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August 2026 Development Update - Side Campaigns

Hello everyone, Luke here.

Unstable Branch

A remind that regular unstable updates are pushed to the Unstable branch.

ATS > Properties > Versions > Unstable

If you want to learn more about unstable updates, come join our Discord server, speaking of...

Reminder about updates posted on Discord.

We spend a lot of our time on our community Discord server. Discussing the latest Unstable changes, talking to people, testers, and posting internal updates on things to come. Which is why I often forget to post updates on Steam. Please come join our server (even as a faceless anonymous) so you can stay up to date with our changes to Unstable

Campaign Progress: Apocrypha and White Tower

The Apocrypha and White Tower side campaigns have finally entered testing on our private tester branch after a lot of rewriting, rebuilding, and unit work. The Fryhart non-player faction has received a lot of tuning and fancy toys to scare and challenge the player with. Expect this to enter public Unstable branch very soon.

Team Strength

OK so the three-man team is back at full strength finally. Aleks is back so general work throughput and moral has recovered by 33% and Tychon will start getting new units and getting balance work. This of course means more work for me needing to fix the Tychon missions across Shallows and Kreydell, but that's life.

Performance and Optimisation

Aleks has completed a massive performance focused overhaul of our ATS engine. Using more of your CPU's cores and threads more efficiently, that kind of thing.

Map Editor Difficulty Variants

I have completed a large overhaul to the Map Editor. Letting us build difficulty-variants faster, as well as letting players finally make their own map difficulty variants too.

Formations and Adoption

I've added a formation system, which allows Capital ships to adopt smaller ships as escorts. Aswell as allow Drones to stay in formation with their carriers. It also handles coordinating what they attack far better.

Tractor and various unit Balance

Brendan has been fighting with Tractor units, among many other units, to get some of ATS's more weird and annoying balance issues improved.

A lot of other stuff

We've been working on the next update for many months so far, and a lot gets done. But I also tend to forget about even rather major improvements or additions. So if you want the latest as it happens, don't wait here, come and chat with us.

Alright I need to get back to work. Cheers.

Luke AP