Approximately Up Braking Point System (BPS) Guide

What it solves

The hardest moment in any flight here is deciding when to start slowing down. Get it wrong in one direction and you overshoot the planet; get it wrong in the other and you waste a long approach crawling in.

The Braking Point System — BPS — automates that decision. It is worth noting up front that players write the name both ways, braking point and breaking point, and search for both. The in-game name is Braking Point System.

The published behaviour

Patch 1.0.010, released August 10, 2026, added one specific capability: support for inputting negative speed values into the BPS, which are interpreted as absolute values. That is the only numeric behaviour the developer has published for this block, so it is the only one stated here — you will find no invented deceleration curves on this page.

What that change means practically is that a value arriving from a sensor with a sign attached no longer needs to be conditioned before it reaches the BPS, which removes a whole class of wiring workaround.

Why people rebuild it anyway

One of the top-rated community guides on Steam for this game is titled around building a better, real Braking Point System — and the existence of that guide is itself the interesting fact. Players with a working stock BPS are still building their own out of logic blocks.

The reason is the same one behind every automation build in this game: a stock system makes one decision, while a hand-built loop can take more inputs. A custom braking build can read altitude from an Altimeter, speed from a Velocity Meter, distance from a Long Range Distance Meter — which moved to double precision in patch 1.0.100 — and mass from a Massmeter since patch 1.0.104, and weight all four.

The blocks that make that possible are the same short list behind every control loop here: gates, a Delay, a Round block whose halfway values round up since 1.0.104, and integer/float switches that have defaulted to Float since patch 1.0.012.

Building your own, in outline

Read current speed and distance to the target.
Compute whether the distance remaining is less than the distance needed to stop at current deceleration.
Fire retro thrust when it is, proportionally rather than as an on/off switch.

Step 3 is the part that separates a smooth stop from a violent one, and it is exactly what a community video demonstrates for landing — variable thrust produced entirely from in-game logic gates.

Braking handles the horizontal problem; hover mode handles the vertical one, and most complete automation setups run both. The wiring fundamentals for either are in the logic and wiring guide, and every block named here appears with its full patch record on the parts reference.

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