Approximately Up Blueprints & Steam Workshop Guide

Why blueprints matter more here than in most builders

A ship in Approximately Up is not a loadout, it is an engineering project — thousands of components in the developer’s own description, each wired by hand. Losing one to a bad landing without a blueprint means rebuilding the wiring, not just the shape.

Blueprinting is also how the community works. Steam Workshop is listed in the game’s official Steam categories, alongside Steam Cloud and Steam Achievements, which makes it the sanctioned sharing channel rather than a third-party arrangement.

What the patches tell you about how it behaves

Three published changes are worth knowing, because each one describes a real behaviour:

Workshop browsing was broken and is not any more. Patch 1.0.010 fixed the Workshop “Most Popular” sorting filter, page loading and missing results. The note describes the old symptom precisely: when searching, it often looked like the first page was skipped and pages 2, 3, 4, 5 loaded instead, producing results that looked wrong. If you tried Workshop browsing in the first week and gave up, that was why.

One setting used to vanish from every blueprint. Patch 1.0.007 fixed the Fuel Analyzer mode knob not being saved in blueprints. A design saved before August 9, 2026 will load with that knob back at its default.

You can turn the Workshop off. Patch 1.0.005 added an option to disable the in-game Workshop entirely, for players who would rather not have it in the interface.

Editing without fear

Since patch 1.0.110 on August 31, 2026, the build mode has Undo and Redo with up to 200 steps of history, bound to Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y by default. The same patch added an option to swap those two keys — key bindings are tied to physical keys, so on a QWERTZ layout the defaults land in an awkward place.

That single feature changes how blueprinting works in practice. Before it, iterating on a saved design meant saving defensively before every experiment.

Two checks, both cheap:

H mode. Since 1.0.110, any component connected to nothing shows an exclamation mark. Sharing a blueprint with a loose part shares a ship that will eventually disassemble itself in someone else’s flight — that is exactly the failure the patch was written for.
Which build it was made on. Wiring conventions have changed: the RCS Controller front panel had Yaw and Roll swapped until 1.0.010, the OR gate behaved like an AND until 1.0.005, and integer/float switches defaulted to Integer until 1.0.012. A design from early August may encode a workaround for any of those.

Demo blueprints

The demo ran for almost six months and was removed from Steam shortly before the August 6 release. Exporting designs out of it was a live question at the time — there is a Steam thread asking exactly that — and no patch note describes a supported migration path into the full game. Treat demo-era designs as reference rather than as assets you can import.

The full block reference is on the parts page, and the save system guide covers the separate question of saving a game in progress rather than a design.

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