Approximately Up: How to Build Your First Ship

Build in the order the ship will fail in

A first ship in Approximately Up usually gets off the ground. What it usually cannot do is stop, turn, or come back down intact. That is a clue about build order: thrust is the easy part, and control is the part people skip.

The order that works is structure, attitude, power, propulsion, instruments — and it is worth resisting the urge to bolt on a big thruster first.

1. Frames before anything else

Everything begins with a single piece of frame. The block you want early is the Frame Quarter With Ports, because its ports are what let components attach and cable up without threading wire across the whole hull. Three separate patches went into its behaviour, which tells you how central it is:

• Patch 1.0.009 made a port appear on the opposite side of the entire connected frame chain when you plug one side, and kept the A/B/C/D port labels matching at both ends.
• Patch 1.0.011 added contact areas to those ports so components attach directly to them.
• Patch 1.0.104 fixed a remaining case where the ABCD labels could still mismatch on a chain.

If you built during the demo or the first launch week and found ports behaving unpredictably, that was those bugs, not your layout.

2. RCS before main thrust

The RCS Thruster and the RCS Controller are what point the ship. Mount them before the engines, because a ship with thrust and no attitude control is a projectile.

One thing worth knowing before you wire the controller: it shipped with Yaw and Roll swapped on its front panel relative to the output ports on its back. Patch 1.0.010 swapped the front panel labels to match. If you are following an older video and your yaw input produces roll, check which build the video was recorded on.

3. Power as a system, not a battery

Power in this game is generation, storage, distribution and protection — four separate concerns:

• A battery stores it. The Large Disposable Battery is a single-use high-capacity option.
• Solar Panels generate it passively; the Autohemisphere variant self-orients.
• Plasma Cables and standard cabling distribute it, each cable held to the nearest frame by a cable holder.
• The Fuse Box cuts it when a threshold is crossed, which is what stops one shorted subsystem from taking the ship with it.

The Fuse Box could not be turned back on once tripped until patch 1.0.006 fixed it.

4. Thrusters, sized to the ship

Fuel thrusters come in Small, Medium and Large. The mistake is picking by size instead of by mass ratio — and until patch 1.0.104 there was no in-game way to check your ship’s mass at all. The Massmeter added in that patch measures the mass of the ship it is mounted on and updates automatically after decoupling, which is exactly when your thrust assumptions stop being true.

5. Instruments, before the first landing

Two blocks belong on the first ship, not the third:

• An Altimeter, because you cannot arrest a descent you cannot measure.
• The Gyro-Line, an attitude reference drawn across your view. Patch 1.0.100 highlighted its middle line specifically to make screen centre readable during an approach.

The full reference for every block is on the parts page, and the tier list ranks them by how often each one decides a flight.

The failure nobody diagnoses correctly

If your ship comes apart in flight for no visible reason, it is probably not aerodynamic stress or a bad joint. Patch 1.0.110, released August 31, 2026, identified the real cause: a single component attached to nothing — the developer’s own example was a loose label — starts colliding with other parts mid-flight, and the collisions snowball until the whole ship disassembles.

The same patch added the fix: in H mode, any component not connected to anything now shows an exclamation mark. Check H mode before every launch. It takes two seconds and it is the single highest-value habit for a new builder.

Save your work

Blueprinting lets you keep a working design and iterate on it rather than rebuilding from scratch. Since patch 1.0.110 you also have Undo and Redo with up to 200 steps of history, bound to Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y by default — with an option to swap them, added the same day for keyboard layouts where those defaults sit awkwardly.

Details on both are in the blueprints and Workshop guide and the save system guide.

Where to go once it flies

The Moon is the standard first destination, and it is harder than it looks for one specific reason covered in the Moon landing guide. Before you go, it is worth reading the RCS thruster guide — attitude control on approach is what separates a landing from a crater.