![Starship EVO Patch Notes — [EXPERIMENTAL] 26w23a: Terrain visual + FPS improvements](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fstore.akamai.steamstatic.com%2Fimages%2Fstorepagebackground%2Fapp%2F711980%3Ft%3D1777097469&w=3840&q=75)
[EXPERIMENTAL] 26w23a: Terrain visual + FPS improvements
Starship EVO Patch Notes — June 2, 2026
Aggregated from Steam, cross-tracked with Battle.net coverage on GamePatchNote.
This build delivers a big technical milestone with the introduction of Virtual Textures for terrain.
A lot of you experienced low FPS on the planet surface, this update represents a radical step taken to address this.
At survival release my FPS on the ground were at 50. A few recent updates pushed that to 70, but this one now delivers 100fps!
On top of that, terrain texture will looks noticeably better at distance, especially from orbit.
The drawback: it require more memory and will require extra computation to bake the texture when you move on the ground.
- Memory: high setting require 500MB, low setting 128Mb (But it saves 80Mb from planets textures that are no longer needed). Starship EVO is really light on memory anyway, so it should accommodate even mid-low tier GPU.
- FPS impact: I have worked on smoothing the texture bake over several frames, so only low-altitude fly-by will be really taxing.
How it works: terrain shader was really expensive as you need many textures sample for tri-planar mapping, two material overlay, and some close and far details.
Now each triangle will bake all this samples into a big texture array on the fly.
Close distance terrain nodes we still use an hybrid of Virtual Texture and real-time sampling as the impact (memory/baking time/graphics downgrade) made it not worth it.
This is highly experimental, please report any issues and regressions!
Also: please tell me you GPU (and memory), and whether you manage to use the high setting! For now High is selected if you have a 4GB+ card, but I think it should works for 2GB cards too.
Thanks for playing!