Godot 4.7: the changes worth knowing

Godot 4.7 was released on June 18, 2026. Two maintenance releases have followed: 4.7.1 in July, and 4.7.2 on August 18 with 57 fixes from 39 contributors. The Godot team reports no known incompatibilities between 4.7.1 and 4.7.2, so if you are already on 4.7, update (Godot 4.7.2, Open Source For You).

This is a short tour of the 4.7 changes that affect day-to-day work, grouped by where you will notice them. The full list is on the release page.

Rendering

• AreaLight3D. A new node for rectangular light sources: screens, billboards, windows. You no longer need an emissive material plus global illumination to fake one, and the result has softer shadows and better reflections.
• HDR output on Windows, macOS, iOS, visionOS and Linux (Wayland). Godot has rendered lighting in HDR internally for a long time; now players on HDR displays can see that range.
• Nearest-neighbour 3D scaling. For a retro look, or for keeping edges crisp when rendering 3D at a lower resolution. It costs about the same as bilinear and does not touch 2D.
• Live previews for text shaders. You can see a shader's output in the editor as you type it.

Drawing on textures

DrawableTexture2D is a small API for painting onto a texture at runtime. Before this, the options were a Viewport workaround that got expensive quickly, or the low-level RenderingDevice API. Paint tools, decals and fog-of-war masks get much simpler.

UI

• Offset transforms on Control nodes. Containers set their children's position, rotation and scale, so animating a button inside a container used to be undone the next time the container sorted. The new offset_transform_* properties apply on top of the container's layout, much like a CSS transform. By default the offset is visual only, so a moved button keeps its hover state.
• Images sized to the font in RichTextLabel. An image can now be sized in em, for example [img height=1em]icon.png[/img].
• Landmark navigation for screen readers, so a user knows which panel the focused field belongs to.

2D

• One-way collisions in any direction. CollisionShape2D has a one_way_collision_direction property. You no longer need to rotate the shape to get a one-way wall.
• Conic gradients via FILL_CONIC on GradientTexture2D.
• Scene Paint Mode (B) for scattering pickups, enemies or props across a 2D scene without setting up a tile map.

3D editor

• Vertex snapping. Hold B to snap a mesh's vertex onto another mesh's vertex.
• Path3D points snap to colliders, not only to the camera plane.
• Per-axis ruler lengths. Hold Shift while measuring.
• CSG Autosmooth, with a smoothing angle that defaults to 50 degrees.
• Follow mode. Press F twice to keep the view on a moving object.
• Trackball rotation (U), which behaves more like Blender's gizmo.
• A dedicated MeshLibrary editor for GridMap tiles, like the TileSet editor in 2D.

Editor and tools

• The Asset Library is now the Asset Store, with ratings, zoomable previews and background loading that no longer blocks the editor.
• The Project Manager flags version mismatches, showing an icon when a project must be upgraded or downgraded before it opens.
• The Remote Tree Inspector shows enum names for variables that are not exported, instead of their raw integer values.
• The Godot Android Build Environment (GABE) is now stable, so you can export and publish a game entirely from an Android device.

Before you upgrade

Read the migration guide linked from the release page. It lists the breaking changes. Opening a project in a newer editor can rewrite project.godot and resave resources in newer formats, which makes going back harder. Commit your work first and do the upgrade on its own branch. That way the upgrade is one change you can review, and one you can undo.

Sources

• Godot 4.7, Lights, Camera, Action!, Godot Engine
• Maintenance release: Godot 4.7.2, Godot Engine
• Godot 4.7.2 released with 57 bug fixes across platforms, Open Source For You