Approximately Up Hover Mode & Auto-Hover Guide

There is no hover button

Search demand around this game is full of hover terms — hover mode, hover system, auto hover, hoover mode blueprint. That volume exists because hovering is something players build, not something they enable. Understanding it as a control loop rather than a setting is most of the work.

A hover is three steps repeating:

1. Read the current altitude.
2. Compare it to the altitude you want.
3. Vary thrust by the size of the difference.

Every auto-hover build in this game is some version of those three steps wired out of blocks that already exist.

Step 1: a number to control on

The Altimeter gives height above the surface. That is the input to everything else.

Two related instruments are worth having alongside it. The Vertical Meter reads vertical speed, which lets you damp oscillation rather than just correcting position — a loop that only knows altitude will overshoot in both directions. The Long Range Distance Meter moved from float to double precision in patch 1.0.100, which matters over long distances but not in a hover.

Step 2: the comparison

This is the logic layer. Blocks the developer has named in patch notes:

• Round, which since patch 1.0.104 rounds exact halfway values up.
• Delay, which holds a signal — useful for damping, and which since 1.0.104 saves its internal values to Time Rewind savepoints.
• Logic Gate OR, which is genuinely an OR gate only from patch 1.0.005 onward.
• Integer / Float switches, all of which default to Float since 1.0.012 because most components output in the 0-1 range.

That last one is the single most likely cause of a hover loop that behaves as though it has two settings instead of a range. A loop reading altitude through an integer-truncated path has no fine control to work with.

Step 3: thrust that responds

The output has to be variable thrust rather than on/off, which is exactly what a community video on automated landing demonstrates — using in-game logic gates to produce variable thrust for a safe, smooth descent.

Players describe building PID controllers out of these parts, which is the same loop with proportional, integral and derivative terms rather than a single comparison. The game publishes no PID block; it is a construction.

Hovering with a jetpack

Separately from ship hover, the personal jetpack has its own hover behaviour, and two patches changed how it works on foot:

• Patch 1.0.104 removed the ability to jump in space, because jumping could push you away from your ship with no way to return.
• Patch 1.0.105 fixed being unable to jump on the surface of planets without an atmosphere, which an earlier patch had broken.

Why this is worth building

A working hover is the foundation for everything else that is automated: auto-landing, station-keeping while you handle cargo, and stable platforms for the delivery objectives that make up much of the game. The related build is the Braking Point System, which solves the same problem for horizontal speed, and the wiring fundamentals behind both are in the logic and wiring guide.