Can we talk about the community reaction to Blender builds?

I'm honestly really disappointed in this subreddit right now.

To give a brief timeline of events (skip below the divider line if you're already up to date):

Voyagers update comes out August 2025, letting you build your own spaceship from scratch out of large prefab parts. People make super cool stuff with that, genuinely great addition.

A while later, someone in the community updates the plugin that lets you make 3d models in Blender to work with Corvettes, allowing you to import them into the game, translating them into smaller existing parts like square panels and stuff.

Super cool tool, enables even more freedom to make way more intricate designs by sort of bypassing the large prefab parts and letting you effectively design your own from scratch.

However, the game has wretched performance when loading in too many parts at once. For large prefabs that's not a problem, because there you're only gonna use like a couple dozen at once, whereas Blender builds might need hundreds of small parts to fill out the same amount of space.

This is still fine on higher-end hardware, and because the game is effectively singleplayer like 90% of the time outside of the Anomaly, there's no problem for people who have the hardware to use them.

The problem is when people decide they want to show off their blender builds in the Anomaly. It pretty quickly becomes clear that people bringing their massive fuckin Death Stars and Venator Destroyers into other peoples' games causes anyone using lower-end hardware in there to crash, or - allegedly - even corrupts their saves.

Which is a genuine problem, and the more reasonable people using those Blender ships switch to either using simpler ships when entering the Anomaly, or disabling multiplayer altogether to avoid unintentionally fucking up peoples' games on lower hardware.

Unfortunately, some people are still assholes, or (to play devils advocate) just don't know about the problem, and keep bringing those big Blender ships into the Anomaly.

So far, there is still a legitimate reason to dislike those people, and I'm still on the same page. I 100% agree that that's a problem, and something does need to done about that.

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The problem, and the reason I'm making this post, is that at some point along the way, that hate got transposed from the people bringing those crasher-ships into the Anomaly, to Blender-built ships themselves, to just 3d modelling as a whole. People might not say that last part out loud, but universally if you see a post showcasing a Blender-built ship on the subreddit, I guarantee you the top comments will be stuff along the lines of "yawn", "Blender ship, gross", "anyone could make this, next", etc., even when they're insanely well-made and clearly took a fuckton of skill.

I've never made a Blender ship myself, so I don't have a dog in the fight of Blender ships vs. non-Blender ships personally, but as someone who's spent years learning Blender and 3d modelling skills, I'm left here feeling like this nifty little community for the cool space game has come to resent the skill I've spent years working on mastering and dismissing it as basically nothing more than AI slop because "anyone can do it"*, out of a misplaced anger at a genuine issue. Anger which could be channeled more productively into calling for a solution rather than just hate for hate's sake.

*If you've ever commented that, or truly believe it, I'd challenge you to try and make one yourself. Dunning-Kruger is strong - if you've ever actually tried 3d modelling before, you'd know how much talent it takes to make something that looks even half as good as the ships you're commenting "yawn" under.

If I could propose a more measured response - perhaps it'd be more productive to call for a "part limit" setting, that lets you set a maximum number of ship/building parts to be loaded at a time? Set to something low by default, but allowing people on higher-end hardware to crank it up so they can enjoy their own ships without hurting anyone else's game.

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At the end of the day it's not really a big deal in my life, I don't care that much about what random people on the internet think about something completely unrelated to the niche they belong to, I just think it's a shame that this generally welcoming and friendly community has fallen down the hate pipeline for this one specific thing. I've come to expect better, and I know we can be better.