Migrating to 2.6.0

2.6.0 is the platform-line release: the engine moves to .NET 10 and MonoGame 3.8.5. The runtime API is unchanged — scenes, nodes, actions, and every public type behave exactly as they did on 2.5.12 — so the migration is your project file, not your code.

The one-step migration

Retarget your game project to .NET 10 and bump the package reference:

- <TargetFramework>net9.0</TargetFramework>
+ <TargetFramework>net10.0</TargetFramework>

- <PackageReference Include="Cocos2D-Mono" Version="2.5.12" />
+ <PackageReference Include="Cocos2D-Mono" Version="2.6.0" />

The target framework per platform:

Platform	New TFM
Desktop (DesktopGL — Windows, Linux, macOS)	net10.0
WindowsDX	net10.0-windows
Android	net10.0-android
iOS	net10.0-ios

The MonoGame 3.8.5 upgrade rides along transparently through the package reference — no code changes.

iOS platform versions jumped

If you pin an explicit iOS platform version in your TFM, note that Apple's version numbering jumped: the .NET 10 iOS workload ships 26.x bindings, so an explicit pin is net10.0-ios26.0 (not ios18.x). Android's explicit pin is net10.0-android36.0. The unversioned TFMs above pick the right defaults automatically.

Prerequisites

• The .NET 10 SDK is required to build.
• Mobile targets need the .NET 10 android/ios workloads — included with Visual Studio's mobile development workloads, or installed from the CLI with dotnet workload install android ios.

What changed underneath

• MonoGame 3.8.4.1 → 3.8.5 — MonoGame's major restructuring release (a new native core, ARM64 support, and Vulkan/Direct3D 12 backends in preview). Cocos2D-Mono continues to ship on the proven DesktopGL and WindowsDX backends; the preview backends are not consumed yet.
• .NET 9 → .NET 10 — .NET 9 is a standard-term-support release past its support window; 2.6.0 puts the engine on the current LTS.
• The engine migrated off APIs MonoGame has marked obsolete, with identical behavior — your code is unaffected.

The full stack was validated end-to-end before release: all targets compile clean, the unit suite passes, and the interactive test app was run scene-by-scene on both desktop backends.

Coming from earlier than 2.5.12?

Apply the migrations in order: the 2.5.11 guide covers the move from the per-platform packages to the consolidated ones (that's the big one), then 2.5.12 and this release are drop-in steps from there.