How to Play Approximately Up: A Beginner's Guide

What kind of game this is

Approximately Up is a modular spaceship building sim by a single developer, Approximately Games, released on Steam on August 6, 2026 for $24.99. It is a finished 1.0 release, not Early Access.

The loop is: build a ship out of components, fly it first-person from its own deck, and complete objectives across a system of planets — solo or in online co-op with up to four players. Nothing is abstracted into a stat screen. Power is a cable run. Attitude control is thrusters you place. An altitude readout is a block you mount and wire.

The store description’s own summary of the co-op experience gives you the tone: who forgot to connect that cable, who mounted the thruster backwards, who forgot the door-opening button.

The first hour, in order

1. Do the tutorial on Earth. It is where the build controls stop being abstract, and it ends with a genuinely strange errand — the Baaa-ck To Headquarters achievement asks you to bring the tutorial sheep to Headquarters. Two of the first three achievements in the game come from this stretch.

2. Build something small that works. The instinct is to build big. The better first ship is minimal: a frame chain, RCS thrusters and an RCS Controller for attitude, a battery and power routing, then main thrusters. In that order — see the first ship guide.

3. Check H mode before you launch. Since patch 1.0.110, any component attached to nothing is marked with an exclamation mark. Loose components were the cause of ships mysteriously breaking apart in flight, so this check is worth building into your routine immediately.

4. Mount an altimeter. You cannot arrest a descent you cannot measure, and the first landing is where first ships die.

5. Go to the Moon. It is the standard first destination and it has a surprise: it has an atmosphere, so a vacuum-tuned thruster setup behaves differently on the way down. The Moon landing guide covers the approach.

Five things that go wrong for everyone

• The ship will not turn. RCS problem, and there are four distinct causes — including a real bug where the RCS Controller’s front panel had Yaw and Roll swapped until patch 1.0.010.
• The ship comes apart mid-flight. A loose component. H mode.
• A sensor reads only 0 or 1. Integer/float switches defaulted to Integer until patch 1.0.012 changed them all to Float.
• A binding you set disappeared. Real bug, fixed in 1.0.105 — bindings used to save only when you left a seat.
• The flight takes forever. It did for everyone. Patch 1.0.100 added Fast Forward at 3x to the Time Controls menu (default key P), explicitly for players without hours to spare.

What you are working toward

The system has a published edge — the Edge Of The Known achievement names Tenebra as the farthest known planet — and a network of Black Hole Tunnels that the achievement text says lead to a new universe. In between are named worlds with delivery, capture and rescue objectives, most of them with a Planet Station that unlocks permanently once you land on it.

Where each world sits, and which names are confirmed rather than player-reported, is on the planets page. What each objective asks for is on the missions page. And if you would rather know what you are buying first, the Steam review breakdown covers what players praise and complain about.

Automate once you can fly

The reason this game holds people for hundreds of hours is the logic layer. Once a ship flies reliably, players build auto-hover, auto-landing and PID-style controllers out of in-game gates, delays and rounding blocks. That is where the wiring guide and hover mode pick up.