Stationeers: The Terrain Performance Update

Stationeers received a significant performance update on 9 November 2026. Version 0.2.6429.27802 focuses entirely on how terrain is built and drawn, with the goal of reducing stutter and terrain pop-in during mining and travel.

Terrain meshing is much faster

• A new "brick prefill" system replaces the old approach of making over 1,000 octree lookups per terrain chunk. The marching cubes function now runs around 3 to 4 times faster as a result.
• CPU time spent preparing terrain meshes on background threads dropped from around 55ms to 15ms, a 70% improvement. This frees up CPU headroom for other simulation tasks.
• The main thread portion of terrain meshing now completes in around 4ms, down from an average of 40ms spread across 10 frames. Players should no longer see terrain slowly loading in around them.

Less garbage collection stuttering

• Terrain meshing previously generated around 2MB of garbage per mesh cycle, triggering frequent garbage collection pauses. It now generates roughly 10KB, nearly eliminating those pauses.
• A single pre-allocated block of native memory is now used to store meshing results, copied to the GPU and then freed cleanly.

GPU and texture improvements

• The terrain shader was updated to only sample a texture when it is actually visible. When only one texture type is present, the number of texture fetches drops from 22 to 14.
• Profiling showed a 10 to 20% FPS improvement in GPU-constrained scenarios from this texture sampling change alone.

What this means for your server

The patch notes do not mention any world wipes, save format changes or new server settings. The performance improvements are largely client-side, but all players will need to be on the same version to connect. If you run mods on your server, check that they are compatible with version 0.2.6429.27802 before bringing players back in.

Updating your RiverHosting server

1. Take a snapshot of your world before updating so you have a safe restore point.
2. Update your server to version 0.2.6429.27802 through your panel.
3. If you use mods, check and update them via the mod management page before players reconnect.

If you run into any problems, visit riverhosting.com/support and the team will help you out.

Read the full patch notes on the official announcement.