Greetings, fellow Celeste players!
As you might have noticed, this year we were way less active than usual here at the Celeste project, and this has multiple reasons. I want to take the opportunity to shed some light into the darkness: What happened, what the current status is, and how the future looks like.
So, let's start with myself. Back in 2025, I suffered a severe burnout. While most of you probably haven’t noticed, as PF2K managed to uphold the rest of the team for content. For that time, I want to thank PF2K, martinmine and Elle for managing organisational, technical and financial stuff. I also learned a lot about myself, and in a process of 6 months I managed to get back on my feet. Likewise, I also had to accept that a full-time job involving purely programming just doesn’t work with then doing somewhat the same things in your free time, that would be, again, programming. This is where I had to reduce my involvement with this project to a minimum. Now, in 2026, I am feeling better but still need to be careful.
Then, with 2026, also PF2K had to reduce his involvement to a minimum due to personal reasons I won’t elaborate. However, I want to stress that he is still with us and is not gone, just can’t provide the time for this project at the moment. Anyway, at this point, the project has been more in a “maintenance” state. However, thanks to Kire and Servimomia, we still had some content pushed out, and some content that is still being worked on. We also had some major things to deal with that we still was able to solve with our slim time: Windows Update bricking our server, where we had a downtime of nearly a day, a huge forum (xenforo) update that has been tested on a temporary extra server, a DDOS-Attack on our web-server. We want to maintain the status quo as best as possible…
But there is still hope, and let me explain why:
Firstly, there will be an organisational change: NCSGeek, a fellow moderator that has been with us since the beginning, will be promoted to “Moderator Manager”, getting admin tools to allow him to help you, the players, with more complex issues when I am not available. At the same time, I want to thank you all the mods that have been with us, that are: Andy P, Servimomia, Smileyguyx, and Wartai. They have always been very supportive. In addition, I want to give a big shoutout to our volunteer tech support members: CWO and Sonicflare. And last but not least to all the content creators in 3D and art space, especially Chaos and happysmurf. Thank you so much!
The second point is tools that allow us to get things done faster, including bug fixes. Roughly two years ago I talked about the white screen bug. Now I want to announce that I want to challenge this problem and alongside the out of memory issues. We might have the potential here to somewhat fix it. With some help from GPT-Astra and GPT-Sol, I was able to create the first initial runnable version of AOEO with LAA, increasing the usable memory from 2GB to 4GB. Now, as these changes were done with a lot of trial and error, they will also need some testing. There will be a setting in the launcher that you can enable to play the LAA-Version of it. Even with my best efforts to find every gap, I will need your support with testing this version. Expect crashes and bugs here and there, but I hope, with your support, we might reach a stable state where we can use the full 4GB. It isn’t out yet, but I am working on getting some kind of an alpha/beta state that you can test.
The last thing I want to tackle is donations. We’re still behind our donation goal of 3.5k$. Realistically it is more in the direction of 3k$, as with the reinstallation of the forum, the goal progress had been reset mid year. Still this shows a missing gap of roughly 2k$. Now if we don’t reach this goal, this doesn’t mean that the server will go down as of tomorrow. I’d even move it to my potato server before closing the server at all, but for maintaining the server quality we’d expect, I’d like to keep it to a strong hosted cloud service. On a side note: To give the donations a bit more visibility, I’ve created a new channel on discord called #donations.
So how is the future? Frankly, I don’t know. Don’t expect anything like big new civs for a while. I’d rather see one or other quest pack here and there. So right now I am feeling more like a janitor to keep an eye out that everything is working as expected…
Until then, have nice weekend,
~Kevin “Kevsoft”
PS: Halloween Event will come soon
As you might have noticed, this year we were way less active than usual here at the Celeste project, and this has multiple reasons. I want to take the opportunity to shed some light into the darkness: What happened, what the current status is, and how the future looks like.
So, let's start with myself. Back in 2025, I suffered a severe burnout. While most of you probably haven’t noticed, as PF2K managed to uphold the rest of the team for content. For that time, I want to thank PF2K, martinmine and Elle for managing organisational, technical and financial stuff. I also learned a lot about myself, and in a process of 6 months I managed to get back on my feet. Likewise, I also had to accept that a full-time job involving purely programming just doesn’t work with then doing somewhat the same things in your free time, that would be, again, programming. This is where I had to reduce my involvement with this project to a minimum. Now, in 2026, I am feeling better but still need to be careful.
Then, with 2026, also PF2K had to reduce his involvement to a minimum due to personal reasons I won’t elaborate. However, I want to stress that he is still with us and is not gone, just can’t provide the time for this project at the moment. Anyway, at this point, the project has been more in a “maintenance” state. However, thanks to Kire and Servimomia, we still had some content pushed out, and some content that is still being worked on. We also had some major things to deal with that we still was able to solve with our slim time: Windows Update bricking our server, where we had a downtime of nearly a day, a huge forum (xenforo) update that has been tested on a temporary extra server, a DDOS-Attack on our web-server. We want to maintain the status quo as best as possible…
But there is still hope, and let me explain why:
Firstly, there will be an organisational change: NCSGeek, a fellow moderator that has been with us since the beginning, will be promoted to “Moderator Manager”, getting admin tools to allow him to help you, the players, with more complex issues when I am not available. At the same time, I want to thank you all the mods that have been with us, that are: Andy P, Servimomia, Smileyguyx, and Wartai. They have always been very supportive. In addition, I want to give a big shoutout to our volunteer tech support members: CWO and Sonicflare. And last but not least to all the content creators in 3D and art space, especially Chaos and happysmurf. Thank you so much!
The second point is tools that allow us to get things done faster, including bug fixes. Roughly two years ago I talked about the white screen bug. Now I want to announce that I want to challenge this problem and alongside the out of memory issues. We might have the potential here to somewhat fix it. With some help from GPT-Astra and GPT-Sol, I was able to create the first initial runnable version of AOEO with LAA, increasing the usable memory from 2GB to 4GB. Now, as these changes were done with a lot of trial and error, they will also need some testing. There will be a setting in the launcher that you can enable to play the LAA-Version of it. Even with my best efforts to find every gap, I will need your support with testing this version. Expect crashes and bugs here and there, but I hope, with your support, we might reach a stable state where we can use the full 4GB. It isn’t out yet, but I am working on getting some kind of an alpha/beta state that you can test.
The last thing I want to tackle is donations. We’re still behind our donation goal of 3.5k$. Realistically it is more in the direction of 3k$, as with the reinstallation of the forum, the goal progress had been reset mid year. Still this shows a missing gap of roughly 2k$. Now if we don’t reach this goal, this doesn’t mean that the server will go down as of tomorrow. I’d even move it to my potato server before closing the server at all, but for maintaining the server quality we’d expect, I’d like to keep it to a strong hosted cloud service. On a side note: To give the donations a bit more visibility, I’ve created a new channel on discord called #donations.
So how is the future? Frankly, I don’t know. Don’t expect anything like big new civs for a while. I’d rather see one or other quest pack here and there. So right now I am feeling more like a janitor to keep an eye out that everything is working as expected…
Until then, have nice weekend,
~Kevin “Kevsoft”
PS: Halloween Event will come soon
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