Goodbye Regolith
I've made the difficult decision to shut down Regolith permanently. The site will not receive updates going forward but will stay online until June 1, 2026.
So let me start by saying this is tough. Like, really tough; Like, holy-shit-I'm-not-sleeping-and-I'm-chewing-antacids-like-they're-candy tough. This really crept up on me like that stupid boiling frog metaphor everyone always uses. No matter how I slice it though I think this is the right call. It's gotten to the point where I can't keep up with the bugs and CIG's changes are plans are just too big and unknown.
So let's get into it. I imagine there are questions and some feelings. Let me share mine first and we can use discord for the rest.
Q: "Wait, WHAT?!?"
Regolith started life as an insanely complex Google Spreadsheet I used inside my Org to handle profit sharing. Thanks to cabin fever and a global pandemic it grew into something SO much more: equal parts hobby, coping mechanism, obsession, community etc.
By a very rough count nearly 31,000 people have tried it and the daily usage metrics are pretty damned respectable. It's some of my best UI/UX design work and I'm insanely proud of all of it from the Survey Corps all the way to the custom OCR capture engine. It even (mostly) pays for itself thanks to generous donations.
but... while the changes to the upcoming Star Citizen 4.7 look really cool I started looking into it and realized how big a change we're talking about.
Regolith was initially designed around the way mining was when it first launched in 2022. Some of those initial decisions and assumptions have not aged well and I have been bending, patching and band-aiding things to keep up ever since. The breaking point is coming soon and at that point we're talking about gutting nearly everything under the hood and starting over. Here's the hard truth: I just don't have the time to keep up with the pace of Star Citizen's development anymore. I've decided to pull the plug before the tool becomes completely useless and these changes completely bury me.
Throughout Star Citizen's developer diaries we've heard over and over that a major goal for 1.0 is that it will eventually contain in-game tools for everything Regolith currently does. Deprecation was always inevitable. I'm sorry to bow out before these tools come online but maybe others (looking at you SC-trade tools and UEX) can pick up a bit of the slack to fill the small void Regolith is leaving behind.
Q: "Noooooooo, but WHY?!?"
The mining changes in 4.7 are a big part of it but not the only factor. A bunch of other pressures have been building and are worth mentioning. Let's just do a rapid-fire round:
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Cost: Inflation and rising server costs have been offset by donations, but only barely. I was never in this to make money but the numbers are starting to trend red and I don't really want to chase more funding.
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Time: I code for my 9-5 job so doing it in my spare time as well has been taking a bit of a sanity toll. It's not burnout, not yet anyway, but it is really affecting my ability to play and enjoy Star Citizen. I have so few free hours in a day and they've all been going to Regolith. I'd like to play Star Citizen again just for fun. Maybe that's a little selfish but there it is.
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Unpredictable Development: Oh CIG... for better AND worse, Star Citizen's development pace and wild tangents in game mechanics have been ... let's be charitable and say "challenging". Their whims and bugs become major features and alterations for Regolith. The moment I realized I wasn't excited by the 4.7 mining changes (which, FYI, I think will be awesome for the game itself) that was a major red flag.
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The Internet: Is increasingly kind of scary. Running, maintaining, and protecting a website and a discord server is pretty stressful and not good for my blood pressure. I think my next hobby needs to somehow involve touching grass with my bare feet.
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Discord: Regolith has been tied to Discord pretty heavily and I'm not loving the direction Discord is currently pointing. They've backed off some of the badness but the trend is still not where I want it to go. 'Nuff said.
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Personal Stuff: Life has thrown me some pretty big changes lately, most of it is good but all of it is going to require more of my attention and I've realized that attention is a finite resource. I'm not going to share details here but let me just say that life is SO VERY short and leave it at that.
Q: "Couldn't you sell it? Give it away? Keep it going somehow?!?"
A couple of people have reached out with semi-serious offers to buy Regolith over the years but nothing really felt right. Selling out would probably mean that my precious little site could be filled with ads, trackers and malware and milked for every cent of revenue it could garner. The only real reason anyone would pay money for Regolith is to gain access to its users so that just always felt gross to me.
As for handing it off I don't think that would work either. It's grown from a simple little React app into a surprisingly complicated tech stack. A couple of people have donated their time to fix a few bugs here and there (you know who you are, you sexy heroes!) and my @testers are amazing but nobody who could maintain the server side of things has manifested yet.
When it comes down to it Regolith is kind of like a Kerbal 1.0 rocket: just a miraculous mess of random parts flying in a very loose formation at the edge of sanity.
Q: "WHEN?!?"
Donations (Ko-Fi and Patreon): Immediate
I've already turned off the Ko-Fi and Patreon donations. They've been the lifeblood of Regolith and it could not have continued without them so to those of you that gave even $5: thank you all!!!. I won't take any more donations so server costs are on me for the next couple of months while all of this spirals down.
https://regolith.rocks: June 1, 2026
The actual Regolith site will stay up for a couple of months in order to give folks a chance to screenshot any data or for more savvy users to pull their data out of the API if they want it. I'll shut it down for good on June 1, 2026.
Discord: June 1, 2026
I'll leave the Discord server up until the site goes down (June 1, 2026). Grab or screenshot anything you want or use that time to connect with other users and jump to a new server. I might lock down some channels like bug reporting but I'll try to stay active and reachable until then.
Honestly, losing the Discord makes me almost as sad as losing the site itself. I started the server as a cheap, easy way to collect bug reports and now there are 1,200 genuinely awesome people in there helping each other and talking about space mining. Way beyond my wildest expectations! Thank you to all of you for not forgetting to be awesome!
Merch Store: ???
Finally (and least importantly) the merch store will stay active for a while just in case anyone wants any last mementos. Eventually I'll probably take it down but it's not costing or hurting anyone so there's no rush. Same with this site and the blog.
Wrapping things up
I know many of you will be disappointed by this. If I'm being totally honest I would have liked to see it live on. Regolith has been an amazing experience and very nearly everyone I've met because of it has been wonderful. The community has been an inexplicably bright beacon of positivity in a sea of ... internet so we should all be really proud of that.
I don't regret a single second I spent on Regolith but when life happens it's important to be clear-eyed and unapologetic. It's been a fun ride but it's time.
o7,
Raychaser
p.s. If anyone wants to contact me beyond June 1, 2026, I'll keep the Raychaser bluesky account active.