2026 and the final stretch of the road to the 0.91 Update.

Hey people, Luke here.

Update 0.91 to the Live (default) Branch is coming.

A real update to live. we have been aiming for the 14th, but we are lagging a bit behind (map reworks still being refined) so may need another week. But come hell or high water an update is going out in Jan.

Welcome to 2026

By the 14th it will be the one-year anniversary of ATS's release. We've managed to actually make a living off this insane project of ours and have continued to dump thousands of manhours into improving a vast amount of stuff in ATS that we simply didn't have the time to deal with before release.

Huge enhancements to unit visuals, damage effects, weapons, unit behaviors, unit balance, visual niceties like rotating parts and pistons on buildings. Entirely new scene backgrounds with different spance-cloud tech. Overhaueld missions and plot-points, human-made-character-art.

An uncountable number of adjustments and improvements all across the board, an insane and ridiculous under-the-hood improvement from the now ancient Live version.

Why has this taken so long? (and why it might still take a bit longer)

As noted previously, there are only three of us. On top of that at most two people are working on the project at any given time over the last year as availability permitted. And sadly, everything takes time to get done. There's no magic, and no amount of willpower can get labor done faster for the same cost.

Engine

The move from Unity ECS 0.51 to Unity ECS 1.14 was huge and required about 4 months of work to get back to where we were. I know a terrible waste in a sense, but it gave us not only performance improvements, less crashes, but entirely new lighting, physics, technical and graphical tools.

I had to rebuild the unit-builder pipeline in order to give use the power and flexibility to have dynamic hit boxes, and the new hull-blackening damage visual. It seems like a small think I know, but nothing is small in the land of performant code for thousands of units.

Bug and Crash fixing.

Hundreds of bugs and issues have been squashed. Also the great crashes are dead. It took us like 5 months, but the crashes are finally gone. Short of overloading the game with 30,000 units, it will hold together. In fact, I've seen it break apart at stupidly ridiculously high unit counts but not crash. Which isn't exactly great, but it's is amusing to me as a good enough win.

Modding (player made factions, ships, etc)

Letting people make their own factions and ships is really important for indie games, it helps ATS outlive my own ability to create stuff. So I spent a rather significant amount of time making a proper modloader for the game. People such as Bagel and Alophox (veteran ATS Testers) have already spent a rather large amount of time working on their own mod factions and helping me bug/stress-test the modloader. It's been a rather fun and exacerbating adventure. But it's critically important.

Also yes, mods can be put into custom maps. You could make your ATS if you wanted to!

Actual Character Art

We've finally found someone to make character art. Our AI placeholders have been accepted and loved by our community (at least the bulk of it), but they were never proper renderings of the characters as we wanted them. I know some people will ask to have the old ones back, and perhaps a legacy toggle of old-halts can be done at some point, but we have to move forward with man-made art. Not only for quality reasons, but for moral ones.

Kreydell and Shallows

There are a number of missions and plot points that were left underdeveloped in the rush to get the game out by the 14th, after 4 years of work. So, I've had to spend most of 2025 just rewriting Kreydell, and rewriting, reviewing with Brendan, changing, overhauling, testing, and redesigning missions. This includes enhancing parts of Shallows' tutorials. Across the board there is new map-tech to help scripted events happen more reliably and improvements to the design of various scenes for visibility purposes.

Unit Balance and the then necessary Mission Updates

We're human, and the game has roughly ~150 units including structures and such. It's very time demanding to adequately ensure everything is interacting in a fair and satisfying way. As such a lot of balance has happened over 2025, but that then requires testing and rebuilding campaign missions. Consequences had to see some updates as well as most missions in the game. Changing one unit can have rather significant knock-on effects that are only visible when you go and test it out. Tychon's continued development has had rather serious impacts on the missions they feature in.

My point is that we had a lot to do in one big go, there had not been a point yet were everything was good and stable. However, that is coming to a close. The game is working, things are polished, there are some requested settings and tweaks, new missions design that are quite fun. Clearer story progression... it should be good.

See in another week or two.

Luke AP