Astride's focus in 2026

Here are some words about Astride’s progress in 2025 and what our focus will be in 2026.

One year ago, we shared our development goals for 2025. These included horse breeds, foals and breeding, tutorials, horse AI, more tack, client quests, environments updates, and improvements to the horse controller and player character. Now that we have entered a new year, we would like to look back on what we achieved in 2025, before sharing our plans going forward. While all the updates included bug fixes and general improvements, we will focus on the new additions each update introduced.

We started the year strong by releasing an update with horse breeds, updated UI, improved horse creator, a stable, lead change, stirrups, and more color variations for saddle pads. This was a big update where we really nailed down the horse genetics, both for breeds and coat color.

The second update of the year came in May. We had earlier upgraded to Unity 6, which resulted in some shader issues that had caused some delays. While we don’t have any absolute deadlines, we try to set goals for when we want an update to be ready. In addition to the shader issues, this update also ended up needing a lot of testing. The update included a new horse controller with halt and rein-back, option to swap between first-person and third-person, refusals, more leg markings, new show jumping and dressage courses, Arabian as a new breed, Rabicano as a new gene, new gait UI, and improvements to lead change and animation transitions.

The third and last update of 2025 was the breeding update in October. This was another big update that added breeding, stable management, foals, Percheron as a new breed, tutorials, cross country courses, day and night system, time progression, new interaction system, save slots, buying and selling of horses, and being able to own multiple horses.

Looking back at the goals we had set, we were able to complete the following:

• Foal: base mesh and textures, hair, blendshapes and animations

• Breeds: Arabian, Percheron

• Tutorials: tutorials to introduce the players to the game’s controls and gameplay

• Controller upgrade: improve gait transitions, leading, multiple horses

• Player character: first-person and third-person perspective off and on horse, object interactions

We also added a few more color variations for tack, and work on the environment has been ongoing. In addition to this, we added several features that weren’t specified in the development goals, such as cross country and stable management.

We were not able to release Alter Real and Dole, and we did not complete client quests, horse AI, bitless bridle, halter, and clothing options for the character. So what happened? Is horse AI cursed? Will Astride ever get a proper gameplay loop? The truth is that we were going to implement client quests and a wardrobe system before the end of 2025 and then start on horse AI first thing in 2026, but we had to put those plans on ice due to some issues with Unity.

A few weeks before the release of the October update, Unity notified its users that they had discovered a security vulnerability (Ouroboros wrote about this in the October devlog). This was pretty major and affected all the editor versions. Unity gave clear recommendations that everyone should update to the newest editor version where the vulnerability had been fixed. We of course did this, but soon started seeing problems. When initializing the game world, it would suddenly stop spawning objects and loading data. This happened for several of our testers, and debugging gave few answers as to the cause. It appeared to be connected to the save files, but there weren’t actually any issues with the save files and they worked fine on earlier versions of Unity.

After extensive debugging, Ouroboros noticed that everything initialized fine on the server side, but not on the client side. Since Astride supports multiplayer, all the code is set up for client and server. This is also used during single-player, but both the client and server is run locally and doesn’t connect to the internet. Astride uses a server authoritative model, so the client receives much of its data from the server. For some reason, this was not working and the client didn’t receive the data it needed.

Since Unity has several supported major versions of the editor, we tried to upgrade from 6.0 to a newer major version 6.2. The result was that the game wouldn’t run at all due to several errors. The conclusion is that the code we have for creating and initializing the client and server is outdated and won’t work properly on newer versions of Unity. This makes sense considering that Unity has made changes to its multiplayer packages this past year, and this is even more true for DOTS multiplayer (Netcode for entities).

The only way we were able to release the breeding update was by creating a build in an old version of unity and using a patcher (made by Unity) on the build to patch the security vulnerability. This works, but it isn’t ideal as we do want to upgrade Unity to get access to new features and improvements.

The plans for 2026

This brings us to our plans for the immediate future. We have decided to take time doing a more manual update so that we can move to Unity 6.3. Work on this started in October 2025, and we expect to keep working on it at least until summer 2026. Updating to Unity 6.3 is only one part of it, as we intend to take this opportunity to do some heavy optimization, improvements, and polishing. At the moment, we have a project containing all of Astride’s code and assets running in Unity 6.3.0f1 with a new and improved multiplayer system. Almost all the other features and systems are disabled in this project, and the plan is to enable them one at a time so that we can give each the attention it needs. During this time, we will release bite-sized builds to our testers so that we can properly test every part.

This decision is made to keep our players safe from major security holes and to up the game further. This will benefit both Astride and you guys in the future, even though it may take longer to finish the production.

That’s all we can share for now. This has been a difficult decision to make since it means it will be a while before we can give you any new features. We will continue to post devlogs every month, and we will write an update in regards to our progress and future plans once summer arrives.