Lightyear Frontier 1.0 — progression guide: deliveries, milestones and the mech you end up with

Lightyear Frontier is mech farming on an alien frontier: you land with an Exofarmer, a walkable mech and a dead colony network to feed, and you scale from hand-planting sprouts to flying a Skyblazer over fields you planted with a minigun. Two years of Early Access, seven content updates and two million players later, the game left Early Access on 4 November 2026.

This page is written against the 1.0 launch build, v1.0.2563 (hotfix, 6 November 2026), and it is a progression-and-systems page rather than a played-through walkthrough. The reason, and exactly which parts are which, is in the last two sections.

The short version

What is actually new in 1.0

1.0 is the largest patch the game has had, and half of it invalidates older advice. The changes that matter to a new player:

• Two new areas, Sandswept Highlands and Hollow Marsh, roughly +40% world size. Both are open from the start of a save but are late-game content.
• The story ends. Missions now run start to finish, and the finale unlocks once every colony reaches Thriving (you can keep playing afterwards).
• Milestones 13 and 14 added, and every existing milestone rebalanced. Automation now arrives at Milestone 4 instead of the endgame.
• Deliveries consolidated: fewer deliveries, fewer required in total, and the delivery menu checks your whole inventory at once instead of asking you to feed resources in one by one. Multiple deliveries can be queued and launched together.
• Mech customisation rebuilt: tools, parts and modes upgrade in place along a fixed path instead of being crafted per tier and slotted. Power costs removed from tools/parts/modes; mod slots reduced but each mod is stronger.
• Automators are gone, replaced by Automation Pipes. Storage constructs gained outputs, so auto-crafting pulls straight from storage.
• Day transitions removed. No day-end screen; weather now changes during the day and the Weather Station forecasts in hours.
• Farming rework: fertilisers split into Mulch (changes mound type) and the new Fertilizers (yield bonus, type unchanged), seed stacking, crop rotation previewed on the HUD, four new crops.
• Animals buffed: happy animals drop 3 resources a day instead of 1, content animals always drop, unhappy animals stopped running away.
• Inventory and storage capacity ×10 (crops kept their old weight, so they now take a tenth of the space), and damage/health pools ×10 across the board.
• Difficulty presets (Creative / Relaxed / Balanced / Challenging, plus custom), set per world by the host.
• Guidance: a Resource Scanner in the map menu, nameable stamps, trailers and farm animals on the map, and markers on constructs and items a mission needs.

Pick the preset before you plant anything

The preset is chosen at save creation, and an old save is asked once, the first time it loads on 1.0. It is the single highest-leverage decision in the game and it is reversible per world later.

Take Balanced for a first run: the hazards are the only pacing in the game, and removing them removes the reason to build a real base. Take Relaxed for a co-op save with a younger player, where losing a trailer full of minerals to a tornado is a tantrum rather than a setback. Day length can be set to 3× in 1.0 (the 0.25×, 1.25× and 1.75× options were removed), and in co-op every one of these settings is host-controlled for the whole world — guests cannot tune their own damage or fuel.

The loop, in order

Each step pays for the next, and the whole thing is driven by deliveries:

1. Clear the corruption. Noxious Slimes and Noxious Weeds sit on the land and on resources. Clearing them restores a region and opens its plants, minerals and animals.
2. Plant. Sprouts go into mounds. Mounds need water, crops take several in-game days to mature, and what you plant next to what decides whether the harvest is doubled or mutated.
3. Craft. Raw crops and minerals go through the crafting constructs — Furnace, Grinder, Sawmill, Mineral Crusher, Oil Presser, Seed Extractor, Seed Splicer, Fertilizer Infuser — into the goods a delivery actually asks for.
4. Deliver. The Delivery Cannon sends crops and goods to the colonies. Each colony has a status that rises from Struggling toward Thriving, and every delivery pays out Mech Power plus milestone progress.
5. Clear the milestone. Milestones are gated behind delivery requirements, and each one unlocks recipes, constructs, tool and mode upgrades, or new construct tiers. This is the only progression currency that matters.
6. Spend it on the mech. Mech Power and unlocked parts go into the mech at the Mech Depot: bigger tools, wider tractor modes, faster travel. A better mech lets you farm a bigger field, which lets you finish bigger deliveries, which clears the next milestone.

The trap is treating step 3 as the goal. Crafting is a means to a delivery; a chest full of processed goods is worth nothing until the cannon fires, and the milestone is what actually changes your options.

Deliveries: what 1.0 changed, and how to use it

• Fewer, bigger deliveries. Deliveries were merged and their requirements rebalanced around larger harvests. You need to complete fewer deliveries in total to finish the game than in Early Access.
• The menu checks your inventory like crafting does. Instead of contributing resources to a delivery item by item, the game checks whether you have everything and sends it in one action. The per-planet views are gone; it all happens on one screen.
• Queue them. Add several deliveries and launch them as one sequence, so you are not backing out to watch the cannon fire after each one.
• Prometheus Station takes research deliveries. The old multiplayer Research Initiatives are gone; you now deliver to Prometheus Station yourself and get blueprints for unique mech mods in return. This is a single-player path now, and the deliveries do not wait on other players.
• Colony representatives talk. New dialogue tracks each colony from Struggling to Thriving, so the deliveries are the story, not a side activity.

Milestones: what is actually confirmed

The full per-milestone unlock table is not published anywhere official, and 1.0 reshuffled it by design — so treat any Early Access-era milestone map as stale. What the patch notes do establish:

That is the honest state of it: the ladder exists and it is delivery-gated, but the contents of milestones 1–12 are not documented in the 1.0 notes. If you are mid-run and want a specific unlock, the in-game milestone panel is the only current source. The community maps that circulate (Field Plow at Milestone 2, Trailblazer at Milestone 6) are Early Access numbering.

Automation, from Milestone 4

Automation is the part of 1.0 that changed most, and it arrives early enough to matter for a normal playthrough.

• Automation Pipes replaced Automators. A pipe runs between constructs; there is no separate automator block. Pipes cost Energy, which is the resource you manage instead of the old connection limits, and generators got an output buff to pay for it.
• Storage constructs have outputs. Storage Box II, Silo, Silo II, Small Shed and Storage Shed can all send items out, which means a crafting construct can pull its inputs directly from storage. That was the single most requested change in the game.
• Three auto-craft recipes per crafting construct. One construct cycles through up to three queued recipes and skips any it cannot feed, so the old "one construct per recipe" sprawl is gone.
• Resource filters. Every storage construct has a filter tab: Accept or Deny, per item or per category, including items you have not discovered yet. Denied items cannot be piped in, cannot be picked up into it, and produce a warning if you try to place one by hand. This is how you build a dump chest.

A sane first circuit: Sawmill II chopping logs → Silo with an Accept: wood filter → one Automation Pipe → a crafting construct running three recipes off that wood. The filter is doing the sorting; without it every storage on the network fills with the same mixed pile.

Existing saves keep their Automators, and you can still build more of them if you already have some — but they no longer unlock at any milestone, so a new save never sees one.

The mech in 1.0: fixed slots, linear upgrades

The old model — craft a Mk.2 version of a tool, put it in a slot, spend Power on it — is gone. The new model:

• One dedicated slot per tool, part and mode. Each upgrades in place along a set path. Upgrade a Seed Shooter Mk.1 and every mod chip on it carries over to Mk.2.
• Pieces have built-in stats now. Upgrading raises the base numbers, so a piece is useful before you mod it, and each tool's secondary ability unlocks on its first upgrade instead of eating a mod chip.
• No Power cost on tools, parts or modes. Power is now for mod chips only, which means you cannot brick your mech by equipping the wrong loadout.
• Fewer, stronger mod slots. Mod chips were cut in number and buffed in effect; expected builds are "a few good chips", not twelve copies of one.
• Parts were merged. Left/right arms are one Mech Arms part, legs are Mech Legs, and engine plus windshield are Mech Body — appearance is still customised per limb.
• All transform modes live in one wheel once unlocked, and a tap of the transform button flips between Bipedal and the last mode you used.
• Running out of fuel no longer disables your mod chips. It applies a scaling stat penalty instead, which is the game telling you to refuel without deleting your build.
• Weak Points appear on nodes, logs, chunks and other breakables when you swing the Spike Saw; hitting one is +25% damage. Weak-point size and bonus damage can be raised with mods.

Transform modes are the other half of the mech, and the names matter because the old ones changed:

Tractor modes can be widened while driving if you have width mods installed, and the width is adjustable mid-use — worth knowing before you assume a field needs a second pass.

Farming: mounds, mulch and the rotation rule

This is the one system that rewards planning and that 1.0 made much easier to read.

• Mounds have a soil type: Nitrogenic, Phosphoric or Potassic. Which type a new mound gets depends on where you dig it — the community mapping is Outset Grasslands green/nitrogenic, Frostpeak Ridge red/phosphoric, Hexagon Valley purple/potassic.
• Harvesting a crop leaves traces that change the mound to that crop's type, so you steer soil by what you grow in it.
• Same-type pairing doubles the yield. Plant a Potassic crop in Potassic soil and you get a high-yield harvest.
• Planting one step against the soil mutates the crop — a Phosphoric crop in Potassic soil, for example. Mutated crops are the ones recipes and deliveries ask for.
• In 1.0, a mutated harvest gives you both the mutated and the normal crop, so mutation is a bonus instead of an accident, and the HUD previews the outcome before you plant — the memory test is gone.
• Mulch is the 1.0 name for what used to be called Fertilizer: it changes the mound type. The new Fertilizers add a yield bonus without changing the type. Both are crafted from new Powder items, made from animal droppings or wood. The Compost Box is now the Fertilizer Infuser, with a Mk. II.
• Seed Stacking (Seed Shooter Mk.4) lets you put several seeds into one mound for a bigger yield, and the Minigun mod turns the shooter into a continuous seeder for fields measured in acres.
• Four crops were added in 1.0: Cloudbud, Coilvine, Papristalk and Quartznip.

Animals are a resource stream rather than a pet system, and 1.0 made them pay:

Petting a happy farm animal drops its resource immediately, once per day per animal. Wild animals now drop their own species' resource when fed instead of a random regional item, and have a 5% chance to drop an egg. Normal eggs spawn every day, near animal nests, whether or not the region is restored — the old advice to clean corruption first is obsolete. Farm animal breeding is unlocked through Diane's questline, and Giant Tree Sprouts — the answer to a wood bottleneck — through Ulf's.

The two new regions

Both are open from the first minute of a new save and both are late-game content. Do not walk into the Highlands at Milestone 3.

Endgame and the ending

Reach Thriving with every colony and the ending missions unlock: a joint final delivery with the colonies, a trip into the new region, and the answer to what happened to the ones who came before you — the fate of the Tall. The story completes, and you can keep playing afterwards, so nothing about the ending is a point of no return.

Two 1.0 systems make the run-up to that less grindy than it used to be: care packages drop around the map with crafted resources and Mech Power in them (better the more colonies you have helped), and a Loot Gob rolls around full of natural resources and has to be caught.

The mistakes this patch invites

• Following Early Access advice. Automators, "Fertilizer changes the mound type", per-tier tool crafting, Power costs on tools, 2× item weights on everything you hoard — all of it is 1.0-stale. If a guide mentions Automators, it predates this patch.
• Rebuilding your roof layout after the patch and losing efficiency. The check for the crafting efficiency bonus changed: it now looks straight up from the construct's centre and its four corners instead of fanning out from the middle. If a workshop suddenly stopped getting its bonus, that is why.
• Leaving old Water Reservoir pipes connected. The reservoir's output moved slightly, so pre-1.0 pipe connections from it no longer work and have to be rebuilt.
• Trusting a floating build. Structural integrity propagation was fixed in 1.0, so constructs that were never actually supported can now collapse. FRAME BREAK's own note says so.
• Building one crafting construct per recipe. Three recipes per construct, cycling and skipping missing inputs. This is the difference between a clean production line and a wall of machines.
• Hoarding crops like the old weight system. Crops kept their old weight while capacities went ×10, so crops are effectively free to store. The thing to build more of is storage for minerals, not for crops.
• Panicking over a lost trailer. Lola's shop now runs a retrieval service for lost trailers and item caches, for a fee that scales with what they contain.
• Committing resources to a design you have not seen. Planning Mode in the build menu places holograms without contributing anything, so you can lay out a base and only then pay for it.
• Ignoring fuel after the nerf. Empty fuel is now a stat penalty rather than a dead mech, which makes it easy to keep driving at 60% effectiveness. Eco Driving (a Coziness buff) cuts fuel consumption by 20%.

Co-op, briefly

Up to three friends join a farm, cross-platform, and the world's settings belong to the host. Shared Saves keep the session alive while the host is away, trailers stay connected between play sessions, and every player has their own mech that they customise independently. 1.0 also fixed clients joining without a tool equipped and clients not being recognised as connected to distant storage in very large home areas — the two bugs that made late-game co-op sessions annoying.

What this page does not know

Named, because 1.0 is two days old and current documentation is thin even by launch standards:

1. The contents of Milestones 1–12. Only 4, 5 and 13–14 are documented. The rest requires reading the in-game panel.
2. The colony status ladder between Struggling and Thriving — how many steps, and whether every colony uses the same ones.
3. Delivery quantities per colony step, and therefore how many harvests a given milestone actually costs.
4. The soil pairing for the four new crops (Cloudbud, Coilvine, Papristalk, Quartznip) — the rotation rule is documented, the new crops' types are not.
5. What the final delivery requires. The ending's exact demand is not in any note I could read.
6. The six hidden achievements, and whether 1.0's new ones include a completionist gate.
7. Other platforms. FRAME BREAK says a PlayStation 5 or Switch 2 port is being looked at, with nothing confirmed.

How this page was made, and what it does not claim

This is a compiled guide, not a played-through walkthrough. It was built from: the full 1.0 patch notes (the 4 November launch post and the 6 November v1.0.2563 hotfix), the seven Frontier News previews published June–October 2026, the 1.0 FAQ, the Steam store copy, and Steam's achievement page for the visible subset. The crop-rotation rule and the region-to-soil mapping come from a community crop sheet that predates 1.0 — the rule survived the patch, the crop columns may not have.

The site's rule is that a page names its sources and its gaps. This one has not been played through. It is written to be useful anyway on everything the developer documented — the delivery loop, the automation rework, the mech's new upgrade paths, the farming rule, the region split — and it names seven gaps rather than filling them with inference. If you are playing it, one confirmed figure closes a gap faster than a paragraph of guesswork: the milestone panel in your save is worth more than anything published this week.