Approximately Up Radar & Navigation Guide

Two different problems

Navigation here splits into finding things near you and knowing where you are. They use different blocks, and confusing them is why a well-instrumented ship can still get lost.

Radar: finding things

Radar locates objects in your vicinity. The clearest confirmation of what it is for comes from the April 2026 devlog describing the Fred’s Quest event: 24 eel eggs were hidden beneath the surface of an ocean planet, and the devlog states you can locate them using your radar.

That makes radar the tool for the objective layer of the game — packages, cargo, and things deliberately placed for you to find — rather than for interplanetary navigation.

Distance measurement is separate and comes in two ranges. The Distance Meter covers short range and the Long Range Distance Meter covers long, and patch 1.0.100 moved the long-range one from float to double precision. Patch 1.0.105 improved close-range collision detection for both.

Space GPS: knowing where you are

Patch 1.0.104, released August 25, 2026, added the block that answers the position question. The Space GPS outputs distance, longitude and latitude relative to the centre of the universe, which the patch note defines as the Sun.

Two conditions on it, both from that patch note:

• It must be mounted outside the spaceship.
• It needs at least 60% free space around it to work properly.

A correctly wired Space GPS buried inside a hull will not work, and nothing in the interface will tell you why. It is granted as the reward for the Tree Lid mission on Baobara.

Finding a planet you cannot see

Before the Space GPS existed — and still, for worlds whose coordinates you do not know — players navigate by sight. The top-rated Steam community guide for reaching Aundara from the Moon is entirely a visual procedure: aim at a landmark building, orient toward Earth, roll roughly 45 degrees clockwise so Earth’s shadow sits a particular way, then watch the downward-facing camera until a dot appears. That dot is Aundara.

Two things about that method generalise:

• Cameras are navigation instruments. A downward-facing camera feeding a monitor is how you spot a distant body against black. Patch 1.0.009 fixed the camera being locked in Cinematic Mode while seated, which had made this harder than it should have been.
• Distances change between patches. Patch 1.0.005 moved Aundara closer to the Moon, from 115M to 95M. Any visual procedure recorded before August 7, 2026 was recorded against the old distance.

Instruments worth mounting for navigation

• Altimeter — height above surface, the number that matters on every approach.
• Gyro-Line — attitude reference, with its centre line highlighted since patch 1.0.100.
• Axis Rotometer — rotation on the local axes, correctly signed since patch 1.0.006.
• Magnetometer — a field sensor whose power draw dropped from 15 P/s to 5 P/s in patch 1.0.110.
• Space Scanner — added its own manual entry in patch 1.0.104, with the localisation for that page fixed in 1.0.105.

Where each named world sits in the system is on the planets page, and the black hole tunnels guide covers the one route that does not work like the rest of the map.