Approximately Up Wiring & Logic Gates Guide

Two networks, not one

The thing that makes Approximately Up a wiring game rather than a building game is that power and data are separate concerns, both routed by hand. A thruster needs power. A thruster controlled by a lever needs power and a data path from that lever. Neither is implicit.

Cables attach to frame ports, and each cable is held to the nearest frame by a cable holder — a small stick that, since patch 1.0.008, gets painted along with the cable it holds.

The Frame Quarter With Ports is the block that makes routing tolerable. Patch 1.0.009 made plugging one side surface the same port on the opposite side of the whole connected chain, with A/B/C/D labels matching at both ends.

The logic blocks that exist

Everything below is named in a patch note, so this list is short and verifiable rather than long and guessed at:

The two bugs worth knowing about

The OR gate was an AND gate. Until patch 1.0.005 on August 7, 2026, the Logic Gate OR behaved like an AND. Any circuit built or any tutorial recorded before that date may be compensating for it.

Everything defaulted to Integer. Patch 1.0.012 changed all integer/float switches to default to Float, because most components output values in the 0-1 range. Before that change, a circuit reading a sensor could quietly be truncating everything to 0 or 1.

There is also a live issue, reported in Steam discussions and not yet closed by a patch note: logic parts sending an erroneous signal on the first frame of Fly Mode. If your automation misbehaves for exactly one frame at launch, that is a known report rather than a build error.

Reading a value and doing something with it

The pattern behind almost every automation build here is the same three steps:

1. Measure — a sensor outputs a number. An Altimeter gives height, a Velocity Meter gives speed, the Axis Rotometer reports rotation on the local axes, and since patch 1.0.104 a Space GPS gives distance, longitude and latitude relative to the Sun.
2. Decide — logic blocks turn that number into a condition. Round, Delay and the gates are the whole toolkit.
3. Act — the result drives a thruster, a door, or a display.

Two notes that save debugging time. The Axis Rotometer outputs correctly signed values for the local axes only since patch 1.0.006, and its hitbox was fixed in 1.0.008. And the Space GPS must be mounted outside the ship with at least 60% free space around it to work at all — a wiring-correct build that is physically buried will read nothing.

Getting the number onto a screen

• Datameter and Large Datameter display values, and since patch 1.0.011 both can toggle between integer and float display.
• Camera Overlay puts data over a camera feed, with the same toggle added in 1.0.011. Patch 1.0.010 stopped an unpowered overlay from painting white noise over the primary input.
• Wireless Transmitters send a signal without cabling, at a real range of 2000 m — the in-game description said 100 m until patch 1.0.009 corrected it, because 100 m was the Demo value. Labels were added to transmitters in 1.0.011.

What people build with this

The reason the logic layer matters is that it is enough to automate flight. A community video demonstrates variable thrust for smooth landings built entirely from in-game logic gates, and searches around this game are full of auto-hover, auto-level, auto-landing and PID controller builds.

The two most common ones have their own pages here: hover mode and the Braking Point System.

Every block named above is listed with its full patch record on the parts reference.