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Godot Engine

DESIGN
Velocity5.0

Open-source 2D and 3D game engine

Godot runs two branches at once: 4.7 takes the features, 3.6 still gets fixes.

game-enginemaintenancelegacy-branchstabilityrelease-cadence
Current state
Godot's release feed is almost entirely maintenance traffic. The 4.7 line shipped as a feature release in June and has since taken two patch releases (4.7.1, 4.7.2), while 4.6.x got its own tail of fixes. The newest tag is 3.6.3 — a maintenance drop on the legacy 3.x branch that predates the 4.x rewrite.
Where it's heading
The pattern is a project in consolidation rather than expansion: feature releases arrive a couple of times a year and everything between them is stability work, on both the current and the legacy branch. Keeping 3.6 patched years into the 4.x era signals a deliberate long-tail commitment to projects that never migrated. The feed itself carries no detail — every entry is the same template pointing at off-site release notes.
Prediction
Expect the next tags to continue as 4.7.x patches, with 3.6 receiving only occasional fixes. The entries give no visibility into what lands in 4.8, so any read on upcoming features would be guesswork.

Recent moves

  1. 24d ago

    Godot 3.6.3 maintenance release on the legacy 3.x line

    A bug-fix release for the pre-4.x branch, compatible with earlier 3.6 versions. It adds nothing new — its significance is that the legacy line is still being patched at all while 4.7 carries development.

    View source ↗
  2. 1mo ago

    Godot 4.7.2 maintenance release

    The second patch on the 4.7 line, published as a bare version bump pointing at off-site notes. It continues the post-feature-release stabilisation pass rather than changing anything users choose the engine for.

    View source ↗
  3. 2mo ago

    Godot 4.7.1 maintenance release

    First patch after 4.7, addressing stability and usability defects with compatibility preserved. Standard cleanup on a freshly shipped feature branch.

    View source ↗
  4. 2mo ago

    Godot 4.6.3 maintenance release

    A late fix drop on 4.6 released the same day as 4.6.2, closing out that branch as attention moved to 4.7. No user-visible capability change.

    View source ↗
  5. 2mo ago

    Godot 4.6.2 maintenance release

    Bug fixes for the 4.6 branch, shipped alongside 4.6.3 in the same batch. Part of the tail-end servicing before the branch went quiet.

    View source ↗
  6. 3mo ago

    Godot 4.7 feature release

    The one entry in this window that adds capability rather than fixing it, described only as usability and performance work with compatibility preserved. The feed body is boilerplate, so the actual feature set is not readable here — it anchors the branch the subsequent patches service.

    View source ↗