Godot 4.6 Release

Panel shufflers and multi-monitor Feng Shui masters rejoice… 4.6 is your version. You can finally move that bottom panel.

We unified the entire docking system in this release. Bottom panels are now regular docks, and you can drag and drop docks and move them around between the sides and the bottom of the editor. Most docks can also be floated.

It’s a significant step toward a full workspace system, allowing you to arrange the editor in a way that makes sense for your workflow.

Note that not all docks support both horizontal and vertical layouts just yet, but they’re movable!

No more awkward fiddling with the standard gizmo handles to rotate around the camera view.

You’ll notice the rotation gizmo now has a fourth handle aligned to your camera view. When you’re rotating objects in the 3D viewport, this extra handle lets you spin things around the view direction, a common action when you want to orient objects relative to how you’re looking at them, not just their local axes.

It’s another one of those little additions with a big impact on your 3D workflow.

No more guessing with your UI spacing! When you select a MarginContainer node in the editor, you will now see its margins drawn directly in the viewport.

This makes it crystal clear exactly how much space you’re adding around child nodes, letting you fine-tune your layouts with confidence.

Godot 4.6 makes it much easier to understand what objects exist in your running game by adding ObjectDB snapshots and comparisons to the debugger.

You can now capture the internal list of all live objects at any point in your game and compare two snapshots to see exactly what was created, destroyed, or left behind. Tracking memory leaks or unexpected object growth will no longer require guesswork and logging.

You can now spot problems at a glance by visualizing clearly what changed over time!

You can now customize the LED light colors on supported controllers, but this is only the beginning! Godot 4.6 lays the foundation for advanced joypad features support.

Starting with Godot 4.6, the door is wide open for the integration of motion sensors, touchpads, haptic feedback, adaptive triggers, and controller information queries like controller type, button layout, connection method, and battery state.

Upcoming releases will allow you to fully leverage the capabilities of modern controllers to set up a richer gaming experience in your projects.

Godot now generates LOD (level-of-detail) models that better preserve the shape of the original object, particularly for meshes built from multiple separate parts.

This ensures that distant objects in your game retain their intended form while still benefiting from performance-friendly simplification.

Reflection and radiance probes now use octahedral maps. This makes them cheaper to compute for your GPU and lighter on memory.

For you, it means you can efficiently add high-quality localized reflections to your scenes, like water reflecting a room or glossy surfaces in a specific area. Plus, since the dependency on cubemaps has been removed, probes work more reliably across a wider range of hardware.

The Mobile renderer steps up for 3D. Previously, visible color banding made it a tough sell for projects aiming at the highest visual fidelity. Not anymore!

Material debanding is now available for 3D: enable the existing debanding project setting and watch those ugly color bands disappear from your scenes. Additionally, when HDR 2D is enabled, the renderer now maintains higher color precision throughout the entire 3D pipeline, preventing quality loss.

Combined with all the optimizations unique to the Mobile renderer, these changes make it an excellent choice for high-performance 3D games on both mobile and desktop platforms.

Godot is a general-purpose engine used by a wide variety of people, on a wide variety of devices, with a wide variety of graphics drivers, and not all of them work gracefully. Ensuring stability across the board is a constant effort, and this release makes big strides.

Thanks to developers of games like Rift Riff and Kamaeru sharing detailed crash logs from Google Play and giving us access to their projects, we tracked down and fixed a series of crashes affecting devices with certain Mali and Adreno mobile GPUs. If you’ve been seeing unexplained crashes on Android with the Mobile renderer, this release should bring relief to you and your players.

Spreadsheet-based localization has just leveled up, making CSV files more adapted to real game translation workflows.

You can now include optional ?context columns to pass meaningful context for translators (so the same key can mean different things in different places), and ?plural columns to define plural forms directly in your CSVs, including rules for languages with complex plural logic.

In addition, Godot now lets you generate CSV translation templates, giving you a good starting point for translators and making it easier to maintain consistent, exportable localization tables across languages and projects.

C# translation calls are now parsed just like GDScript, so localized text is collected automatically during POT/CSV exports.

This means strings inside Tr(string) and TrN(string) in C# will now be picked up automatically when generating translation files, so you don’t have to manually extract or manage them yourself. It closes a longstanding gap in localization workflows.

When you want to place objects on real-world surfaces, track persistent locations, or react to QR codes in AR or VR, you now get spatial anchors, surface detection, and marker tracking through the standardized OpenXR Spatial Entities extensions.

This is the first phase of a broader effort to replace vendor-specific implementations with a single, consistent API for tracking and anchoring content in the real world. While some advanced features like furniture detection still require platform-specific solutions, spatial entities give you a solid foundation that will only grow as XR ecosystems evolve.

Starting with Godot 4.6, you can provide players with the possibility to load and save specific files using the system file picker, without asking for broad storage permissions.

This makes it possible to support loading custom content (like levels), importing data files, or exporting saves and presets, in a more granular manner, avoiding Play Store compliance issues and keeping players in control.

This one is mostly under the hood but to many of you it will come as a great relief and open new possibilities. As of this release, GDExtension’s interface, the bridge between Godot and native code, is now defined in JSON instead of a C header.

This makes it much easier for tools, scripts, and language bindings to read, analyze, and work with the API automatically. This long-awaited upgrade lays the foundation for faster automation, improved bindings, and smoother integration, unlocking possibilities that weren’t practical before.

The C header is of course still available, but it is now generated from the JSON definition.

Now when your comments include formatting like bold, code blocks, and structured text, they render more clearly in editors and IDEs that support Markdown.

Godot 4.6 improves the GDScript language server so docstrings that use BBCode now convert to Markdown more faithfully. You get better readability in documentation popups, tooltips, and editor previews, making it easier to write and maintain rich in‑code docs.