Developer Update - 25 June 2026

Official Dev Updates
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Welcome to the Developer Update for June 25, 2026.

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Today’s featured world is 真夏、往時の如し by 夏至邱芜.

Announcements

VRChat 2026.2.3 is Live!

Release 2026.2.3 came out on Monday!

It features:

  • Companion Updates
  • New Customizable UI Background Option: Gradient
  • Prop Ability Toggles for World Creators
  • Steady Cam Improvements
  • An AVPro Upgrade
  • Download Prioritization Fixes

… and a lot more.

Read about it here.

Or just have Strasz read them to you:

Get Some (Virtual) Sun

June’s Content Update is still cooking! It’s hot. Cool down with a HURRICANE MEGABLASTER XTREME 1000! Get your Inflatable Swimmies on!

And, most of all, get in the POOL!

Tanabata is coming!

Tanabata is almost here! For those unfamiliar with the story:

Once a year, the two brightest summer stars in the sky, Orihime and Hikoboshi, cross the Milky Way and reunite on July 7. To celebrate this, it’s tradition to write wishes on colored strips of paper called Tanzaku, and tie them to bamboo so your wish will reach the stars.

We put out a form last week asking for wishes to place in the Home world. We got over 1.5k responses! Thank you for submitting! These wishes will populate the majority of the Home world.

You’ll be able to submit your own wishes in the Home world on colorful Tanzaku, each with its own meaning.

For reference:

  • Gold: Friendship. Wishes for trust and friendship 金：友情。信頼や友情を願うもの。
  • Pink: Gratitude. Wishes of thanks to the people around you. ピンク：感謝。まわりの人への「ありがとう」を伝える願い。
  • Purple: Learning. Wishes to learn, study, and master something. 紫：学び。学び、勉強し、何かを身につけるための願い。
  • Green: Growth. Wishes to become who you’re growing into. 緑：成長。なりたい自分へと成長していくための願い。
  • Blue: Honor. A vow or promise you will keep for yourself 青：誇り。自分自身と交わす誓いや約束。

We’ll be launching a Tanabata-themed Shop update on July 3 at 2pm PT.

We’ll ALSO be releasing the Tanabata-themed Home world and some special avatars through the Avatar Marketplace from July 6 2pm PT - July 12 at 2pm PT.

If you take pictures, please use the social media tag #VRCTanabata七夕 !

Unity 6!

That’s right! VRChat on Unity 6 is now in Open Beta. Or well, it’s on it’s own Open Beta Branch: unity-6

You probably have some questions! First, let me copy this lil notice I put in the Discord:

:warning: I AM GOING TO SAY THIS LIKE TEN TIMES. IF YOU ARE A CREATOR, DO NOT UPGRADE YOUR UNITY SDK. DO NOT UPLOAD CONTENT WITH ANY VERSION OF UNITY THAT IS NEWER THAN 2022.3.22f1! :warning:

cool ok

Small Q&A!

Wait, won’t this cause a content apocalypse?!

No. This build doesn’t change anything about our render pipeline, which means that all content should be backwards compatible. We’re still on a special build for Single-Pass-Stereo (not SPS-I) rendering too.

Udon in worlds will continue to function as well, we have put several shims into place for Unity APIs that have changed.

If you load a world or an avatar and it looks or behaves different with Unity 6 than on live (with Unity 2022), that is a bug and you should report it!

Should I upgrade my version of Unity for content creation?

No! Stop! See the big warning above. Don’t do it. It won’t work and you might brick your content and we will not be able to fix it. Wait for us to tell you to do so.

Our servers will reject uploads from Unity 6. If you somehow get something past that block… uhh, you deserve your fate.

Are you ever going to migrate to URP?

Not yet. We’ll talk more about our migration plans in the future.

Which version exactly? Why not 6.3/6.7?

This upgrade brings us to Unity 6.0, or very specifically 6000.0.60f1.

We might upgrade to 6.3 or 6.7 at some point, or even skip them and go straight to whatever comes after. We can’t stay on one version forever. But, you know, baby steps.

What about performance?

It’s better. In fact, our closed beta testers kept using it despite some early bugs that were crashing them. How much better? That depends, of course, on a lot of factors. So, I dunno, try it and see.

What other new stuff do I get?

We’ll talk about that when we get to the SDK! At the moment, only 2022.3 features are supported still.

Where do I post feedback and bugs reports?

As usual: Open Beta | VRChat!

SDK Improvements

Look! Improvements to the SDK!

No huge new features here, but we’re working through some issues in the SDK that have been affecting it for quite a while, as well as a few quality of life improvements for it.

Here are some of the upcoming changes:

  • PhysBones and Contacts should keep working if the project reloads while you’re still in Play Mode. This isn’t something the vanilla SDK really does or encourages, but several popular community packages follow that pattern.
  • ClientSim in world projects should keep working during Play Mode reloads as well.
  • Other improvements to stability in general related to entering and exiting Play Mode in both avatar and world projects.
  • Our SDK components are fairly all over the place at the moment when you press “Add Component” which can make it hard to find them if you don’t know what they’re called already. We’re organizing them all under VRChat to make them a bit easier to find, and hiding some internal components from view where they’re not useful.
  • Multi-platform builds of avatars can fail to get to the end at the moment if your avatar isn’t at the root of the scene, this will be corrected in the future.
  • We’re making changes to how various inspectors and tools internal to the SDK work to try and reduce how much the SDK logs things the end user can’t do anything about.
    • (No more “Value cannot be null” spam, if you know you know.)
  • When you edit your avatar’s generated colliders in its descriptor (the ones for its hands and fingers), it’ll now mirror properly if your avatar isn’t exactly on the scene origin, as is usually the case with most avatar projects.
  • A range of exceptions that trigger in specific situations that could make the SDK unusable in some cases.

That’s the general overview, and we hope to keep picking up more quality of life issues like these for the SDK as we go.

An Update on Age Assurance, Content Gating, and Safety Improvements in VRChat

We recently posted a blog post on this topic. You can find it here.

Tupper can walk you through it here:

Feel free to comment about it here, although please understand we might not be able to respond. That doesn’t mean we aren’t collecting the feedback, though, as Tupper notes in the video.

Closing

That’s it for this Dev Update. As a note, due to some scheduling conflicts, we’re going to be pushing the next Dev Update to July 16. That’s a bit out, but we’ll see you then!

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Any Soba progress to share? :3

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"Are you ever going to migrate to URP?

Not yet. We’ll talk more about our migration plans in the future."

So.. how exactly will this work? Wasn’t built-in entirely removed in Unity6?

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Unity 6 is a great update for sure. This does remind me, this could potentially mean a MacOS version is closer than ever?

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Unity still has support for it all the way through to Unity 6.7 LTS… Unfortunately :sweat_smile:

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It will be supported up to 6.7, with this in mind, I’m curious how it’ll be implemented since BIRP and URP doesn’t necessarily work together out of the box, and would usually result invisible objects if you swapped the pipeline on runtime.
I took a look at it on paper and experimented with it, they might be cooking something up

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Anti-cheat software for games only affects computer performance and does nothing to stop avatar theft.

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I’m honestly still waiting to use SPS-I to be used, since basically all of the major shaders have gotten support for it, and the call to do so has been since 2022. The SDK itself compiles SPS-I variants of shaders already. When is this going to get enabled? Why keep standard SPS, if everyone has moved on to support SPS-I proper? (And the performance left on the table keeping SPS isn’t insignificant.)

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I just had some for lunch, if you want some…I think I still have a cup :0

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It has received the deprecated status as of Unity 6.5, and the last version of Unity that will ship with the current rendering pipeline we’ve been used to will be the 6.7 LTS. Going beyond 6.7 will mean VRC will likely swap to URP, but like with previous moves to newer engines Unity will likely assist VRC in preserving our content to URP

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I have to imagine part of the delays to Soba releasing was because of them working on this upgrade to Unity 6. Would want Soba to be built around newer capabilities.
Hopefully it won’t be too much longer…

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Regarding the avatar ripping issue that has recently become a hot topic again, does the official team have any plans or measures to address it?

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BiRP shaders can often work in URP if not accessing pipeline-specific functionality, just not “Surface shaders”, since they include things that won’t be operating in different pipelines.

I could see VRC implementing a conversion tool from BiRP>URP, since they have a lot of incentive to do so. Unlike HDRP, URP is actually very similar to BiRP in terms of what context-data a shader will have and what it outputs, with mainly some minor changes to how certain data is setup and processed/accessed for efficiency.

The biggest change to the pipeline is its reliance on the SRP (and its batcher) and how it handles rendering things. One of those big changes is the removal of support for multi-pass shaders to support more low-end hardware that doesn’t support it.
If you want multiple automatic passes, you have to put a material for each pass on the object. (otherwise, VRC would have to customize the pipeline itself to support multi-pass, which isn’t a huge undertaking actually).

So if they do end up moving to URP and convert things… It may be that they just drop support for multi-pass, breaking some stuff as an acceptable payoff for better performance and performance analysis.

No support for GrabPass is also a big problem, as a lot of custom shaders rely on that for all kinds of effects. But it also has pretty large performance impacts, especially if lots of objects are doing it. This is one change where I’m really not sure how they’d backwards-compatible that other than customizing the pipeline to support it, as it would otherwise require using custom render pass scripts per-avatar, which would be even more of a nightmare than just supporting GrabPass.

So hopefully they do go the customized URP route. As there are a lot of performance gains to be had from that change as well, not just from upgrading to Unity 6. It would be a shame to see our shader effect capabilities reduced significantly. (if they want more accurate performance analysis, it’s not that hard to check how many unnamed passes the shaders are including)

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This release removed the “View Reports” button from the Quick Menu page. What was the reasoning behind this intended change?

[1860] “View Reports” button missing on Report QM page | Voters | VRChat

As of writing this, the topic to bring back the functionality is trending #1 in the Open Beta board on VRChat Feedback: [1860] Keep or reintroduce the “View Reports” button on Report QM page | Voters | VRChat

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The blog post outlines the intents to build “Age Assured Groups, where you must be Age Assured 18+ to join.”

What happens to a group member in Age Assured Groups who loses or requests removal of their Verified 18+ status from VRChat after joining Age Assured Groups? Will they have the same permissions as before?

The ability to lockdown instance visibility to Age Assured 18+ members in Groups which host Age Gated (Verified 18+) Group members instances with a consent gathering in group rules would be useful to some.

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I can already see the blindfold being put over me. One day I’m gonna walk into VRChat and suddenly 80% of VRChat is gone because I don’t wanna get age assured.

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Whenever people bring up Avatar Ripping I do wonder if they understand how VRChat and in extension all video games work.

If you can see it on your screen, it can be obtained by you or someone else.

The only way to “fix” the issue would be having everything running off a server and end users only see effectively a video stream of their gameplay. VRChat can add as much security as they want, obfuscate as much as possible, do everything in their power to theoretically stop ripping, but it would still happen on some scale. Does this mean VRChat should give up? No but there are limits to what they can do before it starts having too many downsides on all users.

“Just ban them” also isn’t really an option when its impossible to stop someone from just making a new account with a VPN and spoofed Hardware IDs. Again doesn’t mean VRChat should just give up but the point still is there is no perfect solution.

I know a massive chunk of the community expects some kind of solution here but like with “just get rid of all the kids,” it doesn’t work like that.

Also trying to shoehorn the EAC debate into this doesn’t help your case either when prior to EAC ripping was a far larger problem when you had infected as well as purpose built Client Mods stealing avatars left and right.

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We still don’t even know what Age Assurance exactly will entail yet and while currently yes you can only get it via a single month of VRC+ (you keep your verification after VRC+ expires) but they could

  1. Allow you to pay at-cost for verification, would cost money but less than VRC+
  2. Allow a just adding a credit card to count as verification
  3. Taking into account your account age, assuming you were at least 13 in 2021 then you’d be 18 in 2026 therefor of-age

There’s a lot of paths that could be taken and I’m sure some I’m not even thinking of.

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Will Age Assured Groups be available to existing groups, or does this require creating a new group?

If it’ll be available to existing groups, what happens to group members that are not Verified 18+ in a group once the group is switched to be an Age Assured Group?

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What does most of that have to do with what I’ve said?