Illia, Riley Greer | Lanes: Devlog URL: https://4xciv.com/devlog/moon.html#logo A minimalist Hohmann draft became four directions: trajectory plate, engraved pewter, mission patch and knife-cut. The patch won: Earth to Mars, 264 days. ### explore.4xciv.com is live Date: 2026-09-27 | Authors: Michael Conard, Erik Bethke | Lanes: Explore URL: https://4xciv.com/devlog.html#explore-live The Atlas, stripped of game mechanics and the passphrase, so the solar system can be shared with scientific communities. It started from a side-by-side of the Sun from Earth and from space. ### Autopilot flies anywhere Date: 2026-09-20 | Authors: Michael Conard | Lanes: Play URL: https://4xciv.com/devlog.html#autopilot Autopilot computes real transfer windows with wait, burn and course-correction steps, and can fly from any body to any other. Mars to Jupiter took almost six years of sim time. ### 21 to 37: the moons arrive Date: 2026-09-16 | Authors: Michael Conard, Stormy Emery, Kyle Bethke | Lanes: Explore URL: https://4xciv.com/devlog.html#moons Io, Ganymede, Callisto, Titan, Enceladus and the rest ship with real imagery. Where probes never looked, a seeded fill stands in, and one toggle shows you the gap. ### Subagent bake-off: $38.44, $46.29, and $0.23 Date: 2026-09-14 | Authors: Michael Conard | Lanes: Devlog URL: https://4xciv.com/devlog.html#bakeoff The same ticket, three agents: Opus 5, Sonnet 5, and a self-hosted DeepSeek V4.1 Flash. Opus's own code review graded the $0.23 run an A. ### Boots on the ground at Jezero and Hadley Date: 2026-09-07 | Authors: Michael Conard, Erik Bethke | Lanes: Explore URL: https://4xciv.com/devlog.html#ground Descents from orbit to the Jezero Crater floor and to the Apollo 15 site, on real height data. Same day: Jupiter's cloud bands, Saturn's rings, and Deimos meshed. ### Colony building works end to end Date: 2026-08-31 | Authors: Erik Bethke, Michael Conard | Lanes: Play URL: https://4xciv.com/devlog.html#colony "It is hella buggy, but can place down 3 different buildings and they persist and you can craft with them." Three hex plots at Jezero Delta, live Harvest Ice and Mine Regolith recipes. ## What's New ### 2026-10-04: Build hexes for colony buildings (feature) Lanes: Play, Canon | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/colony-build-hexes.html Several colony buildings now pack edge to edge on a 9 m build-hex lattice inside one claimed cell, each claiming only its hull and berm, and finished neighbours shorten a new building's on-site time. ### 2026-10-04: Colony night lights (art) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/colony-night-lights.html At night each colony building carries its own lamp rig, with door lights, connector strips, red obstruction lights and the magenta grow light through the glazing, instead of standing in a fully lit hex. ### 2026-10-04: Delta-V Map trips on Explore (fix) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/delta-v-map-on-explore.html The Delta-V Map on Explore lists the same trips Play does from the same start, and GO on a row flies it. ### 2026-10-04: Earth date on the clock (fix) Lanes: Play, Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/earth-date-on-the-clock.html The clock panel at the top of Play and Explore now opens with the Earth date and UTC time, with the Mars sol and year beneath it. ### 2026-10-04: Every building on a plot is drawn (fix) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/every-structure-drawn.html A plot no longer stops at eight structures: every building past the eighth is now drawn, graded and lit. ### 2026-10-04: Fly down onto the summit (fix) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/fly-down-onto-the-summit.html Picking Everest, Denali or Aconcagua from the Atlas region list turns the view onto the summit and flies straight down to it, without the mountain building itself on screen. ### 2026-10-04: Lagrange labels give way in flight (fix) Lanes: Play, Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/lagrange-labels-fade.html In flight, a Lagrange marker's label fades while it overlaps the target's name, distance or pin, and comes back when they separate. ### 2026-10-04: Magenta Grow Lights and a New Landing Pad (art) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/magenta-grow-lights-and-a-new-landing-pad.html A new landing pad rises on its own surveyed hex plot at Jezero Delta, Mars. Greenhouse domes glow magenta at night as the shot moves from day into night. Scored with Erik's own Suno track, "Serene Ascent." ### 2026-10-04: Satellites hold their slots past the snapshot (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/satellite-predictions.html Starlink, Kuiper and Iridium NEXT keep their slots past the snapshot, the ISS follows NASA's predicted track, and a satellite 30 days past its elements is hidden. ### 2026-10-04: The real night sky (art) Lanes: Play, Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/the-real-night-sky.html Stars drift with their measured proper motion on the game clock, the Milky Way comes from the NASA Deep Star Maps, and ship hulls reflect the real sky instead of a painted one. ### 2026-10-04: Leap seconds (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/leap-seconds.html The sim clock renders all 27 historical leap seconds, including 2016-12-31 23:59:60Z. ### 2026-10-04: Weekly satellite ingest (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/weekly-satellite-ingest.html A weekly job pulls the latest complete week of Earth-satellite orbital data, with an alarm if it ever fails. ### 2026-10-04: Colony on Jezero Delta (art) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/colony-on-jezero-delta.html Landing pad, greenhouse dome and survey stakes placed across the Martian plot. ### 2026-10-03: Satellites, phase 1 (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/satellites-phase-1.html A full October 3 snapshot of real satellite positions and orbits, color-coded by type. ### 2026-10-03: Real-Earth terrain (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/real-earth-terrain.html Mount Everest and the Alps, from orbital survey altitude down to a ground-level walkaround. ### 2026-10-03: Transfer windows (feature) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/transfer-windows.html Autopilot offers the next, next-next and best-of-the-next-five windows for any body-to-body flight plan. ### 2026-10-02: Lagrange points & barycenters (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/lagrange-points-and-barycenters.html Sol-Earth, Sol-Mars, Sol-Jupiter and Earth-Luna Lagrange points, plus the Sol-Jupiter and solar-system barycenters. ### 2026-10-02: Martian sunsets (art) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/martian-sunsets.html Accurate sun scattering and atmospheric sunsets over Jezero Delta. ### 2026-10-02: Small-body eclipses (fix) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/small-body-eclipses.html Europa transits show as a dark spot on Jupiter; a Phobos transit dims Mars's sunlight by only 26–40%. ### 2026-10-01: Night-vision goggles (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/night-vision-goggles.html Exposure amplified roughly 12x for the lunar dark. ### 2026-10-01: Shadows between bodies (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/shadows-between-bodies.html Body-to-body shadow casting, checked against the real November 8, 2022 lunar eclipse. ### 2026-10-01: Iuventius Pup drive (art) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/iuventius-pup-drive.html Ignition, full burn, cutoff and cooling for the Pup's main drive. ### 2026-10-01: Thruster ignition transient (fix) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/thruster-ignition-transient.html The ignition pop on thruster start-up is smoothed out. ### 2026-09-29: Mars sunrise (art) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/mars-sunrise.html Sunrise and atmosphere bloom at Jezero. ### 2026-09-27: explore.4xciv.com (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/explore-4xciv-com.html Pure solar-system exploration in the browser. No passphrase, no game mechanics. ### 2026-09-26: Atlas refactor (fix) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/atlas-refactor.html 259 merged PRs; 17,797 net lines removed from the largest file alone. ### 2026-09-21: Sign in with Bike4Mind (feature) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/sign-in-with-bike4mind.html Persistent crafting state tied to a Bike4Mind account. ### 2026-09-20: Autopilot (feature) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/autopilot.html Real transfer windows with wait, burn and course-correction steps, from any body to any other. ### 2026-09-20: Terrain-aware movement (feature) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/terrain-aware-movement.html Ground movement that follows the terrain, with atmosphere that reacts to it. ### 2026-09-19: Survey and claim (feature) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/survey-and-claim.html Hex-plot survey-and-claim at ground level on Jezero Delta. ### 2026-09-17: Let there be light (art) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/let-there-be-light.html The Sun gets real granular, flare-streaked surface detail. ### 2026-09-17: Delta-V Map (feature) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/delta-v-map.html In-ship HUD listing travel time and speed change to every body in the system. ### 2026-09-16: 21 → 37 bodies (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/21-37-bodies.html The Jovian and Saturnian moon systems ship with real imagery. ### 2026-09-16: Honest gap fill (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/honest-gap-fill.html Seed-based synthetic fill where real data runs out, with a toggle to show the gap instead. ### 2026-09-16: Asteroid belt rework (art) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/asteroid-belt-rework.html New battle-phase asteroid-belt art around Mars. ### 2026-09-12: Flight navigation (feature) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/flight-navigation.html Trajectory paths, prograde/retrograde markers, aim error and aim-assist thrusters. ### 2026-09-12: Item catalog (feature) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/item-catalog.html 173 items across 15 categories, with crafting and colony inventory screens. ### 2026-09-12: Inventory icons (art) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/inventory-icons.html Generated icon sets for biomass, raw minerals and power equipment. ### 2026-09-11: Real gravity (feature) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/real-gravity.html All 21 bodies apply correct relative gravity; combat moves into the real system; warp up to 86,400x. ### 2026-09-07: Boots on the ground (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/boots-on-the-ground.html Descents to Jezero Crater on Mars and the Apollo 15 Hadley site on the Moon. ### 2026-09-07: Jupiter and Saturn (art) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/jupiter-and-saturn.html Jupiter's cloud bands and Saturn's ring data go live; Deimos is meshed. ### 2026-09-06: Tile seams (fix) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/tile-seams.html Phobos, Europa, Venus, Charon, Pluto and Ceres rebaked to remove seams. ### 2026-09-05: Phobos shape model (fix) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/phobos-shape-model.html Phobos gets its correct shape; mouse-drag rotation direction fixed. ### 2026-09-04: Quick-select (feature) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/quick-select.html One-click list for all 21 catalogued bodies, plus real-terrain surface descent. ### 2026-09-02: Orbit-to-surface zoom (fix) Lanes: Explore | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/orbit-to-surface-zoom.html A performance pass makes the zoom from orbit to the rocks smooth; flight HUD patched. ### 2026-08-31: Colony building (feature) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/colony-building.html Place three buildings on Jezero Delta hex plots; they persist and you can craft with them. ### 2026-08-23: Bibliotheca (feature) Lanes: Canon | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/bibliotheca.html Raw, semantic and Ask the Magistra search over the canon. ### 2026-07-21: What's New panel (feature) Lanes: Play | URL: https://4xciv.com/whats-new/whats-new-panel.html This feed, in-game: Artifact Viewer and ship-part updates.