Approximately Up Troubleshooting: Fixes That Work
Ships breaking apart in flight
This was the most alarming bug in the game’s first month, because it looked random. Patch 1.0.110, August 31, 2026, explains it in full: in some cases a loose component that was not attached to anything — the developer’s example is a single unattached label — starts hitting other components during flight, causing a snowball effect where more and more parts collide until the entire ship breaks apart.
The fix and the check: the same patch added an exclamation mark in H mode on any component not connected to anything else. Open H mode before launch. It is the single most valuable habit in this game.
A separate cause, if the ship is intact but disintegrating at speed: there is an open Steam thread on ships breaking when flying too fast, which no patch note has yet closed.
RCS and thruster problems
| Symptom | Published cause |
|---|---|
| Yaw input produces roll | The RCS Controller front panel had Yaw and Roll swapped relative to its rear output ports until patch 1.0.010 |
| Rotation is weak or absent | Geometry — thrusters mounted symmetrically about their own axis cancel out, and thrusters near the centre of mass have almost no leverage |
| Thrusters do nothing at all | Power path. Check the Fuse Box, which could not be turned back on once tripped until patch 1.0.006 |
| Pitch fails intermittently | Open Steam report on RCS Pitch Minus randomly failing, no patch note yet |
The full diagnosis order is in the RCS thruster guide.
Instruments reading wrong
- Axis Rotometer outputting nonsense — it has output correctly signed values for the local axes only since patch 1.0.006, and its hitbox was fixed in 1.0.008.
- Thermometer broken after an update — reported in the discussions and fixed in patch 1.0.105.
- Space GPS reading nothing — it must be mounted outside the ship with at least 60% free space around it. A correctly wired one buried in a hull will not work.
- Everything reads 0 or 1 — integer/float switches defaulted to Integer until patch 1.0.012 changed them all to Float, because most components output in the 0-1 range.
- A logic circuit misfires for exactly one frame at launch — open Steam report on logic parts sending an erroneous signal on the first frame of Fly Mode.
Cables, doors and packages
- Data cable disconnecting — an open discussion thread; no patch note.
- Doors losing power in a crash — emergency door opening is on the developer’s announced near-term list from the devlog of August 17, 2026, not yet shipped.
- Packages glitching underground or blowing away — patch 1.0.110 made packages immune to wind and other forces before their first touch, and fixed a physics bug where moving a package in front of a running thruster launched it with extreme force. Patch 1.0.100 improved depenetration for the Tree Lid and Hazard Barrel specifically.
Settings and input
- Keybinds reverting — until patch 1.0.105, bindings only saved when you left a seat, so changing one and quitting to the Main Menu lost it. They now save immediately.
- Middle-click pick not working — the default binding for picking the component you are looking at shipped as the mouse side button by a typo (Mouse3 instead of Mouse2) and was corrected in patch 1.0.007.
- Max FPS limit doing nothing — VSync takes priority over it and must be turned off first. A note explaining this was added to the options menu in patch 1.0.005.
- Cannot jump on an airless planet — fixed in patch 1.0.105. Jumping in space was removed deliberately in 1.0.104, because it could push you away from your ship with no way back.
Performance on large ships
Patch 1.0.100 improved overall performance by around 10%, most noticeably on very large ships. The developer’s own test case went from 126 to 138 FPS in Build Mode and 80 to 87 in Fly Mode.
Worth knowing before you blame your GPU: on big builds the limit here is simulation, not rendering. Fast Forward costs more CPU, not less — it runs the whole simulation at 3x with nothing skipped or simplified. More on this on the system requirements page.
Every block mentioned above, with the patch that changed it, is on the parts reference.
Thanks for the feedback!