There was one new builder this month via the new way with Ko-Fi commissions, but they didn't give me a name.

Total contributions for September are 386 bucks. This includes the first 1.5 days of Epic Games Store Revenue at end of August, which totaled to €142.44. So for EGS, I count the values from the month before the reporting one, as it looks like I get the final amount paid out at the end of the next month always. Then it's easier for me to use this value. I'll share more about the store next in the next report when the results for the first full month are in.

Thank you all for your contributions!

Now let's have a quick look back at the third year of StarbaseSim development:

• Almost the full first half of the third year was spent on implementing flying in multiplayer with new controllers.
• You can fly as many rockets as you want now with a pretty decent attitude and position controller.
• Overhauled the booster and ship with awesome highly detailed models by @ChameleonCir.
• Put the game on Epic Games Store, making it much easier to use multiplayer and keeping it updated.
• Did the first Unreal Engine update from 5.2 to 5.4. Probably won't make these updates too often...

In numbers:

• hit 1800 followers on X @StarbaseSim
• 884 subs on Youtube @ashtorak
• 33 paying members on Patron (110 total),  €172 per month
• still just around $30 per month on ko-fi, but a first commission in September brought it to $56 this month at least

The following Itch numbers are totals for all three years:

• views: 47.5k
• downloads: 16.1k
• payments: 106
• gross revenue: $1035

Itch numbers may be falling off a bit now since a lot of payments go via other channels, especially now with Epic Games Store. Also, there weren't much updates of the Itch version due to slow development overall with the controller stuff and everything.

In general, in the third year growth was much lower overall. Of course, there haven't been released a whole lot of fancy updates and there is still missing half of the launch site. So, it's not too surprising. I am surprised though how slow everything went with the development in Unreal Engine. Not just because the multiplayer things. Even overhauling the booster and ship models took very long. Hard to imagine that in last year's report I was fabulating  about going to the Moon maybe. Couldn't be further from it now!

Also since I'm broke again. Last year I wrote that I was applying for social welfare and I finally got it in November. But the whole process was super annoying and so I didn't continue with it. Instead, I am looking into getting into a normal engineering day job again now. Also to be able to work on some hardware again and not sit on the PC working on the game the whole day, every day, to the point that I didn't even get to see much of what was going on at Starbase anymore apart from the weekly RGV stream and some stuff that was shared on Discord.

Putting the game on the Epic Games Store was partially also in the hope that maybe it would do very well, so I could continue working full time on it, but with spending a bit less time. That didn't turn out to be the case. Looking at whole of September, it will be something like €600 revenue on EGS and if you add on top the other contributions, maybe it would barely be enough to survive. But keeping the revenue up like this after the EGS launch, would require to continue working 24/7, producing updates and promoting the game. I don't want to do that anymore. I want to play around more with the fun things again, and I can do that in my free time after the day job is done.

So, going forward, we will have less frequent updates and less content in them. But maybe they are going to be more fun, at least for me.

Also, I should mention that another reason why development was slow at the end of the third year was because I got a little bit of social life suddenly in June...the kind that will also require a bit more of a stable income now ;)

So, overall the year was as busy as expected. I guess, the next one will be the same. It will just be a bit easier on the mind for me, when I'm not poor anymore :D

The problem is, that I had to get it out as soon as possible, in the hope to make some money, as my savings are basically zero now. So either this works right now or I have to get an actual job and reduce the amount of time spent on this substantially.

This also led to having it rushed out within a week and an overlooked bug that prevented the use of multiplayer, that I had to patch day one, that could have been easily prevented with a little more time and testing beforehand. On the other hand, I didn't expect the Epic Games Store to be so bad. Not just on the end user side, but also on the developer side. The main issue is, that every build and thus small patch has to be reviewed by Epic first before it can go live, which can take a whole day easily. So quick fixes to the live version are impossible like this. That's not good, because sometimes there are just things overlooked during testing, sometimes big things.

So not too happy with the Epic Games Store overall so far. But let's see what happens over the next days.

There are two new builders this month: Welcome Lewis K and Midnight Blue!

Total contributions for August are 414 bucks. This includes the first 1.5 days of Epic Games Store Revenue at end of August, which totaled to €173.84. So the other contributions went down considerably compared to July due to two less producers.

Thank you all very much for the support! :)

There also have been quite a few changes to how supporting is organized now. This Ko-Fi post gives more details.

Apart from that there were some private things going on, that kept me even more busy, so that I even forgot about the report yesterday!

What's even worse, I totally forgot to check, if also on Ko-Fi someone reached builder level!

So we can welcome a total of eight new builders this month: Welcome Apmub, Kyler Caulfield, RAF and the rest anonymous for the time being!

On top of that, we have a new producer: Taniel from https://www.youtube.com/@tanielsspacestation2908

Total contributions for July are 302 bucks.  

At least contributions still go up a bit. But not enough to do this full time. So there will be some changes coming soon. Also we are already at 87 builders in total. I will change this system also probably when we reach 100 to make tracking easier for me and I will increase the threshold amount, maybe double it or so.

Anyway, it looks mostly good now. Just cleaning out a few more small bugs, hopefully small, and then we should be good to go. I really only want to add the new ship model and get this version out without adding much more features for the moment. Just to see that the 5.4 version is working also in the wilds. Oh, and then I also want to get it up and running on the Epic Games Store, at least for supporters initially. So that it's easier to use multiplayer and prepare it for a future release as a normal game.

New Itch release will happen after this update or when we reach 1000 subs on Youtube, whatever is first.

There is one new builder this month: Welcome Prehistoricman !

Total contributions for June are 254 bucks.  

I collect the money and when it's enough I'll donate it at the end of the month or when I do the next monthly report. Just so that it's not eaten up by fees.

If 10% seems low to you, remember that your contribution is mainly to show appreciation and to support the making of the game. You decide how much this is worth to you. If you want to donate to a charity, do it directly.

I want to do this also as a motivator for me to be engaged in charitable causes on a regular basis also in the future.

Update: 

I haven't been very consistent with what I put the 10% on and I don't like this method that much anyway, so I will discontinue this and adapt the amount and time of donation to what I can afford. Because currently I can't really afford anything, if I want to continue full time developing StarbaseSim. Maybe later on I can do donations on a regular basis, but not with fixed amounts or shares.

There is one new builder: Welcome Ian!

Total bucks for May are 250. 

While the Ko-Fi goal for the hard disks hasn't been met yet, it's close and I already bought the following disks as I need the SSD for the Unreal Engine upgrade. Here is what  I got:

My biggest single investment so far! I need it since the Unreal source alone is over 200 GB and then the StarbaseSim project is growing every day as well. When you do a few builds you add a lot more to it. With some assets and other often used stuff, the 1 TB SSD that I had until now filled up fast. So 2 TB should be good for a little longer and then I can upgrade again if necessary. Doesn't hurt to get a fresh SSD every couple of years anyway. The HDD is just for data storage and backups and should be good for a very long time.

That means I'm now migrating to UE5.4. I want to see, if I can use the new multiplayer physics and prediction stuff. There might be also other improvements and features that could come in handy. Of course, compiling everything without errors and trying out the new things will take a while and has some risk. With 5.3 there were some issues, so I didn't pull through with it. But they weren't that big, so I'm optimistic that it will work this time.

Thank you all very much for the support! :)

Anyway, total for this month was 325 bucks - new best month again!

There has been just one new builder, which is anonymous for the time being.

I didn't invest into anything, apart from the usual Patreon subscriptions to modelers and info people, as I just worked on the controller most of the time.

Thank you all very much for the support! :)

There have been a total of 1102 downloads for the Windows version and a whopping 57 for Linux. So still half a percent of Linux users, as before. What's nice to see is, that the base level of views and downloads is much higher than before. Of course, there was the 3rd Starship test flight at 14th of March, which helped keeping interest elevated. Funny though that you can't see any spike from the flight this time. Probably due to the release of the Unreal version two weeks earlier. Anyway, it's good to see some stable interest with 500-ish downloads in the initial rush and then another 500 in the following month.

There were six payments directly on Itch for a total of ~50 $. Not too great, but compared to what I get usually on Itch, it's pretty much as expected. Of course, there are also 20 Patrons and 6 kofis (monthly Ko-Fi contributors) as well as a couple of one time kofis, and a direct PayPal contribution of 3x 15 €.

Adding everything up, we get a total of 287 bucks - best month so far! In $ it could be a 300+ maybe even. I should probably start with some more serious accounting at some point :D

We also got a lot of new builders: 7 in total and with name Logge1986, Borbarad_2, Taniel and Connor Scott - welcome! If this continues, I might have to increase the builder threshold again as well!

Looking onwards, there should be a new smaller update released in April for supporters. They already know more about it. Else, follow the Twitter/Youtube to stay informed. 

Thank you all very much for the support! :)

There have been two new builders, one of them Chaos_Demon - welcome! 

Total contributions were 154 $

Not much more to say right now as the Unreal version has just been released here on Itch for the first time today. So it was very busy and there will be more to tell in the March report.

Thank you all very much for the support! :)

Anyway, there are three new builders, one of them being CaptinD2 - thank you!

Total contributions are pretty decent again with 256 $ and there are the first monthly contributors on Ko-Fi. I might have to increase the minimum amount though. Because there is a Stripe transaction for every 3 $ amount, which has 15% fees just for Stripe only! 

There have been a few contributions on Itch again as well, most of all a 100 $ one by @steveMmattison - the biggest single contribution so far.

Thank you all very much for the support! :)

In other news, when I add these contributions to the Ko-Fi goal later, we will have reached it! I'll write more about that there and on Twitter.

Also, in December we finally got the first part of the flying stuff for Unreal engine in an acceptable state. But there is a lot more to do in this regard as the controls will also be improved along the way compared to Unity.

There are five new Builders! Also because I missed some earlier apparently. Anyway, thanks and welcome to Iwo, Kendall and the other three new Builders!

There even has been a new Itch contribution of 5.55 $ :O - thanks to the one lone contributor! :D

Download numbers were quite decent as well and that with still no updates since April:

An Unreal version will land soon here though with the Ko-Fi goal already at 78%. I updated it already a few days ago this time.

I also started to invest in the Unreal version and bought some explosion effects from the market place for 5 bucks. It's not really much better than the Unity one and I could have re-built that one in UE, but it was quite cheap, so I could save some time there.

Now on to 2024! I have the feeling it will be even more busy. At least I'm more comfortable with Unreal Engine now :)

We also saw the second test flight of Starship in November (on a side note: I always find it funny how some say it was a success and others no, it was a failure, while in reality it was just a partial success (or partial failure^^)). You can see the date of the flight clearly in the download numbers:

Unfortunately this resulted in zero contributions on Itch. At least the other channels were similar as last time. So we got a total of 175 $ via KoFi and Patreon.

KoFi is nice, but I don't get any monthly contributions there. All have been one offs so far. Haven't been a lot in total though, so let's see how it develops.

Since I have been using Patreon for one year now, let's make a comparison. Here are the total contributions for the first year of Patreon and the same time period for Itch:

Patreon: 1310 € | after fees: 1082 €

Itch:             655 $ | after fees: 555 $

On both platforms there is about 10% platform fee and the rest is payment processing, which is in the same area also around 10% for both platforms. So no clear winner there. At least, if you pay the suggested fee on Itch. You can also choose to pay zero. But that's not how to do business^^

Anyway, in October we got a total of $156. This includes some coffees via ko-fi. But only 1 $ via Itch. I guess, it shows that there haven't been any updates here. But we are getting closer on the ko-fi goal to bring the Unreal version over here as well. It should be above 1/3 already when I update it later.

No builders this month.

There has been one new builder this month Skelly and last month I was so busy, that I totally forgot to mention OV_104_Atlantis as builder and producer.

There won't be new producers for the time being as I started a ko-fi and didn't make tiers there and might remove them also from Patreon completely. One reason for this is also because I want to have everyone mentioned in-game equally next to each other, which makes it easier to set up when putting it on some wall or so.

Total contributions this month were about $200. I won't do separate listings per platform anymore though as it is not very exact anyway with the different currencies and how and when it's converted and transferred to PayPal, Payoneer or now Stripe as well.

There was no payout in September. There are still no real investments apart from a few small Patreon subscriptions.

Thank you very much for all the contributions! :)

Now let's look back at the second year:

• The tank farm has been properly integrated and thus could be used by Zack in his videos, which created a huge wave of contributions. Special thanks go out to Zack and crew here! :)
• It was followed by the transport (SPMTs) and build site update.
• The latter already showed problems with floating point precision in Unity, so I started to investigate other game engines.
• Created the Unigine demo in about a month 
• Created the Unreal Engine demo in a bit more than a month
• Moved on with Unreal and pushed several bigger and smaller updates
• Unreal version now has part of build site with Megabay crane, SPMTs, basic Mechazilla for stacking of basic booster and ship
• and everything with multiplayer!
• Started a Patreon
• Started a ko-fi page as alternative to Patreon as I was not super happy with it

In numbers:

• hit 1000 followers on Twitter @StarbaseSim
• got 20 active Patrons (38 total), €127 per month
• and my first coffees on ko-fi :D

The following Itch numbers are totals (so including the first year):

• views: 26.7k
• downloads: 8.7k
• payments: 81
• gross revenue: $754

Almost 7x as much downloads and payments compared to last year with the proportion staying the same at almost one payment per 100 downloads. However, the Itch numbers are only partially comparable as there is Patreon now as well and for the last half year there were only updates on Patreon. If we get another 7x or maybe 10x even in the coming year, especially on Patreon, it would become actually sustainable. Let's hope I can survive until then! :D

Because after two years of full time game development, I'm finally broke now. As this was foreseeable, I already applied for so called "Bürgergeld" in May. It's a form of social welfare in Germany that is supposed to provide the basic means of living, supposedly without too much hassle and part of it you can also get on top of a small income. This seemed quite attractive at that point as it would allow to continue to focus full time on StarbaseSim - compared to doing part time stuff or taking on a credit and worrying about paying it back. On the other hand, I was also a little bit curious actually how the whole process works, because you hear lots of (horror) stories about it. So why not get some first hand experience? As it turns out, the wheels of bureaucracy grind very slowly...as expected. What I didn't expect was, that it is such a big hassle to provide all the documentation in the correct way. So there is still no money in sight from that direction after shuffling documents for more than 4 month. Maybe I have to do some part time stuff after all.

I'm wondering how much more payments would there have been, if it wouldn't have been free to download. The 8k number includes also patches though, so in the end it's far less unique people, who downloaded it.  So maybe just a couple of 100 people would have paid upfront? But I want to get it into as many hands as possible. So there will always be a free version. It might just be a bit older or without certain features like multiplayer. We will see, how it goes with the Epic Games Store version that will come sooner or later.

Else, the plan for next year is the same as before, follow the development of the real Starbase and Starship program, and maybe even jump ahead a little bit...like Moon or Mars base?

Progress has been very slow unfortunately. I couldn't really copy paste much from the Unity version, and every time I gained a little something by it, I lost it right away when taking care of the multiplayer stuff. Sure, we have multiplayer now. It's fun and all, but I don't know, if it's been worth it.

At least a little bit of content for Twitter and Youtube fell off from the multiplayer test sessions in August, so it helped to increase the contributions a bit again. There were also two new builders, but both anonymous so far.

Contributions this month were: Itch 42 $ and Patreon 135 €.

I also made a payout again from Patreon over 127 € as it works within a day there . I needed it as I'm pretty much broke now. So there won't be any investments for some time probably or rather everything will be invested in myself to keep me going :D

I have basically two options now: Apply for social welfare and continue on a shoe string budget to be able to invest all time in this and hope it grows quickly now or get an actual job and work part time on this. I'm not really a part timer though and progress would probably come close to a stand still. So I might have to go with the first option, at least for a little bit.

Also, I applied for an Epic Mega Grant at end of May and now finally got a mail that they reviewed it, but didn't select it for a grant unfortunately. That would have been epic right now in the current situation, but I guess, my application was a bit too scuffed maybe. For example, I included a link to a test build of the Unreal version (which was pretty crappy at that time anyway), but later deleted the file when cleaning up my google drive without thinking about the application. So when they tried to open it now in August they just got a broken link. xD

Oh well, maybe I try to re-apply a bit later when the Unreal version is in a better state.

Finally, I want to give a shout out also to all the smaller contributors on Itch and Patreon, that I don't write individually to. Even though it's not too many people yet, I have to draw a line somewhere or it will get too much for me. If you are one of them, just know that I see every contribution with your name or email and everything is highly appreciated, thank you! :)

The builder names will be added soon in the UE version.

Contributions this month were: Itch 5.55 $ and Patreon 78 €.

I also payed out a total of about 230 bucks, so 23 € will go to the charity pot.

There were no investments as I was occupied with the basic Unreal Engine stuff.

Patreon is also down a little to 65 €.

Anyway, since there was no update again and in general not much activity on social media and such from my side at least, there were only four contributions in total on Itch, but at least one builder, welcome

Starman 42 !

Total contributions were $37 via Itch and €98 via Patreon.

Thank you all very much! :)

Unfortunately this means again no big game updates in April as well and hence not a whole lot of contributions. Just the first Starship integrated flight test could alleviate the numbers a bit.  Not much though, in the end it resulted in similar levels as the Zack video earlier this month. The download numbers were increased around the 20th also due to two small patches during that time. 

There was only one new builder who remains anonymous for the time being. I am wondering, if I should increase the recommended contribution amount again. Seems not many even realize that there is something like this. So that if they put down the larger amount they also get a little surprise sometimes :D

Total contributions were $95 via Itch and only €6 via Patreon since billing was paused for most of the month.

Thank you all very much! :)

Anyway, there were only 2 new Builders in March:

• DoubleDiver
• Norantio

Overall, there were few contributors, but they made it up by being more generous. Thank you very much to everyone who has contributed! :)

Total contributions were $65  via Itch and €115 via Patreon. The latter was a bit lower also since I paused billing as long as the Unigine investigation is going on. I guess, this wouldn't have been necessary. But I didn't know how long it would take and what would come out of it. So it didn't feel right to me to continue billing people. But so far I am pretty confident that I can actually make the switch. In any case, the test version should be ready next week for Patrons and then I'll reactivate billing again.

There are 4 new Builders, one is anonymous, the others are:

• @steveMmattison
• Liam Edwards
• vtomi

Thank you all very much! Contributions from Itch are $34 and from Patreon €132. Patreon went pretty well with 7 new members and a 

• new producer: Joe Wattz

We just hit 50 Builders now in February. That means I will increase the Builder threshold to $15 as mentioned in the January report.

I haven't done a payout in February, but there was enough money still on Paypal from January for my only expenditure this month which was $50 for Ryer for the new theme music. I guess, I could also add or mention at least the monthly payment for Github Copilot, wich is $10 as I am using this just for programming for StarbaseSim. It's not super useful, but it saves a little time every now and then, and it's always interesting to see what it comes up with. Other than that there are the usual $32 for the Starbase Patreons. 

Let's hope March turns out a bit better, because I want to start investing in some Asset Store stuff.

Overall it went pretty good with 14 new Builders, most of them Anonymous again. Here are the named Builders:

• Keefe
• Joe Wattz
• Ethan W

Thank you very much!

There are 46 builders in total now. At 50 I will increase the threshold to $15 so that it stays a bit more exclusive and it's less work for me :)

I'll also reduce the default amount on the download prompt. Let's see if all the anonymous people just payed the $9 because they thought they have to before downloading. It's still strange that they won't answer the mails at all. Maybe they don't use this mail account or my mails just land in the spam folder all the time^^

Total contributions were 235 bucks from Itch and Patreon. 

I made a payout to Paypal of $111, from which went 20 to FoxStudios@Sushifoxxstudio and  32 to Starbase Patreons.

Zack released Episode 2 of his latest investigation. Itch analytics clearly show the Zack effect: 

Most of the contributions came in after his videos. Without publicity like this, there are almost no views. So again a huge thank you Zack! :)

We got 12 new Builders in December, most of them Anonymous, but four gave names:

• Azuki @azukisnowpaw 
• Peak 
• Chris
• StarFire

Thank you very much! I am just wondering, if people don't get my mails or just don't care about having a name mentioned. I also removed the anons from the in-game list now as it would get too much and doesn't really make sense to list them anyway. So I have a bit longer until I figure out where to put all the names in the future :D

Total contributions were 184 bucks from Itch and Patreon. 

This time I made payouts to Payoneer to test this out. I think from Patreon it arrived almost instantly on Payoneer and from there it took a day or so to arrive on my bank account. Pretty good! From Itch it took the typical 12 days until it arrived on Payoneer. Fees were similar, so from $82 revenue, 64.82 were payed out (it seems Payoneer collected another $3 when the money arrived on their side, but I think this covers already currency conversion, even though it was still displayed as $. So not really sure. It didn't show any more fees when paying it out in € though apart from what they take to transfer it to the bank account, but that was similar to the Patreon transaction that was already in €). Overall the fees are pretty similar to Paypal.

With the payout from Patreon I won't go into detailed numbers as there it reduces the available payout by the money that goes to other creators which are already six Starbase related people and it's getting more every day :D

In total I received €100 on my bank account. So another 10 to the humanitarian aid bucket. 20 went to FURScience@Sushifoxxstudio and I became the first Patron of Nick@ChameleonCir for 8€/month. Another 85 went to the code signing certificate. Technically this was already last month, but I didn't mention it there.

So what's the verdict about Payoneer? Not sure, it seems pretty similar to Paypal. I guess, I have to use it a bit more. It's always good to have two payment providers anyway.

Happy New Year! :)

In the future, early access shouldn't be much longer than a week, but it might vary. The small update for my other game which I also released in November only stayed in Patreon for a couple of days. I implemented some features there that I am now also going to use on StarbaseSim. 

The collaboration with Zack brought in a lot of new builders and patrons. Interestingly, most of them came from his tweets before the video was released and also the downloads after the release of the video haven't been much higher in total. It seems, not as many people realized from the video that this is actually a game that you can just download and play yourself. After all, his video has 134k views right now, which is almost 10x his Twitter followers...

Anyway, total contributions for November are 137 bucks ("bucks", because I am just counting together € and $ for the moment as they are almost 1:1 still, and on Itch I have $ available for payout, while on Patreon it's in €).

There 8 new builders, 4 anonymous as of now. Welcome to:

• Myles Brown 
• mouser58907 
• RamBic
• Chris Terry 

and a special shout out to Zack Golden who is now also a producer on Patreon!

Thank you all very much! :)

Two patrons joined already after announcing it on Twitter two days ago. Thank you very much! I won't mention them here unless they reach Builder level, where you have to pledge the current minimum of €3 for 3 months or choose the €9 level. Since Patreon gave me Euros to choose from, I used them this time as the exchange rate is almost 1:1 anyway currently. However, it looks like Patreon adds fees before you pay, so that I actually get the €3 from the pledge, while you have to pay a little more. On Itch they substract the fees afterwards, so the $9 there are actually 9 for you, which makes it quite a bit cheaper. At least if you only look to get the name in-game. But on Patreon you get a few more benefits. So that equals it out, I guess.

Other than that there was one new Builder for $9: jrees343 - Thanks a lot! :)

Also, I finally got feedback from one anonymous Builder that they are fine with having their name shown, it's ZacK Golden @CSI_Starbase! What an honor to have him join us as one of the first ten Builders. Thank you again as well!

Other than that, there is not much to report for September. I just made a payout to send 35 $ to Sushifoxxstudio. For the payout I started with $83.35 gross revenue, from which Itch took $8.30 and payment providers $8.42 (mostly PayPal) for a net payout to my PayPal account of $66.40. The payout took 12 days to complete. I am now left with $31.40 from which $6.40 will go to some Ukraine help at a later point. For the rest I have to see. If Sam doesn't take it, maybe I'll just put it in my own pocket. Some of it went into Patreon for people like Starship Gazer, RGV and Zack already, but I won't take them into account here as this is more out of personal interest.

Now let's look back at the first year:

The first ever public version of Starbase Simulator has been released one year ago on 1st of October 2021. Since then there have been:

10 more updates

6542 views

1425 downloads

13 payments

$95.35 gross revenue

So about 1 download every 5 views and 1 payment every 100 downloads. No idea, if this is good or bad, but I would have expected the number of payments to be around something like 1% of downloads.

So everyone who does a payment helps to keep it free to download for 99 other people, roughly. Thank you very much!

Thanks also to everyone who contributed in one way or another helping me to get through this first year. I don't know what the second year will bring. But if there isn't a sudden huge uptick in revenue, there will be much less updates for sure, as I have to get an actual job at some point :D

Also, so far I have focused primarily on improving the game and spent almost no time at marketing and spreading the word. Maybe it's time, after the tank farm update is finished, to spend a few weeks on that.

I have looked into using something like OpenModelica, but it seems a bit complicated to integrate with Unity and wouldn't work on all platforms anyway. So I decided to make a simplified physics simulation for the tanks with only some temperature dependency for the liquids. It seems to work fine now and I started working on the control panel and soon visualization.  So, a playable version is close...

There are two new builders:

actarnoff - 15.55 $

adrilasar - 9 $

Thank you very much! Every contribution is highly appreciated. Also non-monetary, like bug reports where @WiatrakKosmosuX has been very helpful in the last month. Thank you as well! 

:)

At least we got two new Builders, #8 and #9 for 5.55 $, but both anonymous so far. I am starting to wonder, whether people just not read their emails or if it lands in the spam folder or what. At least one of the Builders is kind of famous in the Starbase scene and probably wouldn't mind being mentioned. But he probably would also miss an email easily :D

I also want to mention Creator @Sushifoxxstudio again as they have contributed a lot of blender models.

Many thanks to all of you! :)

Remember: the last out of the first ten Builder spots will be available for just 5$. Then the threshold goes up to 9$. Be quick! It went up as we have ten together now!

Also, I sent Sushi already 11$ ahead of the itch payout. It will be more later, but as I am still waiting to collect a larger amount for payout, I wanted to show already that I am serious with my intentions.

There is a new Creator Brendan Lewis - thank you for the lovely pictures! :)

No Builders again. I guess everyone is out enjoying summer (or winter)? Certainly, I am! That's also one reason why the June update almost slipped to July. If it continues like that, there might not even be a July update :D

The new catcher is also in and it looks and works beautiful.

Now I started working on the Booster QD. I need it and the Ship QD for more detailed propellant loading.

Besides this not much happened as the Senkrechtstarter effect seems to have completely waned off. See pictures from Itch analytics below. You can see how the views go up dramatically already the day before the live stream when he just posted the link, then the peak, followed by the usual exponential decay.

Unfortunately interest went so far down that there aren't even any new contributions.

I am wondering, if I should invest a little bit of time in self promotion or just wait and see if the upcoming Starship and Booster testing brings in a few people.

In any case, a reminder: When we have 10 builders together I will set the threshold to $9.

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Itch analytics for April/May with Senkrechtstarter effect:

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Itch analytics for May with normal levels:

I already started with improving the catcher model, which even has cables and wheels now! Feels much more realistic! It will be in the May update. Besides this, I can finally start to work on raytracing, which I have been waiting for so long.

There was the live stream on the Senkrechtstarter channel which got some 8000 views by now. It also helped to find some builders:

#4 Redacted - $10

#5 Anonymous - $5.55

#6 Anonymous - $5.55

#7 Albrecht Köhler - $25.55

and a smaller donation for a total of $48.15. Thank you all very much! :)

Some money will go to @SAMCG14_ for providing his very nice tower and catcher models. However, I will still wait a bit longer with the payout from Itch to have a larger sum. 

Also, when you send money via Itch, they send me your mail address, where I try to contact you, if you want to be mentioned as builder. If you don't reply,  I will list you as "Anonymous". You can change that any time by sending me an email.

Also, if you make additional contributions I will add them up and when the total is above the threshold you still become a builder (or something like producer which might come as a higher level later).

When we have 10 builders together I will set the threshold to $9.

Unfortunately the Ukraine stuff is still quite some distraction. Now I even have to drive around some refugees which have arrived here in our remote village.

Else I have been focusing fully on getting everything converted to the HD rendering pipeline. I was doing pretty good, but in the end the bugs got me again and there are just so many new settings and options to explore and stuff to optimize.

No new creators or builders.

New Creator:

Sushifoxx Studios @ChatsLapis - thank you for the 33-engine booster model

New Builder:

Daniel Gasco - $5.55

Plus another $4 for a total of 9.55 this month.

I won't do payouts with these small amounts as too much gets eaten by fees. So it stays on itch for the moment.

Later I will put 10% from this also to aid for Ukraine as announced here.

New creators: 

- Owe @Bl3D_Eccentric

- @steveMmattison

No builders :(

1. LAN_Daddy.TV - 7$

2. Space Explorer - 5$

From this money I will send 10 $ to creator Nick, @_AstroGuy_: https://t.co/2nc1HhNSWN as soon as I receive the money from itch (and it looks like it will be actually a bit less than 10$ after all fees).

Happy New Year! :)

Andi (@Ashtorak)

Anyway in the last month I worked mostly on the booster. So there are no new 3d models. But I still have to credit my first two creators:

- SAMCG14: https://twitter.com/SAMCG14

- Nick, @_AstroGuy_: https://t.co/2nc1HhNSWN

Thank you so much for making your models available to the community! You will be listed as creators in the next update.

There are no builders to mention, yet. If you are quick, you can be the first one!

I am not big on crypto. But I have Ethereum, Cardano and BitcoinCash addresses. Would anybody send something to it? I don't know how to credit people though in this case. Just by the address? I guess, for some it could be stored in the block chain. That would be pretty cool, actually.  I should investigate this more.

For the payment via itch.io I use the default cut of 10% for them. So preferably you use their method, so they can run this service.

Land safe! :)

Andi (@Ashtorak)