First 48 Hours After the Rebuild Merge | Patch Notes 2026.1.9.2

The rebuild is now the default version of Cepheus Protocol, and the first 48 hours gave us exactly what we needed: a real stress test at scale.

Discord playtests help, internal testing helps, but nothing compares to thousands of players stress testing the game in every possible way. That’s how you find the edge cases you never see in controlled sessions.

The good news is we’ve already reproduced and fixed several of the biggest issues being reported, and we’re pushing those changes live right now.

What We Learned (First 48 Hours)

• The rebuild foundation is holding up well, but community play testing immediately exposed edge cases, mainly around vehicles, navigation, and some UI flow.

• A lot of confusion is still coming from missing systems (Civilian Evac, dynamic civilians, etc)

  See the FAQ below!

• UI overlapping issues were resolved

Hotfix Live Now (Vehicle + Gate Fixes)

This post is going live at the same time as the latest fixes.

Two issues were big enough that we wanted them fixed immediately.

What’s Fixed in This Update

• Vehicle structure detection and ramming edge cases

  • We found scenarios where vehicles could mis-detect or fail to detect player structures depending on the situation.

  • Result: vehicles could repeatedly crash into jersey barriers, walls, and certain player structures/landscape actors instead of treating them as solid obstacles.

  • This has been corrected so vehicles properly respect those structures and stop “brute forcing” into them.

• Gate navigation update bug

  • We reproduced a bug reported on Discord involving gates not updating navigation correctly.

  • If a gate was set to Auto, then swapped to Manual mode while opened and then closed, there were cases where the nav state would not refresh. Till you toggled that gate back to Auto and let a unit walk past it to "reset" the state

  • Result: units would still attempt to path through a gate that was visibly closed.

  • This is now fixed and gates properly update navigation when their state changes.

• Fixed Vehicle Turrets when fired to "empty" would fail to properly work after resupplied

• World Buildings (the preplaced structures) Nav Weight would confuse CERC into thinking they could squeeze through them making Path finding freak out. Like say you built a CERC wall and built it into a structure/building. Units would incorrectly still try to path find along the edges of that structure. Context

• Various Texture Optimizations across the project to further optimization Streaming / Out of memory warnings(Still ongoing!)

• Resolved a discord reported crash

• Fixed some assets in HMB (Half Moon) that weren't rag dolling when hit with a vehicle

• Fixed Shawnee not rolling on turns properly.

• Improvements to helicopter height-check handling to more reliably go up when helicopters otherwise would get stuck

• Fixes to BaseGarrisonComponent to resolve fast roping units failing to actually 'remove' themselves from their seats (which cause issues on the helicopter after first fast rope success)

• Speculative improvements to stuck detection for chaos vehicles

• Adjustments to helicopter-only formation movement to reduce chances of 'stuttering' from Formation Actor not moving far enough ahead

• Locked off the VisionGrid DeferredVisionUpdateTimedOut debug behind a cvar (VisionGrid.DeferredTimeoutDebug). Stops the draw debug text from appearing while play

• Fixed a Turret issue that would only occur for Vehicles where they would fail to initialize their eyes properly making it so low level objects could block their ability to shoot.

• Superheavy treaded vehicles tuned to have better steering and performance, including custom steering curve(Abrams, Atlas, MLRS & Bradley)

• Updated PauseMenu to properly treat the level selection subwidgets (for both Pandemic+Horde maps) as part of the Base_PlayerController's menustack, so ESC while in one