v24: Rockets you can launch, a rebuilt Starbase and a canyon full of life

Starbase, rebuilt

A Gulf-coast launch site to fly, from the pads to the beach.

• A launch tower with catch arms, a tank farm, pipe racks, assembly bays and a rocket garden
• Touch a ready stack at the tower to launch it, or wait: one goes up every 4 to 7 minutes. Countdown, a lift-off cloud of dust and steam, hot staging high above, then the booster flies back and the tower arms catch it. A fresh ship is stacked a minute later
• The launch holds while you are close to the pad, so you can't be launched on
• Dusk is a blue hour with the Milky Way as it stands over the real site, a Starlink train, the ISS and meteors
• Beach, dunes, tidal flats and Highway 4 with tankers and pickups on the road

Built to look real

• Photographic light: a clear-day balance of sun and sky, a photographed sky and real shade
• Stainless steel rockets: ships with nose cones, flaps and heat-shield tiles, and boosters with grid fins, a vented hot-stage ring and 33 engines
• Every 1.83 m ring of steel is its own welded sheet, with heat tint at the welds, so reflections break ring by ring
• The rockets are now solid. Hit one and you bounce off. The open ring sections in the rocket garden are still yours to fly through
• Smooth-bodied cars and vans in every car park, in the Yard and at Starbase
• The high bay and mega bay have ribbed cladding, open doors and stair towers
• Surf on the beach, sea oats on the dunes, cracked mud and gravel up close, and shadows across the whole site

Canyon

• Touch the dragon and it turns and breathes fire
• A highline across the gorge, 73 m up, with a gibbon walking it on a leash. Knock it off and watch it bounce on the leash, climb back, swing, backflip and walk on
• A petrified forest behind the start: fallen stone trunks with banded agate ends, chips of jasper, and blue-grey badland mounds to surf
• Lava from the volcano runs across the floor and into the river, under a steaming plume. The air above it lifts you
• The cave houses in the gorge walls now have white fronts, blue doors, striped awnings and ladders
• Camelcorns walk between the giant heart vines, eat the blooms and spit glitter
• The giant panda is fully flyable: in at the mouth, down the throat and out through a door in its belly
• Cat-unicorns at home in the cave houses, and a small waterfall by the panda oasis

Bando: faster, with stairwells

• In our tests it draws 22 to 25% faster than before
• Concrete stairwells through every floor of THE SHELL, SHELL XL, TITAN and THE GRAND. Fly in at the ground and out through the roof
• Two palm oases, rooftop planters, rebar, rubble and concrete pipes to fly through
• Fewer dive rings, with three real dives kept
• A realism pass: the fantasy props are gone. The easter eggs are still hidden

Fractal world

• A herd of 18 unicorns grazing mathematical flowers. Their horns light up as you fly close
• Six winged pegasi flying figure-eights, and glowing pandas chewing glowing bamboo

The Yard and everywhere else

• Yard 13: the factory drones are now wingman-sized, and the robot arms reach in and work on them
• New floodlights, street lanterns and wall lamps that glow at dusk
• Interiors in the Yard and Bando now darken under roofs, and your drone's shadow fades out when you fly indoors
• Factory: a full blast-furnace complex. London: a silty Thames and lamps at dusk
• Post FX (TAB menu): an optional camera rotation blur
• Maps load in small steps with a progress bar in the corner, instead of one long freeze

Multiplayer

"Fly together" rooms match players on v24, so make sure your friends have updated.

Thanks for flying Trippy Plains. Tell us in the discussions which place you want us to make real next.