• 04 October 2026
• Mr.Pendragon

Why ducks get stuck, 520 shelves, and an MTU nearly here

Friday's Covital Show was a party, and the most useful part was hiding between the dance numbers.

Among four island dance crews, a live poll and a cameo from PAM, Marijn Zwemmer, a senior game engineer at Klang, explained the machine to host John Holten. How Seedlings and delivery drones choose a path. Why one plot with 520 shelves can drag an island down. And how close the Mobile Transport Unit is. It's been ready for a while, apparently. It could be a week or so away, with no promise attached.

The rest, quickly. Automated repeat deliveries are being built, and conveyor belts are on the "at some point" list. A new sign system built on icons is in the works. Klang is teaching Seedlings to actually talk to each other at gatherings, instead of sprinting in and standing about. And the great island dance-off went to Bong, on the chat's vote, with a Celtic number. That's not a sentence I expected to write about a society simulator.

This write-up is based on the Covital Show broadcast of Friday 2 October 2026 on SEED's official Twitch channel - the full show is still up there, and it's worth a watch - checked against our coverage of the 0.4 reveal and The Notice Board, Klang's lore blog, and SEED's game data. Klang's plans and timings are reported as Klang gave them. The readings, the figures and the opinions are ours. Nothing here is a hands-on test.

Why your duck got stuck

The best ten minutes of the night started with corn.

One of the community clips showed a corn maze, and the obvious question followed: can Seedlings get lost in it? Not really. As Marijn understands it, corn doesn't block navigation, so your Seedlings will stroll straight through the middle of your maze as if it isn't there. Somebody suggested making them avoid corn, at which point they really could get stuck in one. That'd be funny. It'd also be a proper maze.

Then came the useful part, prompted by a question from Discord. When a Seedling picks a route, this is the order it thinks in:

• Roads first. Seedlings really prefer roads, and where there's a road they'll try to use it.
• Then ordinary ground, or the floor of a building.
• Then objects they'd rather not walk through.
• Then objects they really don't want to walk through.
• Building walls stop them completely. As far as Marijn knows, walls are the only thing that does.

So it's very hard to trap a Seedling. Fence something in with furniture and, sooner or later, they'll wade through the furniture. If you've ever watched one take the scenic route through your nicely arranged room, that's why.

The exception is a room with nowhere left to stand. Last week a Duck Delivery Drone got stuck because somebody had packed a building full of objects - shelves, he thought. The drone had to get through a run of them to reach its spot, and lost the thread somewhere along the way. It started hunting for a route from the other side of the city to a corner tucked behind the shelving. He couldn't remember whose building it was, which is probably kindest all round.

Klang wants to stop that happening in general. Until it does, my advice is simple. Put roads where you want traffic, and leave a walkway through any room you're filling with storage. Seedlings and drones will push through clutter when they have to, but a room packed wall to wall can send the search off across the whole city. A corridor costs you a row of shelves. A lost duck costs you the delivery.

520 shelves, one plot, and your island's lag

Marijn's other story was about density. As an engineer, he said, you mostly look at a city because something's wrong in it. Right now one city has a plot carrying about 520 shelves, all in one building. Klang's AI doesn't like it. Every time a Seedling working there asks itself what to do next, it checks every single shelf. They try to be a little bit smart about it. It's still 520 shelves.

That's the clearest answer we've had to the question SEED players ask most: why does one island lag more than another? Usually, Klang said, it's because some places on an island are extremely heavy. Klang allocates a certain amount of objects to each server, and a 500-shelf plot can leave that allocation a bit off. So the studio has to watch what players actually build, and adjust slowly. Two more exhibits from the week: a building with 1,500 doors, which was a bug and did break things, and somebody keeping around 150 ducks in a single room. At 500 ducks, the panel reckoned, it would start to get really weird.

Then came the dare. Someone on the panel challenged the world to build a territory-sized maze. By the time it had grown into "a territory-sized maze of ducks", someone else was asking, quite sincerely, for nobody to actually do it, because it'd be a problem. After the last paragraph, I believe them.

On my reading, that makes lag partly a neighbourhood problem. Your island's performance depends on what everyone on it builds, not just on what you build. That's no reason to stop building big. It's a reason to report lag properly - the island, the time, and what froze - exactly as The Notice Board keeps asking, because that's how Klang finds the 520-shelf plot.

Help is on its way. Marijn expects larger server changes in a couple of weeks, and said they should make quite a big difference. Reconnection problems are being fixed as they turn up, and they keep turning out to be different cases. Klang reads the surveys, the bug reports, and Discord, so keep reporting.

One more thing on shelves. Wednesday's Notice Board previewed the new vertical shelf, and the panel pointed back to it. With no limit on how many you can place, Marijn expects people to keep building huge plots. When the new shelf lands, celebrate with a dozen. Not 520.

The MTU is ready. It's waiting for company

Four weeks ago, the Mobile Transport Unit was the item from September's roadmap reveal we were most looking forward to and most suspicious of. On Friday, Marijn said it's actually been ready for a while and is coming soon. The guess was one to one-and-a-half weeks, followed straight away by a request not to hold anyone to a date. Klang wants to release it alongside a couple of other things. It has sound now. It has lights.

That claim checks out. The MTU has been sitting in SEED's game data since the 0.3.5 release in mid-September. The file calls it "a large, slow walker built by Frontiers Engineering to haul cargo across the frontier", and it comes with a docking station because it "needs to recharge sometimes". And 0.3.7 made it slower, not faster: its walking-speed value dropped from 0.85 to 0.765, which is under a sixth of a Duck Delivery Drone's. Its collision radius is three times a drone's, and it has room for 4,510 against a drone's 250 per haul. It's also flagged as needing a clear path, which the drone isn't.

Put that next to the navigation lesson above. Seedlings and drones will wade through clutter when they must. A big, slow walker that needs path clearance probably won't. That's our reading of the data, not something Klang has said. But if you're planning where an MTU will come and go, I'd give it a road.

When September's show called it expensive, it wasn't joking. The 0.3.7 data has the recipe: an Electronics Workbench, Engineering 30, and a shopping list led by 915 Passivated Steel Sheets - a new part, each one a Steel Sheet treated with five Nitric Acid at a Basic Anvil. Then 90 Titanium Plates, 60 Steel Beams, 18 Composite Panels, 18 Pistons, 12 Motor Housings, four Electric Motors, and two Computer Modules. Both recipes are tied to a feature switch, and the files don't say whether it's on, so don't start stockpiling sheets until Klang says you can build one.

Klang wants it to change how far people travel, too. Societies are still sticking close to their own territory, Marijn said, and the studio hopes people start going further out. It's nudging that along slowly. A slow walker seems like the right tool for a slow nudge.

Automation, but not the whole game

Marijn couldn't resist one spoiler: automated deliveries. You'll be able to set up repeated deliveries between different locations. At the moment you can sort of do it with contracts, which are limited, or with one-time deliveries, which you have to keep setting up by hand. He's seen the screenshots of the delivery setups people run manually, and called them completely insane. Understandable, given every one of them is done by hand. Automation still has to be built, so there's no date.

That lines up with Wednesday, when Klang said single-item hauling is getting a lot of attention. Two shows, one direction: fewer clicks for the same goods.

A viewer then asked for conveyor belts. At some point, probably, came the answer, followed by the most interesting design statement of the night. Delivery drones are expensive on purpose, because they take work away from Seedlings. Right now drones need no maintenance at all, and Klang will see whether it stays that way. Anything you can automate completely is, in the panel's view, finished - and then what's the game? Factorio and Satisfactory players might be fine with that. SEED, the show reminded everyone, is "a dance with entropy". Things wear out. And Klang wants Seedlings to keep their jobs.

I like this a lot. It's a studio saying out loud what its game is for, and it explains prices that otherwise look like a tax on convenience. It's also a warning worth hearing. If your business plan assumes drones stay maintenance-free forever, Klang has just told you they might not. Someone on the panel called Seedling employment a real-world issue. Fair.

Parties where Seedlings actually talk

One of the clips in the "SEED is..." montage showed a society holding a gathering, everyone converging on one spot. Events aren't a feature yet, but players are making them happen anyway. Marijn's eye went straight to what isn't working: Seedlings running in too fast, and not casually chatting once they've arrived. Klang is actively working on that, so a gathering turns into Seedlings doing something together. Sitting down. Having a conversation. An actual party.

Gatherings were a tile on the 0.4 board in September, set to run through Spark and the Scheduler. This is the first we've heard of the unglamorous half: making the guests behave like guests. The panel made the bigger point, too. People doing things together, over and over, is how a place grows an identity. A party that works is how SEED gets a culture.

Signs you can read without words

Klang's team has spent the past week on a new building sign system: modular, built around icons, and in the panel's view a big change for cities and street life. It isn't the first go at this. Klang prototyped advertising billboards about two years ago - your own image, for a political campaign or a product - and never shipped them. There's also a small prototype of a signpost for elections, to help a society manage its messaging and mark what an area is for.

On Wednesday, custom-text billboards came up as a suggestion, and we said a public billboard is a feature for about four minutes and then a moderation queue. Icons are a neat way round that. Whether Klang chose icons for that reason, nobody said. But a sign that can point to the farm and the polling station without letting anyone type a word is the version I'd ship first.

Cities are already decorating more, with roof pieces and images on the sides of buildings - the attachments 0.3.6 made buildable. Marijn said spotting a crazy setup is the fun part of checking cities for bugs.

The great island dance-off

Then the party itself. "Avesta: One World" was billed as a celebration of everyone sharing one planet, and its second half was, by John's own description, a Eurovision version of the Covital Show. Four island crews danced on purpose-built sets for a chat poll. Clinamen, Monada and Bong are all islands of the Eilo Archipelago, which Klang's lore calls the oldest inhabited ground on Avesta.

• Clinamen opened with a bounce routine: sassy, said John, with fancy footwork and signs in the background.
• The second crew went for power, with a closing scene where the dancers circle one of their own. John heard a bit of Taylor Swift in it.
• Monada brought the punks, with fire on the set and a spiky jumper. It reminded John of The Prodigy. After some deliberation, it was Marijn's favourite.
• Bong's Dancing Army closed with Riverway, which John called a bit Celtic. They must have remembered it from Earth, apparently. It isn't normally John's cup of tea. The chat disagreed, and Bong won the poll.

All of it is built from years of the animation team's work, with costumes and sets from the art team. Most of what you saw is in the game already, the panel said, though not all of it, and things do get removed over time. If you spotted something you want back, screenshot it from the stream and post it on Discord.

For the record, SEED's game data already holds a test item called Dance Floor, described as "A place to let go and just dance." A test item isn't a promise. It's a very good description, though.

Quick hits

• A new UNN. A Klang collaborator sent in a fresh episode of UNN, the United News Network from SEED's lore. It follows the ongoing investigation into abandoned societies and hints, open to interpretation, that players might be able to help. It's on Spark and Discord. After Wednesday's talk of turning abandoned cities into a proper loop, it's worth a look.
• PAM said hello. PAM, the in-game Player Assistant Manager, sent a video message reminding everyone they share one beautiful world, then danced. The panel floated a Covital Show hosted by PAM. More seriously, Klang wants to make her a lot smarter, accepts she doesn't always give the right answer, and wants her doing more for you inside the game.
• How a Seedling decides. Seedlings run on utility AI: they look at the world around them and pick the best thing to do, though most players set priorities, which makes it fairly fixed. Large language models sit on top, in several layers, for Seedling chat, Spark, and conversations.
• 0.4 is still filling up. A lot is still being squeezed into 0.4, Marijn said, with lots of bug fixing and a look at how much more can fit. On Wednesday, Klang put it close to Halloween.
• Happy 72nd, Avesta. The retrospective covered "the last 72 years on Avesta" based on up to 1st October 2026 since Early Access launch. With a real day counting as an Avesta year, that's 72 days since Early Access opened on 21 July 2026.
• Wednesday. The Notice Board is back with Andy and JJ.
• The world report. Klang made a video of Seed Industries' tally of what everyone's been up to - they kindly allowed us to use it - and ran it over the archipelago map from its lore blog. Most islands are filling up now, the panel said. We made a video to accompany this article using their one which is below.

Klang's numbers, as the clip gives them:

• 20,074 Seedlings in 704 societies on ten islands of the Eilo Archipelago, by year 72.
• 18.2 million water collected, 12.8 million hematite mined, and 3.5 million mushrooms harvested.
• The busiest traders: Urbs Aeterna (Caligo), New Eridian (Ilya), Dawn Horizon (Bong), Feels Good Society (Ilya), and Republic of Pondland (Defo).
• Dezima is secure. 164 societies answered the call over the first 64 years of the Founders Era. The statues went to Emotional Net Loss (gold), United Federation (silver) and New Eridian (bronze), who also made the traders' top five. Our Dezima piece has the story behind the event.
• Seed Industries bought 54.3 million items from the archipelago, led by 21.6 million Retted Flaxa and 12.1 million Iron Nails, to send to terraforming on the continent of Paxterra, "where we hope to open new lands eventually".

Two shows, one thread

Klang now runs two shows, and they do different jobs. The Notice Board answers the community's list. The Covital Show explains the machine. Put this week's two next to September's 0.4 reveal, and you can watch several threads move at once:

• The MTU: coming, manually driven and expensive on 4 September; ready for a while, and maybe a week or so out, on 2 October.
• Gatherings: a tile on the 0.4 board; now Klang is teaching Seedlings to socialise at them.
• Exploration: a named tile in September; societies still stay near home, and Klang is nudging slowly.
• Performance: a larger pass expected with 0.4, and top of Klang's own problem list on Wednesday; larger server changes in a couple of weeks.
• Hauling: single-item hauling getting attention on Wednesday; automated repeat deliveries on Friday.
• Signs: meetings about signage on Wednesday; an icon-based system being built on Friday.
• Storage: a vertical shelf previewed on Wednesday; a 520-shelf plot straining the AI on Friday.
• Abandoned cities: wanted as a proper loop on Wednesday; a UNN investigation on Friday.

Not bad for a dance-off

This was the Covital Show at its best, and not because of the dancing - though the chat would argue with me there. It's because Klang let one of its engineers explain how the game works, in plain words, with examples from real cities. That's the Covital Show I want: the reason behind the thing you saw happen on your screen.

Not everything was firm. The MTU date is a guess with a disclaimer stapled to it, and the server changes are a couple of weeks off. But I came away knowing how to lay out a storage room, why an island lags, and what Klang thinks automation is for. That's a good Friday.

Leave the duck a corridor.