As a huge Astroneer fan, I was genuinely excited for the Megatech DLC. On the surface, it’s one of the most thrilling ideas the game has ever had. But right now, it doesn’t feel like a bold new step forward. Instead, it feels like a truly brilliant idea that’s buried under a pile of bugs, poor balance, and pure frustration.
If you love Astroneer and were hoping this would become your new end-game obsession, you’ll likely find yourself stuck in the middle: you’ll admire the design but be shocked by how broken it all feels.
When a Game You Love Lets You Down
When a game you have a genuine affection for lets you down, it stings more than usual. This isn’t a casual complaint.
From my experience, this update has basically broken the game for a lot of players.
Multiplayer is a mess, servers are struggling, and the core new systems are so unreliable they aren’t worth the massive investment they demand.
A Glimpse of Something Great
On paper, Megatech is a dream come true for veteran players. It adds huge megastructures and deeper automation, giving you a reason to build a sprawling factory empire instead of a small, efficient base.
You can feel the potential. The museum lets you donate gigantic amounts of resources for milestones. The biodome promises automated farming. The orbital platform looks like the ultimate base in the sky, with the lure of infinite soil and permanent flight.
The problem is, these great ideas either don’t work properly or are balanced so poorly they feel pointless.
Performance and Stability: An Update That Broke the Game
Before we even talk about design, you have to fight just to play the game. On my main save, the game was crashing every 10-20 minutes. I had to stop playing and switch to another game because it was so unstable.
This isn’t just me. Players are reporting endless loading screens, crashes on startup, and multiplayer that’s nearly unplayable. Even when you get in, the performance on a well-developed save can become a slideshow. For a DLC aimed at players with massive factories, this is a brutal flaw.
Tonedeaf Communication And Slow Fixes
Look, I get it. Bugs happen in complicated games like this, and I’m usually pretty understanding. But here’s what’s frustrating: a full week went by with no real fixes, even though everyone was reporting crashes and broken saves.
What did we get instead? A post from the developers celebrating the launch. They boasted about strong sales and 100,000 new players, while only briefly mentioning that a bigger “balancing” update is planned for early 2026.
That “early 2026” line is a major problem. The message was so vague that we’re left wondering: will we get small fixes soon, or are we being told to wait until next year for the game to work properly?
No matter how you read it, posting a “we’re a huge success!” message while your community is struggling with a broken game feels completely out of touch. When this is the studio’s main game, we expect clear communication and fast action, not just marketing hype.
The Intermodal Platform: Great Free Idea, Broken In Practice
The Intermodal platform might be the best idea in the whole update, and to the developers’ credit, it’s free for everyone. It’s supposed to be a logistics system that moves resources between your bases automatically, cutting out those tedious shuttle trips.
In theory, it’s a game-changer. In practice, it’s completely broken. Right now, if you try to add extra storage to a large shuttle, the game glitches and thinks it’s already full. This means you can only move a tiny amount of items at a time.
So, what should have been a powerful tool for managing your empire becomes an unreliable gimmick. And since it’s part of the free update, even players who didn’t buy the DLC are stuck with a broken core system.
DLS And Printers: Core Systems That Don’t Behave
The Distribution Launch System (DLS) is another great idea on paper. It’s meant to shoot resources across your network, automating your factory and making you feel like an industrial genius.
But the main issue isn’t the concept—it’s that it just doesn’t work right. Sometimes it fires, sometimes it doesn’t. You’ll get error messages saying a tube is empty when you can clearly see it’s full. Printers attached to it get stuck or break completely if you remove resources at the wrong time.
When you’ve invested so much into a late-game system, these bugs make you afraid to use it. Instead of feeling smart, you end up babysitting broken machines.
The Museum: Mega Costs, Mini Rewards
The museum is supposed to be the centerpiece of the DLC—a place where you donate insane amounts of resources and power to unlock rewards. For dedicated players, this kind of long-term goal can be really satisfying.
The problem is with the rewards and how resources work in Astroneer. Resources in your world are technically finite; once you mine a node, it’s gone. You can get more with complex setups, but it takes a lot of work.
From your perspective, this means you are permanently destroying your hard-earned, late-game materials. And what do you get in return? Mostly just cosmetic items. It feels like you’re making your world permanently poorer for a reward that isn’t worth the cost.
The Biodome: A Great Idea That Doesn’t Work
The biodome sounds like it should be amazing. It’s designed to automatically handle seeds and passively produce resources like ammonium and resin. I could immediately see how, if it worked, it could power huge automated systems for the long haul.
But once again, the reality is a letdown.
- The whole system just stops working randomly. You’ll see seeds just sitting there, not being planted or harvested, until you mess with it to get it going again.
- The canisters, which you’re supposed to be able to attach, often bug out and stop refilling.
- There’s even an oxygenator upgrade for it, but by the time you can build this expensive, late-game structure, you already have an oxygenator on your backpack. The upgrade is completely pointless.
So, you end up with a building that’s incredibly expensive to make, doesn’t do its main job reliably, and offers “bonuses” you don’t even need. The core idea isn’t bad, but it just feels like busywork on top of broken parts.
The Orbital Platform: A Base With No Practical Use
The orbital platform is the showpiece of the DLC. It looks incredible—a massive station in orbit that offers infinite soil to dig and the potential for unlimited flight and oxygen.
In theory, this is the ultimate endgame base, a single hub for your entire operation.
In practice, it comes so late that it’s almost useless. Building and upgrading it costs a staggering amount of advanced parts. By the time you can finally finish it, your main base on a planet is already fully built and set up.
Moving all your stuff up there is a complete nightmare. Just moving your resource stockpile would take dozens of trips with the current broken logistics. And you can’t unlock it early enough to use it as your starter base, which is when it would actually be helpful.
You’re left with this gorgeous, amazing-looking structure that has fantastic features you’ll probably never get to use properly. It misses the most important question: when would a normal player actually want to use this?
So, Who Is This DLC Really For?
It’s clear that Megatech is built only for the most hardcore players. The biodome, museum, and orbital platform are all incredibly expensive and complex, aimed at players who have already built massive factories.
If you’re a more casual player who just likes to explore and finish the main game, you’ll probably never even get to experience what Megatech has to offer in a meaningful way.
But even as a dedicated player, you have to ask yourself: is it worth it? The most useful part (the Intermodal platform) is free and broken. The parts you pay for are grindy, don’t work right, and don’t give you rewards that feel worth the effort.
From my perspective, in its current state, Megatech is just “mega meh.”
The Bottom Line: Should You Buy It?
My recommendation is simple: Do not buy the Megatech DLC right now.
The DLC is broken on a fundamental level. The only reason to even consider it is if you are a die-hard fan with massive resource stockpiles and a high tolerance for things not working.
You should only buy it later if the developers release major patches that fix the bugs, improve performance, and rebalance the rewards to make them feel worthwhile.
Until then, I can’t recommend this to anyone. For hardcore players, it’s a frustrating experience. For new or casual players, it’s the absolute wrong way to try and enjoy Astroneer.
