How to Safely Upgrade to Godot 4.6.1 and What the Fixes Actually Mean
If you’ve been tinkering with a 4.6 project for the past few weeks, the new Godot 4.6.1 build is worth a quick look. The maintenance release patches several crashes that showed up right after the 4.6 launch, clears a handful of navigation quirks in the 3D editor, and finally gets the macOS .NET binaries signed correctly. Below is a no‑fluff rundown of why you should consider swapping the old engine for this one, plus a few practical tips to keep your project intact.
Why the Upgrade Matters
The most irritating bug that surfaced after 4.6 hit stable was the NodePath hash collision – two different paths could end up with identical hashes, leading to mysterious “resource not found” errors in large scenes. In practice this meant my own platformer would sometimes lose a reference to a background music node right after re‑loading the scene. The fix in 4.6.1 restores proper hashing, so those silent failures disappear.
Another pain point involved the 3D navigation scheme: orbit snapping would stubbornly stay on even when I cleared the shortcut keys, making it impossible to rotate freely around a model. The new build respects the “none” setting, which feels like someone finally read the user manual.
Critical Bugs Fixed in Godot 4.6.1
The patch addresses a handful of use‑after‑free bugs that could crash the editor without warning. In the AnimationTree and Blend Tree code paths, memory was being freed twice when certain nodes were edited on the fly – I’ve seen this happen after tweaking an AimModifier3D in a shooter prototype, and the editor would simply shut down. Those double deletes are gone now, so you can experiment with animation graphs without fearing a sudden exit.
SoftBody3D also regains its ability to have a total_mass of zero, which is essential for “ghost” physics objects that should float but not affect other bodies. The Jolt integration had an intermittent issue where transform updates were dropped; the fix forces those updates through, so ragdolls behave consistently again.
On the rendering side, the engine now correctly handles sky background draws when no sky resource is assigned. Previously the renderer would read from a null pointer and spit out a black screen in certain HDR viewports – not fun when you’re trying to preview atmospheric fog.
Gotchas on macOS .NET Support
The initial macOS binaries for 4.6.1 suffered a signing glitch that stripped required entitlements, breaking both the built‑in C# support and any GDExtension DLLs you might have compiled. If you downloaded the editor before the fix went live, you’ll see cryptic “cannot load library” errors when trying to run a .NET project. The solution is simply to re‑download the macOS version from the official page – the new package has a proper signature and launches without demanding you toggle Gatekeeper.
Best Practices for Backing Up Your Project
Even though Godot’s maintainers label 4.6.1 as safe to upgrade, treating any engine jump like a minor OS patch is wise. Commit your entire project folder to Git before swapping the executable; that way you can roll back with a single checkout if something still slips through the cracks. If you’re not into version control, at least zip up the project.godot file together with the addons, scenes, and scripts directories on an external drive. A quick test run – open a copy of your project in the new editor, hit play, and verify that all exported scenes load without warning messages.
That’s the low‑down on Godot 4.6.1. Grab the updated binaries, give your backups a once‑over, and you should be back to building games without the surprise crashes that haunted the first 4.6 release.
Maintenance release: Godot 4.6.1 – Godot Engine
The first 4.6 maintenance release has arrived!
