For our Grindfest theme week 2026, we had the opportunity to be shown the new sci-fi MMORPG Stars Reach by industry veteran Raph Koster. MeinMMO editor Karsten Scholz couldn’t stop being amazed.
What kind of MMORPG is Stars Reach? The new game by Raph Koster (Ultima Online, Star Wars Galaxies) and his studio Playable Worlds is a sci-fi sandbox MMORPG that serves you a universe as an online playground. With terraforming tools, you can shape the planets to your liking.
You build cities and governments, define rules for your realm, fend off alien monsters, or pursue one of countless professions. Imagine No Man’s Sky as a real MMORPG, with creative possibilities that could even overshadow Minecraft.
For our Grindfest theme week 2026, I got a look at Stars Reach from Raph Koster and other developers, and in the process, received answers to many of my questions. A heads-up: even though the MMORPG is still in alpha, it already shines with a strength that could genuinely push the genre forward. More about that in detail shortly.
During this week, you can expect exciting articles every day around the topic of MMORPGs. Included are: nostalgic retrospectives, exciting analyses by renowned industry veterans, previews of upcoming online role-playing games, and fun streams.
Here’s the program for the big MMORPG theme week 2026 from MeinMMO
Never before has there been such a sandbox in the MMO genre
What is the big uniqueness of Stars Reach? The MMORPG promises not only a sandbox, but also gives you a shovel, rake, and bucket to shape the sand and create new things through your creativity. But that’s not all. In the sandbox of Stars Reach, behind every grain of sand, there is a physics simulation that you can take advantage of.
But what does all this mean concretely? Here are just a few of the interactions you can expect in Stars Reach:
- For every structure in space, there is its own gravitational simulation.
- On each planet, various simulations take place everywhere, based on parameters such as temperature, weather, or external factors (like fires).
- Trees grow from seed to height and eventually perish. Nature can spread over time. Animals reproduce but can also go extinct. Fun fact: Among the testers, conservation groups have already formed with the goal of protecting endangered life forms.
- There are countless variants of each substance in Stars Reach, for example, more than 200 different types of rocks, each with its own properties.
- If you work stone with the heat beam of a tool, it melts into lava. The liquid lava flows as it would in real life and ignites flammable materials. This way, entire forests can fall victim to fire. With the ice beam of another device, you can extinguish the fire and prevent that from happening.
- When the lava cools and hardens, it eventually becomes a completely new type of rock: obsidian.
- The mentioned tool also has a time beam that allows you to age and rejuvenate materials. This way, you can make trees grow or gain access to completely new materials that can be further processed in very special forms.
- You can create reservoirs and redirect rivers. When you redirect a river down a mountain to create a waterfall, the meadow at the foot of the mountain gradually turns into a swamp. Moreover, the water erodes part of the mountain over time. An artificially constructed river in a desert creates an oasis.
All this is possible because the developers treat every material in the game like a living being that can take on many states, behind which a realistic simulation does its work. The result is immense creative freedom. Testers of Stars Reach have already invented steam engines, built fountains, and created lava lamps.
I ask Raph Koster how they intend to prevent toxic players from altering the terrain to troll other players, for example, by constructing a cave under a house, causing it to eventually collapse into the depths.
We design everything to encourage players to experiment, but you never know what they will ultimately do. […] We focus on making it as difficult as possible for them to completely erase anything. If they do manage to do so, then fine, we’ll just open new worlds. […] Internally, we are currently testing our world generation system, and we have a server where a new planet is created daily.
Raph Koster in conversation with MeinMMO
During the further conversation, the industry veteran explains to me that there are indeed means and ways for a community to stop toxic players. If someone has successfully claimed an area, the buildings that arise there are protected. The same applies if a planet has a governor who defines clear rules for the entire world. Also, PvP is heavily restricted in the open world and purely optional.
A universe connected by wormholes
How is the universe structured? The universe of Stars Reach consists of countless zones connected by wormholes. Each zone consists of planets, moons, asteroids, and more. If one of these zones is avoided by players because the corresponding planet is not exciting enough, the developers can collapse the wormhole to that zone to create space.
Likewise, it is possible to attach new zones to the wormhole network at any time, thus providing players with access to a new playground. Raph Koster draws the comparison to the ultimate sandbox hit: “Imagine all Minecraft servers in the world suddenly being interconnected through hyperlinks.”
Due to the regular removal of zones in one place and the constant influx of zones in another, the universe of Stars Reach is always in flux. Sometimes it shrinks, sometimes it grows. And players determine where, when, and in what form the universe changes based on their number or choice of sandbox.
Additionally, players in Stars Reach can control an entire planet as an elected governor and define its rules, similar to how one would host a private server in other games and establish its framework. If someone doesn’t want PvP in their home and only wants to grant access to friends, they can determine that for their planet.
Since many players had bad experiences with a procedurally generated universe during the launch of No Man’s Sky, I want to know from Raph Koster how they plan to prevent planets from becoming generic and interchangeable.
With a lot of work. We put a lot of time and energy into it. Planets differ greatly in terms of climate and topology. Additionally, we design the different topographies by hand so that they are unique, varied, and interesting. […]
To create a planet, we then select various hand-designed topographies and mix them with adjusted parameters to create an entirely new world.
Raph Koster in conversation with MeinMMO
The parameters not only provide variety, but also ensure that planets are playable, that the creatures in the area differ in their behavior, and that details such as day length, climate, seasons, and so on ultimately create an individual planet.
However, there is no pure water planet with destructive forces like in the film Interstellar in Stars Reach. The necessary water simulations would likely overwhelm the system. Player-unfriendly planets with hot deserts and cold ice fields, however, could emerge.
Action-packed combat with bullet hell moments
Besides tools, you can also equip weapons in Stars Reach to fight off the aggressive creatures of a planet. The fights are quite action-packed since you often have to dodge enemy attacks and harmful areas.
At times, Stars Reach could even pass as an arcade-like bullet hell shooter, with zillions of projectiles flying around you. This fits with the power-ups that enemies drop, providing you with powerful advantages for a short time (like immunity, health boosts, or area explosions).
It should be worthwhile to tackle tricky fights as a team, as players can focus on the roles of healer or tank to assist the group. Similarly, you can create a solo loadout that allows you to deal damage and survive dangers without help.
The loadouts are designed to be flexible enough for you to set up various variants for different content. Perhaps you are currently in a city pursuing the job of botanist or governor. Suddenly, a friend calls, he needs help. You switch to your healer setup, teleport to your buddy, and fight by his side for a quarter of an hour. Afterwards, you return to what you originally wanted to do.
What career will it be?
You don’t necessarily have to be an alien fighter in Stars Reach. The developers are currently planning 40 professions, each with its own extensive skill tree. The specialties include not only combat, but also business, cooking, crafting, leadership, medicine, mineralogy, vehicles, or xenobiology.
Within the trees, you can find more exciting career opportunities, such as a journalism perk that allows you to publish your own articles in the game. Other players can like, share, and even pay you for articles.
You level up each skill tree independently, unlocking skills in the tree with experience and credits. From all the skills you learned, you build a kind of deck that best supports your current playstyle. Respecializing is possible but comes with a cooldown.
This deck design is also used in the recipes of your professions: from all the recipes you have learned so far, you focus on those that are important to you and pack them into your crafting deck. If you want to take on a new recipe because it grants you experience points in crafting, you must first throw another recipe out of your deck.
This structure is meant to prevent every player from being able to do everything at some point. Everyone should specialize and set their own priorities.
How much MMO is embedded?
There is only one version of the universe and you can meet other players everywhere – at least if the governance of a planet allows other players entry. Together, you can build communities, terraform planets, establish economic empires, or go monster hunting.
Stars Reach promotes cooperation even when you are not in a group together. As soon as you stand close enough to each other, loot drops for all participants, which each character automatically collects. Through chat and emotes, you can briefly coordinate if necessary.
However, some social features that are standard in other MMOs are only unlocked in Stars Reach when you have developed the corresponding profession. Only with enough points in leadership can you coordinate larger groups and set tactics, for example. The resurrection of a defeated player character, on the other hand, is associated with a heroic action.
PvP is intended to play only an optional role in Stars Reach if players wish to engage and define the rules of their planet accordingly. Those who do not wish to must not compete with other characters at any time. Moreover, you can protect your built structures so that they cannot be destroyed by other players.
Have you checked out our MeinMMO channel on YouTube yet? Regular videos about the best genre in the world are released there. Just a few days ago, we covered the duel between Aion 2 and Guild Wars 3, both of which were in the spotlight at Summer Game Fest 2026:
A sandbox where an ancient civilization is buried
Like pretty much all MMORPGs out there, Stars Reach is not a 100 percent sandbox without external constraints. The game leads you to an area of the universe built by a once very powerful but now vanished civilization. Also, the playable races were once created by these ancients.
On the planets, you will repeatedly encounter traces of this civilization. This could be an old factory that you discover deep under the ice or in a nested cave while terraforming. But also a regularly appearing event where you must fend off an aggressive alien species that also comes from the lab of the ancients.
Such random encounters can happen again and again. For instance, when a meteor falls from the sky and leaves a crater with valuable minerals on your planet. If you’re unlucky, it might even crash directly into your home – which, according to Raph Koster, has already happened:
While it didn’t destroy the building because it is protected from destruction, the entire terrain nearby was eliminated, causing the house to float in the air.
Raph Koster in conversation with MeinMMO
For the tester who stood nearby, the sudden attack from above was, according to the devs, one of the “best gaming experiences of all time” because it happened completely out of nowhere and was part of an actual simulation that directly affected the entire environment around the impact site.
But what you shouldn’t expect: A strongly story-focused theme park MMORPG that takes your hand every second and offers you a vast selection of clearly defined attractions – like a Final Fantasy XIV or World of Warcraft.
At the end of the demo, Raph Koster explains once again what his goal for Stars Reach is:
We aim to reinvent the MMO genre. For that, we go back in time, as we’ve come a long way through theme park MMOs in which developers have full control over the player experience.
Instead, we want to offer a feel and experience that sandbox games can provide, namely the feeling of a real world that reacts plausibly and where what you do matters.
Raph Koster in conversation with MeinMMO
The team from Playable Worlds also aims to create an experience that many of us had years ago with our first MMO. That is, not knowing exactly what lies before you. This is made possible because every location in the universe is not only different, but it also has a life of its own and is constantly changing.
Outlook on Early Access
Unfortunately, there isn’t a specific start date for the early access of Stars Reach on Steam yet. It still just says: sometime in summer 2026. The developers want to ensure that the core features are included at a sufficient level of fun before allowing a larger number of players onto the servers.
Raph Koster emphasizes, however, that the early access for Stars Reach is not a marketing gimmick, but that it will still be an unfinished alpha version. Moreover, several contents such as certain professions are still missing, and there will still be placeholders. If you want to be part of the early access launch, you should align your expectations accordingly.
How does it look: Are you looking forward to Stars Reach and are you excited to explore the sandbox universe? Or are you annoyed by something in the concept? Let us know in the comments. What else we are planning for our Grindfest theme week 2026, you can find out in this article: The Grindfest 2026 has started! Here you can find the program for the great MMORPG theme week from MeinMMO
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