Hi. We're Skye and Lutraa, and between the two of us we run Astrofox Studios.
We've written a lot of announcements over the years, but we've never actually stopped to write this one: the one where we tell you who we are, where we came from, and where all of this is going. Astrofox turned three years old ten days ago, we've got more to announce this year than in the rest of our history combined, and it feels like the right moment to finally say it all out loud.
So consider this an open door. No trailer, no countdown, just the story.
How two events became one studio
Astrofox didn't start as a studio. It started as events.
Back in 2021, Skye and a small group were running Destiny Games, a Minecraft event series that pulled together the first real community around any of this. Around the same time, somewhere else entirely, Lutraa was running his own Minecraft event called Tropical Championships. Two separate crews, two separate crowds, both chasing the same feeling: build something people genuinely want to show up for.
We met a couple of months after Astrofox was first formed, in 2023. It became obvious pretty quickly that we were both trying to build the same thing from different directions, so we did the sensible thing and stopped competing. We merged the two events under one roof, put the Astrofox name on it, and made it official. Skye became Founder, Lutraa came on as co-CEO, and the studio as it exists today was born on July 15th, 2023.
Everything since has been the same instinct pointed in a slightly more ambitious direction each time.
The part nobody sees: Callisto
Events are wonderful and events are expensive. Servers cost money, and a community that keeps growing needs infrastructure that keeps up. So we built our own.
That started as ExpHost, the hosting we ran to keep our own projects online, and it grew into something much bigger than a side project. Today it's Callisto, and it's genuinely the backbone of the whole studio. Callisto is our infrastructure arm, aimed squarely at developers, and it's also the part that quietly funds everything else we do. When people ask how an independent studio pays for game development and live servers and original projects, the honest answer is: our own subsidiary does. We're not backed by an outside publisher. Callisto keeps the lights on, and that independence is something we're not willing to trade.
It's about to hit its two-year anniversary, and it's the reason we get to build the fun stuff without anyone else's hand on the wheel.
Solaris: the first thing we're truly happy with
For a long time we were the people who ran other people's games and events. Solaris is where that changed.
Solaris is competitive Minecraft done properly: ranked play, seasonal progression, and a real path toward esports, instead of the usual bolt-on minigame server. Lutraa had been running it, and once it was clearly special we brought it fully under the Astrofox wing and gave it everything we had. We've prototyped a lot of Minecraft projects over the years. Solaris is the first one we looked at and thought, yes, this is the one we're actually proud to put our name on.
It went into Early Access about a month ago, it's live right now, and Season 1 lands in August. If you want to see what we mean rather than take our word for it, it's the easiest place to start.
And one more thing we're building
Here's the part we've wanted to say for a while.
After years of building on top of games other people made, we've started building a standalone game of our own. Not a server, not a mod, not an event inside someone else's world, an original project that stands on its own two feet.
We're not going to name it here, and we're not going to over-explain it, because it's early and we'd rather show it than sell it. But it's real, it's in active development, and it's the clearest sign yet of where Astrofox is actually headed. Everything up to now, the events, the infrastructure, the servers, has been us learning how to build worlds and run them properly. This is us finally building one from scratch.
More on that when it's ready. For now, just know it exists.
What's coming this year
We opened by saying we've got more to announce this year than ever before, and we meant it.
Around September, we're putting on a live show, and it's built the way we wish more of the industry was: by devs, for devs. It's where we're going to lay out a wave of new features and plans, a lot of it centred on Callisto and the people who build on top of it. If you develop things, host things, or just like knowing what's coming before everyone else, that's the one to watch for.
We'll share the details closer to the date. It's going to be a big one.
Thank you, genuinely
None of this exists without the people who kept showing up.
To the players who came to a Destiny Games or a Tropical Championships event years ago and never really left, to the folks in our Discord who stuck around through every rebrand and pivot, and to the small team wearing a dozen hats each to make all of this run: thank you. Astrofox has always been a community first and a studio second, and we'd like to keep it that way for a very long time.
If you want to follow along properly, come find us:
- Play Solaris and see what we've been building.
- Join the Discord, it's where everything happens first.
- Want to build this with us? We're always looking for good people, so take a look at careers.
Three years down. The best part hasn't even started yet.
— Skye & Lutraa