May 6, 2026#

Build #20260506.18139.384#

🔔 Announcements#

HELIX has been updated to Unreal Engine 5.7 — a significant upgrade from UE 5.5 that brings meaningful improvements to performance, loading, and visual quality across the board. See the full breakdown in the Engine section below.

Creator Kit is now deprecated and is replaced by HELIX Studio. See the HELIX Studio section for further information.

🚀 New/Improved Features#

⚙️ Unreal Engine 5.7 Upgrade#

The engine underpinning HELIX has been updated from UE 5.5 to UE 5.7, which brings meaningful improvements to performance, loading, and visual quality across the board.

The most impactful change for creators is that IoStore is now the default packaging format. IoStore packages load significantly faster than traditional .pak files because assets are stored in a format optimised for streaming rather than sequential reads. If you're building and testing packaged worlds, you'll notice faster load times.

Other notable upgrades included in 5.7:

Chaos physics is now the standard vehicle simulation system (see Vehicles section).
Iris replication — Unreal's next-generation network replication system — is now running natively without the workarounds we needed in 5.5.
MetaHuman Creator compatibility improved, which directly enabled the Mutable-based character creator rebuild.
DLSS updated to v310.5.3 with Ray Reconstruction now available as a toggle in game settings — meaningful visual uplift for players on supported NVIDIA GPUs.
Bindless resource support enabled, which was required for Pacifica's landscape material (it was exceeding hardware limits for simultaneous texture bindings in 5.5).
Various engine-level fixes for Linux dedicated server builds, Clang compilation, and packaging pipeline stability.

🎨 Character Creator 2.0 — Rebuilt from the Ground Up (Coming Soon)#

The entire character customization system has been rewritten using Epic's Mutable system — the same tech used for MetaHuman characters. This gives us proper per-slot mesh merging, meaning every item on a character is combined into a single optimised mesh at runtime rather than layering separate skeletal meshes on top of each other. The result is better visual quality, fewer clipping issues, and significantly lower memory usage.

For creators building characters or outfits:

Every clothing slot (tops, bottoms, shoes, hats, gloves, masks, accessories) now supports per-item color customization. Colors are driven by material parameters so you can expose as many or as few color options as you like per item.
A new slot hide rule system automatically hides conflicting items — equipping a mask hides the hat, gloves hide nails, full-face helmets hide hair. These rules are data-driven and configurable per item in the database.
Face presets now work like any other slot. Skin tone is set through the face slot and propagates uniformly to the whole body, replacing the old separate skin preset system.
Beard, mustache, eyelashes, necklace, nails, and masks are all now proper independent slots in the Mutable graph.
Characters now support experience-specific default outfits — you can define what a player looks like when they first join a particular game mode via the pawn data asset.
The old CC implementation has been fully removed. Any content referencing legacy CC types will need to be updated to the new slot/tag-based system.

Performance wins that matter for world creators:

Removed a 500MB+ hard asset reference that was loading into memory regardless of whether the CC UI was open.
Fixed a 5GB+ soft reference load on game startup caused by skin material references. Characters now load their cosmetic assets on demand.
NPC spawn cost is dramatically reduced — NPCs no longer trigger the full async CC pipeline unnecessarily.

🚗 Vehicles — Chaos Physics Migration (Work in Progress)#

All vehicles have been migrated from the old modular wheeled vehicle system to Unreal's Chaos physics. This is a significant architectural change — Chaos vehicles simulate suspension, wheel friction, and collision forces at the physics level rather than approximating them in gameplay code, which means more realistic handling and better multiplayer synchronisation.

Every vehicle now has a Chaos configuration. Handling has been tuned but expect further passes — this is a foundation, not a final polish.
Vehicles now sync their physics state across the network more accurately, reducing rubber-banding and position corrections for other players.
Characters inside vehicles now share the vehicle's network relevancy — other players load the vehicle and its occupants together, rather than the character potentially being invisible until separately streamed in.
Vehicle LOD switching distances have been increased to account for how fast vehicles move across the map.
For creators building vehicle-based experiences: a new setting lets you disable character relevancy inheritance from vehicles if your experience handles it differently.

This is still actively being developed and isn't ready for use in creator experiences yet — we'll let you know when it is.

🎒 Inventory System (Work in Progress)#

We're rebuilding the inventory system from the ground up in native code, which gives us proper server authority, rollback-capable client prediction, and a clean API for gameplay scripting. A lot of the foundational work has landed already:

Drag and drop between slots; stack splitting; trading between inventories; quick-bar access.
Dropping a stack of items spawns a crate in the world containing those items.
Vehicle trunks are now proper inventories you can open and interact with.
Item weight tracked per item via a fragment system.
Inventory state is backed by a KV store tied to the experience ID, so data persists correctly across sessions.
The quick-bar, stack logic, and prediction system are driven through Gameplay Abilities, slotting into the existing GAS framework.

This is still actively being developed and isn't ready for use in creator experiences yet — we'll let you know when it is.

🗺️ Pacifica — What's Been Built#

A large amount of the map has been constructed or significantly progressed since the start of the year.

New areas:

Ocean Drive — Luxury Hotels 01–05 all complete with full interiors, lighting BPs, and PLAs. Salsero Hotel/Bar done.
Convention Center — fully modelled, lit, and on the map with parking and surrounding park.
Flamingo Way — an entirely new shopping district: jewellery store, DIY, electronics, art gallery, clothing store, IDEA-style furniture store, strip mall, flamingo statues, custom street signage system.
Hospital Island — exterior, interior first-pass dressing, parking areas, roads rebuilt with proper Errant Paths.
Dodge Island / Port / Industrial — industrial complex, truck gas station, hangars, warehouses, cranes, piers, containers, large ships, transformer station.
Residential — houses 08–12 complete; residential garages; driveways at all entrances.
Modern Villas — buildings, terrain, hedges, dressing first pass.
Nikita's Beach Bar — fully modelled with seating interaction triggers, set dressing, DJ booth, lighting.
Police Station — full set with BP/BPP/PLA, signs, non-drivable police car prop.
Kayak/Jetski Rentals — rental shack and watercraft added to the beach area.

World-level improvements:

Entire road network regenerated using proper Errant Paths roads.
Night lighting Data Layers added and activated across multiple districts. Assets have been assigned to correct data layers for HLOD.
Pacifica terrain and ocean fully rebuilt; VT texture errors and landscape material issues resolved.
World Partition external actor organisation cleaned up — large imports no longer flood the Outliner.

🛠️ HELIX Studio — Publishing & Package Management (replaces Creator Kit!)#

Automatic dependency scanning — Studio detects what your world depends on and lists it before you publish.
Multi-file / IoStore package support — packages can now contain multiple files and IoStore containers (.utoc/.ucas), not just .pak files. This aligns with how UE 5.7 cooks content by default and significantly improves load times for large worlds.
Vault now has the option to hide packages that are incompatible with your current workspace version.
Confirmation dialog before publishing to prevent accidental submissions.
Package downloads are non-blocking with progress reporting and automatic retries.
Each world now gets its own persistent workspace folder rather than sharing a single path.

📝 Packages previously created using Creator Kit will need to be migrated to the UE 5.7 version using HELIX Studio. See the migration guide for further details.

🔮 External Data Layer (EDL) System#

We're currently working on a new system that will allow creators to build content as self-contained packages that can be injected into any base world at runtime — without needing to modify the base map itself. This opens up some exciting possibilities for modular world building and we'll have more to share when it's ready.

🎬 Animation#

New swimming motion-matching database — fully revamped dive, surface, and underwater swim animations.
Vaping animation set.
Smoking animation set.
Drowsy idle pack (RTG).
Weapon aim-offset (ADS) is now smoothed on simulated proxies in multiplayer, fixing a jitter that was visible to other players.
Expensive facial animations and face correction rigs are now LOD-gated — they only run when a character is close enough for it to be visible.

⚡ Performance & Stability#

World Partition loading screen — the loading screen now stays up until the world is genuinely ready to play. Previously it could dismiss while streaming was still in progress.
Teleport loading screen — fast-travelling to an unloaded part of the map now correctly shows a loading screen rather than a black world.
Foliage — streaming hitches from bulk grass collisions reduced; foliage mass-collision optimised.
Character rendering — the invisible base mesh underneath cosmetic characters no longer casts shadows or ticks unnecessarily.
Multiple crash fixes across vehicles, inventory, the WebUI layer, and the character creator.

⚠️ Known Issues#

As always, let us know what you think — and if you run into bugs, submit this form 🐛