Our Plans for 2026 + Arena Mode Beta

2026 is going to be a big year for Ostranauts! We talked a little bit about the future of the game in the 2025 Year in Review post, but we wanted to discuss our plans in more detail here.

Some notable things coming in the Fire in the Hold Update:

• New ship weapons, sensors, and hulls

• Fire and smoke

• 3 new stations around Ceres

• New Plot around Ceres

• New small arms: Combat Rifle, HG Rifle, Shotgun

• Asteroid mining around Ceres

• Unity 6 port/Better performance

• Add emotional statbars to main HUD

• Steam Workshop

• Steam Cloud Saves

• SteamDeck improvements

• Captain/Crew skills improve ship weapon ranges and fuel efficiency

• Emotional clobber events have more variety, and more interactive

Notable things coming in 1.0:

• Replace placeholder maps on other stations in the Solar System

• New EVA and Pressure suits

• Improved modding support

• Steam Achievements

• Bug Fixes

• Polish and quality of life changes

We are committing to Steamworks support for 1.0 launch. We want players to be able to take advantage of modding tools to tweak their experience to their liking. With just a text editor and pixel art tool, it should be possible to edit items, characters, plots, maps, recipes, and even the star system itself!

Plus, some clever players are figuring out even more sophisticated mods to such things as crew AI, character creation, and even UI changes.

Post 1.0

We plan to continue supporting Ostranauts after 1.0, with more bug fixes, polish, and potentially even new content. Over the course of development, we've collected a large list of ideas that were beyond the game's original scope, both from players and our own desires.

The success of Ostranauts will have an impact. If Ostranauts suddenly becomes a massive hit, it'll be a pretty strong case for us dedicating more resources towards making it bigger and better. Or if it isn't very popular, we may have to scale back.

Either way, though, we don't see 1.0 as the end of Ostranauts's development. Merely a signal to potential customers that Ostranauts has reached the end of what we promised in our original Roadmap.

Arena Mode Beta live now!

In preparation for Fire in the Hold, we’ve been working on a combat testing build, called Arena Mode, where you can pick out a preset ship and jump right into combat. Or you can edit a preset, or even make your own from scratch!

From there, you'll be attacked by endless waves of increasingly difficult ships. It's up to you and your ship design to last as long as possible.

When you're defeated, you'll receive an after action report, and score, depending on how many waves of enemies you survive, how much damage you caused, and how expensive your ship was. This should be a great way to get some low-risk practice with designing and piloting ships in combat, for those who want to engage with that system in the upcoming milestone.

You can check out Arena Mode by accessing the arena_mode branch, which can be done by following the instructions here.

We’ve also created a text guide which explains how to play Arena Mode and how to engage in ship combat:

Arena Mode Guide

So strap-in to your flight seats! Power-on your NAV systems! (Maybe pack an extra fire extinguisher!) And go get 'em!

We can't wait to see what you come up with for ship designs, and how far they can get.