Hey all! Joe here to follow up on our earlier message regarding the plan forward for Megatech and beyond. Now that we have released Hotfix 3, the work continues! Let’s talk about where we go from here:

TLDR: We are moving to a monthly patch cadence to fix bugs, longtime issues, and make quality of life changes for the first part of 2026 instead of focusing on new content. Megatech bugs and releasing Megatech on Switch will be first on the list, and then we will move on to things we should have fixed/changed a long time ago. Now for the full explanation:

The team has been answering tickets, reading online posts, and working with community members to take feedback in the month since Megatech has been out. That being said, releasing any game content this late in the year carries one significant risk barrier: shutdown dates for platforms. Because we are a multiplatform game, we need to prepare patches and then send them out to our platform partners for certification, and platforms have outages for the holidays in December. We worked right up until the deadline to release the first three hotfixes and have continued working on the next updates since then, but additional patches won’t come out till early January, after our platform partners come back from the holiday break. This is standard practice, but we just wanted to be transparent with you all. We haven’t stopped working! We just need to wait a bit while everyone gets a much-deserved rest.

The Plan for 2026:

That being said, I have some info about how things in the new year will work, which is a significant change from the last 3 years of development. Since 2022-ish, we have been doing two updates a year: One smaller one in the spring/summer, then work to deliver something BIG in the fall. That cadence worked for the team but required us to go dark for extended periods while we cooked up our big updates for the latter half of the year. That just isn’t going to work this time around, so we are swapping to a monthly cadence with more frequent patches for the first half of 2026. Longtime players might recognize this style, it is how we used to operate in the years around our 1.0 launch, and should help us feel more connected with you all. We can figure out the rest later, but for now, it is clear that we have prioritized new content over fixing long-term bugs and quality of life updates that the game desperately needs. While this isn’t as exciting as announcing a big new content update, I hope that this reprioritization is welcome news for the community who just wants to enjoy what is already in ASTRONEER.

Timeline:

The first patch of 2026 will happen in early January, and then we will keep rolling with regular updates after that, keeping you all updated along the way. I don’t have any shiny graphics, my producer Sarah would be frustrated with me if I shared the raw internal calendar she sent me, but it is basically:

But with a lot of other small details in there and some MS paint arrows drawn over it all. The first prioritization is fixing up Megatech and releasing it on Nintendo Switch, and then we will start to triage long term issues and get them on the docket.

A note: QOL or quality of life means that we are focused on “updates” to the game that make the current experience better. That might mean fixing a long-term bug, or balancing a recipe, or adding/fixing functionality of an existing item to make it more usable. Feel free to suggest things that you think might be candidates for this kind of focused work, but this time will be focused on content already in Astroneer, not new stuff.

What happened?

While I think we addressed it in our apology note, I wanted to be transparent and shed light on some of the factors that got us here in the first place. Astroneer is a nearly 10 year old game, and the underlying technology is so outdated that the very platforms and core code the game was built on are no longer supported by current standards. The engine version that the game had been running was Unreal 4.23, (released in 2019!!!!) before the PS5 platform had even been released. The Xbox platform we released on in 2016 (UWP) has been phased out for a new system. That made continued development of Astroneer very difficult, but we managed for a while.

Nearly halfway through developing Megatech, we realized that the game would need an engine upgrade to continue feature development. The upgrade process can sometimes take months because you must upgrade and test all existing content, then verify everything is working across all shipping platforms before moving on to new work. Engine upgrades often introduce tons of bugs on their own, and this year was already full developing Megatech content and getting the PS5 version of the game out, which have their own bug loads. This meant our very methodical process for bugfixing and testing became much more complex, and ultimately led to a rough launch. We weren’t just finding issues with Megatech, we missed some crucial bugs that were introduced in the upgrade, and that made fixing things quickly even harder. We really like Megatech conceptually, but it is plagued by bugs and a lack of polish that is stopping some players from enjoying it, which is where we are now.

We are committing ourselves to:

I could go on about this year, but I think I will leave it there. I appreciate everyone who has been giving us constructive feedback during this process. Please know that our main focus as a studio is to deliver fun stuff for you all to enjoy, and as a studio we’ve internalized that we didn’t deliver the quality you all expect from us. We can’t change our past decisions, but I hope being transparent about what brought us to this point and how we are working to learn from those mistakes helps. Keep holding our feet to the fire, keep the feedback coming, and we will see you in 2026.

-jt