Kitten Space Agency now has a Public pre-alpha build available. At time of writing, the current version of the game is 2025.11.4.2791, aka Build 2791, available from ahwoo.com.

Downloads and Contribution

Ahwoo is a company set up by Dean Hall to handle the distribution of and contributions for KSP.

Downloading the game requires an Ahwoo account, which is the same Ahwoo account used for the official KSA Forums. Login with Discord is an option, but not required. The game is free to download, and there is the option of sending a contribution, but it is not required.

What's the game like?

From Dean;

The current build is more than a tech demo but less than a game, deliberate as we have focused on the foundational technology to deliver the game to the future. What you can do is play around with this foundation, primarily controlling the loaded rockets and seeing how the orbital physics and basic collisions work

If you're expecting to design rockets and build space stations... you're a bit early. This isn't like playing KSP in 0.17, where it's a game that's just a bit janky and unpolished - there's no ship building, no docking, the UI is janky and kinda awful, no explosions, and not much to do. If any of those are what you want, wait out.

How do I report bugs?

Submit any bug reports on the Kitten Space Agency Bug Report forum, not here.

Can I run the game?

Hard to know - try! It's free. You probably need a mid-range somewhat-modern system for the game to run, but no guarantee anything older won't work. Some people have been able to run the game on integrated graphics.

Known Issues

From Dean;

We are tracking issues with older cards, especially AMD 5000 and 6000 series. Expect other weird edge case issues around GPUs and such. The technology we are using (BRUTAL) is brand new; and this is a huge ask for any engineering team to work through. Much of the work you would get for "free" with an engine is oriented to try solve a lot of these issues, and so we have to work through the various different platform and GPU idiosyncrasies. We also have not optimized our GPU handling, so cards that don't have a lot of VRAM may run into issues. The settings default to the highest level, when you boot the game.

Most notable is the "earth turned into a giant white sphere" bug. The first thing to try is to run the game with "Earth Only" and all the settings turned down.

Linux and Mac?

There is no official Linux or Mac support. Do not ask for official ports yet, we're early days. The developers know we'd like it, and they'll make the decisions down the line. If you want support for linux, there's a handful of threads on the KSA Forums you can try for help;

• Troubleshooting KSA Pre-Alpha on Linux - some tips and troubleshooting advice.
• One True Linux Thread - compilation of configs and hardware that has or hasn't worked for people.

There's also a Linux chat in the discord server. Generally speaking - run the game under Wine with whatever tool you prefer (Bottles, Lutris, Protontricks, or just raw command line), you'll need to install DotNet Desktop 9 and maybe the Vulkan SDK, and that should work.

I've seen reports of users running the game on Intel (x64) Macs, not sure about the newer ARM64 Macs. There's at least one forum thread, too.

This Subreddit

These have been rolled into the actual subreddit rules instead of just being here - they all still functionally apply, though.

The same "posting rules" still apply;

1. Please avoid posting questions that you can find an answer to in the FAQ, or with a search of the subreddit.
   • Please don't post and ask if your computer can run the game. Try it yourself, comment here, look in the forums.
2. Please avoid questions that are too early to have answers
3. "Will the game have xyz" - see (1) and (2).
4. Discord or Forum Support
   • We have nothing to do with the Discord server (other than copying stuff from it) - don't ask us, contact the Discord moderators or ask on their forums.
   • I have written "I am not affiliated with Rocketwerkz" in every place imagineable and I still get people messaging me for a job.
5. Hype-posting or "I'm so excited!"
   • I've allowed a few through, but keep it to a simmer.
6. "I don't like cats"
   • It's all been said! Unless and until we get any sort of news about it, it's all been said before.
   • Here's every post on the topic so far.
7. Please avoid posting about game storefronts, "The game should be on Steam/EGS/GOG" etc.
   • It's a settled topic for now - Dean has made his intentions clear, and members of the community have made their wishes clear.
   • Unless he makes a new announcement on the topic, it's all been said before.
   • Here's every post on the topic so far.
8. No pictures of your actual cat.
   • It's a game about cats, allowing pictures of actual cats is the slipperiest of slopes.
   • If you have a cat pic at the end of a gallery of other pictures (the 'cat tax') that's fine, but don't just slap on cat pictures to a text post for some attention.
9. Links to login-gated sites are blocked. This includes Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook.
   • Reddit doesn't seem to mind Discord direct links - previously it blocked them and wouldn't let me approve the comment.

If you have feedback about the subreddit - let me know. I'm trying to thread a fine line between "keep it related to the game" and not stifling every bit of fun anyone tries to have. I have the Ultimate Downvote (removing a post) and I try not to over-use that power.

From Dean in Discord:

Development Recap One Year One

Did an interview with ShadowZone (which you can view on their patreon now, please remember independent journalism isn't free. Support your favorite content creators wherever you can), made me realize that a lot has happened in the last year, and this was also a good chance to cover off on the massive amount of work that is ongoing. Over the past year the vast majority of our work has been into "core" architecture. Specifically simulation and rendering, especially to allow both to run independently.

Rendering

As part of rendering we have had to develop our pipelines. This involves some very complicated decisions, such as what file formats to use through to how we want to 'talk' to the GPU. The underlying software (BRUTAL Framework) has also undergone a lot of changes through this process as well. One primary other point of help has been Felipe who attends not just KSA steering, but is also using BRUTAL funded by the studio for another project. Felipe has been able to help us drive new approaches for rendering along with a lot of evolutionary work from the "Enterprise" team (who maintain BRUTAL). You will see commits starting now for the latest update to BRUTAL, which brings a change in approach that extends options for the future along with some other niche new uses of Vulkan (Graphics API). The enterprise team, along with Morrow, are also bringing in a new approach to our rendering that is more cleaned up and scalable. Things like "bindless" will be thrown around, which Felipe has been using to great effect.

Spherical Billboarding

All this technical work is then pushed even further by Blackrack and Linx. It really does absolutely blow me away with how the team are "feeding" off each other, where ideas are spawning other ideas like cascading success. The ultimate of this is our approach to planet rendering, which we call "spherical billboarding". Billboarding is a useful tool for rendering objects at a distance as "cards", that is a 2D image on a quad that always faces the player. When the game boots, we generate libraries of spheres that are subdivided in different ways. At close distances, the spheres have their subdivision densely packed around the "reference vertex". At a distance, the subdivision is spread more evenly. The aim of this is to give an even distribution of quad density. However, this gets extremely complex as the reference vertex needs to be oriented to the player, but also snapped so you don't get vertex swimming. This means that a lot of transforms need to be done to do texture stuff.

Additionally Linx and Blackrack have done some tremendous innovation in how world authoring happens. Linx has managed to extract better terrain from a reduction in reliance on the heightmap (the texture) and instead doing work "realtime" to calculate erosion and such. You can see this work in the latest screenshots, when coupled with Blackrack's work - is tremendous. This work is beyond that which you see in rendering for engines even like Unreal 5, with the team able to go to the absolute cutting edge papers for implementation of features. It is hard to overstate, from my perspective, just how exciting it is to watch these folks work.

The good news here is that I consider Spherical Billboarding entirely proved as a technological approach. All our imprecision issues were solved, and our asset pipeline together with the texture changes have proven we are going to be able to deliver the quality and scale we want, within even the existing toolset. Work will begin soon from a content perspective to start delivering a custom system utilizing this toolset.

Vessels and Parts

This work has been in development now for some time, and you are starting to see this scafold actually get used. I actually just switched over the default vessel to our "New Gemini", that is made out of parts using Daishi's custom Gemini parts. Morrow has been building an entire rendering pipeline to support this, especially at scale. This also clips heavily into Dan's work with clustered lighting (shadows). This "architecture first" approach for parts is absolutely vital. We focused on the hardest parts of part scale - the rendering. The other elements (collision, resources, etc...) are certainly complex - but their structures don't involve coordination with the GPU so don't have quite the same OS gate that the rendering does. If we don't get the rendering of the parts right, we simply cannot achieve scale. So this has been a huge focus. I would argue that the work is now speaking for itself, the art is exceptional and it is looking exceptional in game.

From here you will see this continuing to expand out, with the part functionality incrementally improving. Once we have a critical mass of part "implementations", we will use these as usecases for refactoring and applying an overall consistent data approach to the parts. We've tended to find this "middle outwards" approach to technical design more robust, even if it sometimes takes longer. This is because instead of imaginary usecases defining the architecture (often resulting in overconfidence), we wait till we have a few actual usecases before sitting down and coming up with the overall architecture, and then going through a small degree of refactor. This might seem somewhat odd; but the studio has found enormous success so far with this approach.

Kittens

The animation pipeline has been a huge success, although this approach was reliant on the updated version of BRUTAL which KSA has just been ported too. Now the work begins to get the showcase in BRUTAL for the kittens, actually into the game itself. The first pass will allow you to push a button, and a kitten will appear in EVA that you can move around. This will ensure, as a final approval, that the kitten looks right in the lighting and materials. It will allow us to all do a real sea-trial of the animation system and confirm that it all works to the standard we want. Not to mention, it's going to be really awesome to be able to move a Kitten around in EVA.

Public Build Release/Contributions

This is "imminent". The build is considered acceptable by the team, although I did "no-go" it at the last steering. I want a little more time, as this is a short week for us here in New Zealand, we had a lot of people out sick, and we had a lot of new technology go in this week. So we will see where the build is at, at the steering next week. That would mean, everything going to plan, the build would be fully public from next week at the earliest. This would also open up contributions to the project, for the first time. The aim for this, hopefully, will be to secure the future for the project. We'd be able to establish if the projects mission would work: making the game completely free and API independent. It would also confirm whether the project can get more ambitious with it's hiring, that is hire more people, and keep the existing staff paid more (hint: not me, I mean our amazing stuff). I think we already pay very well, but I would like to be able to ensure our staff are paid really well for their future. I think they're doing some of the best work I've seen.

Summary

The project has kind of been a victim of its own success over the past year. Technology wise much has worked so well that we have then ended up leaning into it more. This has made fully public builds more complex, with more moving parts to achieve. Finally we are almost there. I expected a lot more trouble along the way, especially technically. This should not be read as to mean it has been smooth sailing, nor that it will continue to be. We have hired really good people, we've equiped them well with technology. We've divided responsibilities up and put trust in the people. We've also consistently forced a focus on first principles actively fighting arguments of "but this is how we do it in video games". For a project like this I think that is critically important.

Overall, regardless of what happens with this game in future and out industry as a whole - I can say the last year has been my favorite year in my whole career. I'm absolutely honored to be working with such a talented team. I think, largely, their work speaks for itself.