Developer Update - 5 March 2026

Official Dev Updates
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Welcome to the Developer Update for March 5, 2026.

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Today’s featured world is Fish! by Godfall.

Announcements

BWAAAH! Rabbids x VRChat Shop Takeover!

This March, the Rabbids are taking over the VRChat Store!

In addition to a bunch of new items (is that a PLUNGER?), you can also buy a Rabbids avatar – complete with face tracking!

Go get 'em and make sure to BWAAA at your friends.

Space Jam 3 is Ongoing!

Space Jam this year is a World & Film Jam! Submissions are open from Feb 18 to Apr 5 2026 at 11:59pm PT.

Please check out our forum post to learn more about the judging criteria and prizes.

Impostors Are Getting an Update!

We’ve been cooking some improvements that should noticeably improve Impostor rendering and generation, especially on PC.

For Impostors generated prior to this upcoming release, you’ll see some immediate benefit:

  • On PC, outlines should be much cleaner looking (less blocky!)
  • We’ll no longer sometimes accidentally cause floating lines in the air around them (clamping to the actual piece we’re sampling)

For Impostors generated in the future, we’ve got some even better things cooking:

  • We’ve done some magic on the backend to preserve 2.5-4x of the depth precision, as well as more evenly preserving it for a total of 5.5-8.8x the precision!
  • Solved a bug where depth captures had ~8cm of ‘wiggle room’ added to the capture that wasn’t accounted for in the end reproduction. This was why some impostors can look ‘squished’ relative to the overall mesh.
  • Uses a more conservative downscaling to avoid harsh pixelization.
  • Ensures all tris have their long side facing away from the center of the quad, making pieces smoother and less ‘zig-zaggy’.

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  • Updates our texture compression to be more perceptually-based to improve color quality.
  • Improve edge-extension to be more precise, meaning you should rarely see a piece that appears to ‘stretch’ backwards a distance.

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Neat!

Avatar Raycasting

A future SDK release will add a component to let you perform raycasts on avatars! This has previously already been possible via FinalIK, but this component will allow avatar creators to achieve a similar effect in a more beginner friendly way without having to use a paid asset. Here’s a preview of the component:

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We are not retiring FinalIK since it’s still used for more advanced use cases as well. We hope this component will make raycasting setups on avatars more straightforward!

Exposing VRC+ Status to Udon

Soon, worlds will be able to give users rewards for being VRC+ subscribers!

While this is certainly optional, we thought it was an obvious no-brainer for us. We might expand on this in the future. Maybe there could be some sort of way for us to thank world creators? Ideas welcome in the comments.

VRChat Backend Updates

Over the past couple months you may have seen issues with your friends list being slow to update or not being in sync with others.

As of this last weekend, that should no longer be happening. Behind the scenes we’re working hard on performance fixes and scaling our systems to keep up with all the new users we’ve been seeing!

Of course, this is a work in progress – so expect additional improvements… and the occasional hiccup.

Conclusion

That’s it for the Dev Update! See you next time on March 19.

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Rabbids! I’d love to see more collaborations. At least since you’re in talks with Ubisoft, I’d like to see some Assassin’s Creed or Watch_Dogs gear.

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Love the rabbit assets. Great partnership

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Nice to see an extra useful Udon feature!

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Exposing VRC+ Status to Udon

I feel like people will make worlds that block VRC+ subscribers or somethng :laughing:

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Woah! Those new impostors look much better and less pixely now, nice job guys

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YOOO this is huge. very excited ^^

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Since you have added vrc+ detection to udon, and since it has been asked a lot already, can you confirm if you are going to add AgeVerified status to udon too?

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Any updates on Soba that can be shared?

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Will the ray casting component be available on quest avatars as well?

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I wouldn’t mind seeing some kind of VRC+ (and credits, tbh) affiliate program similar to how certain platforms have “Creator Codes” during checkout to send a percentage of your purchase to that creator.

I would personally feel incentivized to use this in my worlds if I could let people know to “use code BIG at checkout” so I could gain something from the transaction.

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Do we have an update on when Repeating Events will go live on the website? It’ll make managing several groups events much easier. :’v

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Some users, including myself are upset with product descriptions not containing thorough descriptions on content functionality. This leads to users purchasing content from the store under false pretenses of what the content can do.

My recent experience with the new Shopping Cart being shown in the announcment like a vehicle being controlled by the rabbids gave me the impression it was the first vehicle item for users! I was dissapointed to see it had no functionality for me and was just a follower that other users can use.

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Man I want soba and the new character controller so i can do directional gravity without chairs lol

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Raycast component is great!

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Hey! I saw your feedback (and the feedback of someone else) and immediately edited the copy of the Shopping Cart so it was clearer. Generally, we try to be as clear and concise as we can, while still preserving some fun in the descriptions themselves.

Hopefully it’s a bit clearer now. I understand sometimes these can be confusing, though, as we keep introducing new things that Items can do!

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For the avatar raycasting I’m hoping that it’s max range isn’t too limited. Can we also get a parameter from it that’s a ratio of the hit distance over the max? That would save me needing to use two contacts to get the ray length like I currently have to.

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The eternal question, haha! We’re still making progress on Soba, but we don’t have that much to share at this moment.
We’re working on a new roadmap update for VRChat creators where we’ll probably share more information.

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Hmm. That seems a bit like a “block list” targeting subscribers, which might go against our creator guidelines.

I’m hoping creators use the feature as intended! Or - rather - as requested in the Canny post below. We appreciate that world creators want to support VRChat! :)

Yes! Though you can only use a limited number of raycast components based on the avatar’s performance rank.

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Exposing VRC+ Status to Udon

you’ll expose this? rad! how about IsModerator? I want my mod room to not be on a static whitelist because then other groups could use those features instead of being forced to gatekeep with a name whitelist. it would also prevent spoofing! it would be great.

my canny post about this

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Work on the new character controller halted as of August last year New Character Controller for Worlds | Voters | VRChat scroll down to the comment from Fax where they mark the post as “interested“.

Also unfortunately gravity shifting stuff seems to have been out of scope regardless.