Approximately Up Multiplayer: Co-op & Crossplay

What the platform list settles

Several of the most-searched multiplayer questions about this game are answered by the Steam category list rather than by anything requiring play:

The crossplay answer disappoints people, but it is the honest one: crossplay needs at least two platforms, and there is only one.

What co-op actually changes

The store description is unusually direct about the design intent. Multiplayer here is not about combining firepower — it is about splitting responsibility for a machine that will fail, and then arguing about whose fault it was. The developer’s own list of questions is: who forgot to connect that cable, who mounted the thruster backwards, who forgot the solar panels, who forgot the door-opening button.

That is a real description of the gameplay loop rather than marketing. A ship in this game has enough independent subsystems — power, data routing, attitude, propulsion, instrumentation — that four people can genuinely work on separate parts of one vehicle.

Time controls in multiplayer

Patch 1.0.100, released August 21, 2026, added Pause and Fast Forward to the Time Controls menu, and the note specifies that both work in singleplayer and multiplayer. Fast Forward runs the whole simulation at 3x, so a long crew transfer is no longer a long wait for four people simultaneously.

Time Rewind, the third time control, predates that patch.

Joining and version mismatches

Patch 1.0.005 added a message when connecting to a host on a different game version, indicating whether you or the host needs to update. Before that, a mismatch was simply a failed connection.

Patch 1.0.010 fixed a related annoyance for international crews: world names were not displayed when playing with someone using a completely different localisation.

Finding people to fly with

The developer runs an official Discord, linked from the Steam store page and the official site, which passed 2,000 members during the demo period in March 2026 and is where the demo events were coordinated. There is also an unofficial subreddit, r/ApproximatelyUp, created around March 2026 — the Steam discussions have threads from players looking for crew.

Building for a crew

Two blocks matter more with four people aboard than alone. Wireless Transmitters carry signals without cabling at a real range of 2000 m — the description said 100 m until patch 1.0.009 corrected it. And writable labels stop being decoration when someone else has to find the right lever; patch 1.0.110 flagged unconnected components in H mode after loose labels turned out to be a cause of ships breaking apart.

Both are covered on the parts reference, and the wiring conventions a crew needs to agree on are in the logic and wiring guide.