ASTRONEER Mid-Year Dev Update Patch Notes (20th May 2026)

Hey all! Joe here again to share more news about what’s coming to ASTRONEER for the rest of the year.

TLDR: We will continue our monthly updates cadence until at least the end of 2026. We’re also preparing something special for the game’s 10th anniversary at the end of this year.

At the end of 2025, I shared our plans to release monthly updates for the game, focusing on bug fixes for Megatech content, but also other legacy issues in addition to quality-of-life improvements to the base game.

Since then, we have made significant improvements to the game in addition to releasing the Megatech DLC for Nintendo Switch. Huge thanks to everyone who has continued to share feedback with while we have been working through these monthly updates!

Excited to now confirm that we will continue our monthly updates until at least the end of 2026. Although a lot of the team is working on our next title: STARSEEKER: Astroneer Expeditions, we felt like monthly updates should continue on ASTRONEER. Not much will change in terms of our focus, you can expect similar updates to the ones we’ve released these past few months; fixing bugs both old and new, and making quality-of-life improvements. That said, we do have a special update free for all players that’s planned for the end of the year to commemorate the game’s 10-year anniversary since the Early Access release.

For a better breakdown of our progress so far and what’s to come, I’ll hand it over to ASTRONEER producer, Sarah.

-jt

Hey Astroneers, Sarah here! I’m here to share a little about what our dev team is currently working on, and what we have planned for the year ahead. We’ve made steady progress on bug fixing and quality of life improvements to the game so far, but there’s still plenty more to do.

Here's some of my data showing the split between bugs and tasks completed so far this year! A task is an improvement or piece of work that made it into the game, like "update the credits", or "implement new Astropedia page."

FUTURE PLANS

Our work for the rest of 2026 can be roughly clustered into three categories (in priority order):

1) Bug Fixing (highest priority)

Fixing bugs in ASTRONEER remains our primary priority for this year. A bulk of this work is Megatech related, but we’ve also allocated a large chunk of the team’s time to try to fix “Legacy” bugs (issues that have been around for a while). Some of these issues are quite difficult to resolve and likely will take us some time, but we’re not giving up on them. You can track the progress on our bug fixing in the Live Bug Tracker. In case you missed it, we recently fixed the longstanding Rails bug.

2) Quality-of-Life Improvements

We’ve been collating player feedback about the overall game experience, and work has begun on some new features that will make meaningful improvements to ASTRONEER. Some of these features are things many of you have been suggesting for a long time (see the leek further down this page!). These will be released as soon as the work is complete and then tested. In our most recent patch notes, we shared an update about changes we’ll make to the IMT – this work is a combination of bug fixing, and work that falls into the QoL category!

3) December Update (New Free Content)

This December, ASTRONEER celebrates its 10-year anniversary of releasing in early access! We’re planning to release a FREE update to all players that will include some new gameplay content and be a bit bigger than our usual monthly updates. We’ll share more about this in the coming months – as much as we love making brand new stuff, our focus has to be on improving the overall stability of the game. I’m really excited about some of the ideas our designers are currently brainstorming, and I’m sure you all will be too! 😊

IMPROVING AUTOSAVES AND SAVE SETTINGS (LEEK TIME!)

As part of our QoL improvements, we’re currently working on overhauling the way that players can save their game. A piece of feedback we hear frequently from the community is that they want more flexibility to decide how their game is saved, and also to have it autosave on a regular basis (instead of needing to do it manually, like hopping into a vehicle or into a Shelter).

At a high level, here are some of the save-related improvements you can look forward to seeing soon!

• Toggling on and off periodic auto saves, and choosing how frequently they happen.
• Settings to change which gameplay moments trigger an auto save (like arriving on a new planet, entering a Shelter, or completing an achievement).
• Introduction of “Save Slots” that will have a drop-down to show you the recent history of that save file.
• Introduction of “Save Slots” that will replace the current save file view in-game.
• Save slots will expand to reveal the recent history of auto-saves for your game.

Here’s a development mock-up of how the save slots could look. Still very much a work in progress though, this isn’t indicative of the final look.

We hope you’re looking forward to these future improvements and additions, and that you’re as excited as we are for the new content and features we have lined up!

- Sarah