Approximately Up Demo vs Full Game: What Changed

The demo is gone

The Approximately Up demo launched on February 23, 2026 as part of Steam Next Fest, originally planned to run until March 10. On March 8 the developer extended it to run until full release, citing a community that was growing better than expected. It was removed from Steam shortly before the August 6 release.

If you are searching for the demo now, that is why you cannot find it.

What the demo actually was

The developer’s own account, from the August 1, 2026 post announcing its removal, is unusually candid: the demo had been available for almost six months and was much larger than a typical game demo. Because Approximately Up is a sandbox, some players spent dozens or even hundreds of hours in it. In the developer’s words, it worked more like an open beta — surfacing bugs, collecting feedback, and testing the game across many different machines before the full release.

That history explains something about the game you buy today: the 1.0 build had six months of real-world testing behind it, which is not typical for a solo-developed release.

The two demo events

Both are gone with the demo, and both are worth knowing about because they are still searched for:

• Fred’s Quest (April 11, 2026). It began at the Moon base, Moonstep, where an astronaut called Fred waited under a giant “EEL’S EGGS WANTED” sign. The objective sent you to a nearby ocean planet where 24 eel eggs were hidden below the surface, findable by radar.
• Fred’s Star (June 6, 2026). The demo finale, and by Fred’s own telling a disaster: the eel eggs turned out to be a power source, an attempted wormhole went wrong, the water planet lost its water, the giant plants died, the Eel King vanished, and a blue star ended up closing on the surface.

There was also #NoFrameChallenge in March 2026 — a race to a newly added planet in a ship containing no Frame or Window blocks, no Time Rewind allowed, timed from Moonstep.

How much bigger is the full game?

The developer wrote in March 2026 that the full version is far bigger than the demo itself and “should contain 17 planets”. The Steam store page today says 15 unique planets. Both numbers are the developer’s, five months apart, and no patch note has reconciled them — the planets page lists every world that can actually be traced to a source, which is a third and smaller number.

Does anything carry over?

No supported path has been published. There is a Steam thread from the demo period asking how to export blueprints out of it, and no patch note describes an import. Another thread asks whether you can uninstall the demo after buying the full game, which draws real search volume — the practical answer is that the demo is no longer on Steam to reinstall either way.

One concrete difference worth knowing if you are working from demo-era knowledge: the Wireless Transmitter’s range is 2000 m in the full game, not the 100 m its description claimed until patch 1.0.009 — and 100 m was the actual Demo value.

What the full game added after launch

The demo’s six months of feedback did not stop the changes. Twelve patches landed between August 6 and August 31, 2026, adding Pause, Fast Forward at 3x, Undo/Redo, the Space GPS and the Massmeter. The updates page has all of them.