Game: Galactic Contention
Galactic Contention 9.0 Is Live on Unreal Engine 5
Galactic Contention 9.0 launches on Unreal Engine 5, ending months of downtime. What changed, how to install it, and what we're running on Server 2.
Looking for the current, evergreen version? See Galactic Contention at Command Squad.
Galactic Contention — the Clone Wars total-conversion mod for Squad — is playable again. Version 9.0 released today, rebuilt on Unreal Engine 5 after months in which the mod simply did not work on current Squad builds.
Command Squad is running it on Server 2 from today. This post covers what actually changed, how to get in, and what we’re committing to.
What happened, and why the mod was gone
Squad’s move to Unreal Engine 5 broke every mod built against the UE4 version, and total conversions took the worst of it. Galactic Contention doesn’t reskin the base game — it ships its own factions, vehicles, weapons, animations and maps — so the port wasn’t a recompile. For most of the intervening period there was no working public build.
9.0 is the end of that. It’s the mod on UE5, running against current Squad, on live servers today.
If you want the mod team’s own account rather than ours, the reveal trailer and the official Discord are the primary sources. We run a server; we’re not the development team and we don’t speak for them.
What Galactic Contention actually is
For anyone arriving from the Star Wars side rather than the Squad side: this is not a shooter with Star Wars textures applied. It’s Squad — 50-versus-50 combined arms, squad leaders, FOBs, logistics runs, and comms discipline — with the Clone Wars in place of modern militaries.
The two factions are deliberately asymmetric:
Grand Army of the Republic. Clone troopers in Phase 1 and Phase 2 armour, DC-15 weapon family, AT-TE walkers and TX-130 repulsor tanks. Medics can revive downed troopers, so a Republic squad that holds together recovers from a mauling far better than the casualty count implies.
Confederacy of Independent Systems. B1 battle droids with the E-5 family, AAT and SAT armour — heavier and slower than their Republic counterparts. No revive mechanic at all, but droids don’t carry the stamina penalties clones do. The Confederacy plays as pressure and repositioning; the Republic plays as position and recovery.
Some layers add Geonosians on the Confederacy side — playable, and able to fly — plus Tusken Raiders and Gungans. The official wiki is the authority on what any given version ships, and it’s worth checking rather than trusting a year-old thread.
Getting in tonight
The thing worth knowing on launch night: you don’t need to install the mod first.
Click join on a server running it and Squad prompts you that mods are missing or out of sync;
choose Download All and it fetches them. If you’d rather download in advance, subscribe on the
Steam Workshop (item ID
2428425228) and Steam handles it in the background.
Two honest warnings:
It’s roughly 35–45 GB. On top of Squad. Starting that download at 8pm on launch night is how you spend launch night watching a progress bar.
Modded servers are hidden by default. In the server browser, open Filter and enable Show Modded Servers. Every launch day for every mod produces a wave of people convinced no servers are running when the servers are running and the filter is off. Ours included.
Full instructions, including offline practice and the usual failure modes, are in our how to play Galactic Contention guide.
What we’re running
Server 2 is now our Galactic Contention server. Details and live status are on the Galactic Contention page.
What we did to get here: stood the server up against 9.0, ran our existing admin coverage against it, and reviewed our rules for anything that assumed vanilla factions. That review came back essentially clean, which is the useful finding — our rules are about conduct and teamwork, not weapon lists, so they transfer without amendment. Same rules, same seeding rules, same admin standards as the rest of the network.
Our launch-day plan is unglamorous and mostly about seeding. A modded server with eight people in it stays a modded server with eight people in it unless someone deliberately fixes that, so seeding calls are going out in our Discord and admins will be in-server rather than on standby.
Things we expect to go wrong, stated in advance so we’re on record: version mismatches in the first days as the mod patches, performance complaints from hardware that was fine on UE4, and at least one layer that turns out to be unbalanced under a full 50v50 load. We’ll adjust rotation as we learn, and we’ll say so when we do.
What we’re not going to do is claim we’re the best Galactic Contention server available. Nobody can honestly claim that on day one — there’s no track record to point at yet, ours included. What we can point at is the track record on our main server and the fact that the same people are running this one.
If you’re new to Squad entirely
Galactic Contention is a harder first step than vanilla Squad. It assumes you already know how squads, FOBs, rally points and comms work, and it adds unfamiliar factions on top. It’s not a bad place to start — a lot of people are about to learn the mod at the same time, which is the friendliest possible moment to be new — but read the new player guide first and you’ll enjoy it considerably more.
Either way: get on comms and say you’re new. That’s true here and it’s true everywhere.
Galactic Contention is an unofficial, non-commercial fan mod developed by the Galactic Contention team. Command Squad is not affiliated with the Galactic Contention development team, Offworld Industries, Lucasfilm Ltd., or The Walt Disney Company. Star Wars and all related marks are trademarks of Lucasfilm Ltd.