Star Wars Galaxies Restoration’s A New Dawn Update Brings DirectX 12 Visuals and a Kashyyyk Overhaul
Star Wars Galaxies Restoration, the volunteer-run project that has kept Sony Online Entertainment’s 2003 MMO Star Wars Galaxies playable and growing years after its official servers were shut down, has released its latest major content drop. Called A New Dawn, the update went live on October 24, 2026, and rather than centering on a single big feature, it bundles together a wide set of changes the team has been working on across rendering technology, the Kashyyyk storyline, professions, and housing.
A DirectX 12 Renderer Finally Comes to a Decades-Old MMO
The headline addition is an experimental DirectX 12 renderer, available through the launcher under Settings and then Experimental, though it requires a CPU with AVX2 support to run. The new renderer brings volumetric fog, clouds, and atmosphere, a reworked water shader, significantly longer terrain and shadow draw distances, and upscaling support for DLSS, FSR, and XeSS. It shares its graphics profiles and options with the standard client, and the team is asking players who run into issues to report them with the game’s built-in bug command. Separately, the regular 64-bit client can now start on CPUs without AVX support at all, while the older 32-bit client has been retired.
Star Wars Galaxies Restoration’s new DirectX 12 renderer adds volumetric fog, a reworked water shader, and much longer draw distances to the 20-year-old MMO.
Kashyyyk’s Wookiee Storyline Gets Repeatable Instances and New Weapons Caches
On the content side, all six instances tied to the Revenge of the Wookiees storyline on Kashyyyk now support difficulty modes and reset daily so they can be repeated, with further balance adjustments planned for the coming weeks. The update also adds new Weapons Cache encounters in Lookout, Encampment, and Compound sizes, each built around one of several objectives such as defending a position, disabling bombs, or solving terminal puzzles, and several prerequisite quest chains on the planet have been eased to make them less of a bottleneck.
Beyond Kashyyyk, the Scout and Ranger professions picked up new camp types and the return of classic scout traps, pets and mounts gained deeper taming mechanics and mounted combat, player cities can now grow to higher ranks with more specializations, and housing finally gets a drag-and-drop furniture tool to replace the old system of typing in coordinates by hand. Star Wars Galaxies Restoration remains free to play, and A New Dawn is available now through the project’s own launcher.
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Picture Source: SWG Restoration
