Approximately Up FAQ

A modular spaceship building sim by Approximately Games, released on Steam on August 6, 2026 for $24.99. You bolt a ship together from frames, thrusters, sensors and logic blocks, fly it first-person from its own deck, and take it to a system of planets on delivery and exploration objectives — solo or in online co-op with up to four players.

$24.99 USD on Steam, with regional pricing applied. It launched with a 20% intro discount to $19.99 for the first 10 days, which ended on August 16, 2026. There is no free version — the demo was removed from Steam shortly before the full release.

No, and the comparison shows up often enough that people search for it directly. Both are modular ship builders, but Approximately Up is a single-developer game built around first-person flight from your own deck, an in-game logic and cabling layer you wire by hand, and a fixed set of named planets with objectives. There is no shared codebase, publisher or studio between the two.

The Steam store page says 15 unique planets, checked September 1, 2026. The developer's March 8, 2026 devlog, written before release, said the full version 'should contain 17 planets'. Both numbers come from the developer, five months apart, and no patch note has reconciled them. Our planets page lists every world named in a source you can open, marked by whether the developer named it or players did.

The part that catches most first-time pilots is that the Moon has an atmosphere, so the thruster mix that got you off Earth is not automatically the mix that lands you. You need enough downward-facing thrust to arrest a descent, an altimeter to know when to start, and ideally a Braking Point System to automate deceleration. Our moon landing guide covers the approach in order.

Yes. The Steam categories list both Single-player and Online Co-op, and the store description frames co-op as up to four players rather than as a requirement. Every objective is reachable alone; co-op mostly changes who gets blamed when a thruster is mounted backwards.

There is no console version and no developer announcement of one as of September 1, 2026 — despite 'approximately up ps5' and 'approximately up xbox' being among the most-searched questions about the game. The Steam page lists Windows only, with no Steam Deck compatibility rating published.

Patch 1.0.110, released August 31, 2026, identified the cause: a single component attached to nothing — a loose label was the example the developer gave — starts colliding with other parts during flight, and the collisions snowball until the ship comes apart. The same patch added an exclamation mark in H mode on every unconnected component so you can find it before launch.

No. It is a paid single-player and co-op sim with no promo code system, no in-game currency to redeem and no live-service rewards. Searches for codes, keys and unlocks around this game lead to key resellers and piracy sites rather than anything the developer runs.

The developer runs an official Discord, linked from the Steam store page and the official site at approximatelyup.com — it 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.

Yes, heavily. Twelve patches landed between August 6 and August 31, 2026, and on August 17 the developer answered the question directly in a devlog: Approximately Up will keep receiving significant updates for at least the next 3-5 years. Our updates page tracks every patch with what it changed.

It ran for almost six months from February 23, 2026, was much larger than a typical demo, and was removed from Steam shortly before the August 6 release — the developer described it as having worked more like an open beta. Demo save files and blueprints do not carry into the full game as a supported feature, and the two demo events, Fred's Quest and Fred's Star, are no longer playable.