This morning, Niantic announced the designs of the new P.A. Chapeau 2026 Badges, in the regular and C.O.R.E. Subscriber versions! Alongside them, the OG P.A. Chapeau Medal has been re-released from the archives!

Each of these badges is available for purchase in the in-game store for 30.800 CMU, accompanied by a side of 5x Very Rare Portal Shields (or 5x Aegis Shields with the C.O.R.E. variant).

https://ingress.com/news/2026-plusgamma#iap

@IUENG

+Gamma Global Op: Bonus Link Points explained!

We get it, the explanation of the bonuses for this Global Op can be a bit daunting, so we'll try our best to summarize it a bit 😅

Agents can earn Bonus Points tied to the state of the origin and destination Portals when links are created.

- Up to 25 Bonus Points from each Unique Portal over the whole 10‑day Operation can be obtained. Once at 25, that Portal no longer gives further Bonuses.
- The reward depends only on that Portal’s current Level and number of unique Resonator owners (more unique owners and lower level yield more points; L1 with 8 owners gives the max 25).
- The calculated Bonus is then granted to all eligible unique Resonator owners on that Portal (plus the Portal Owner if they are not already among them), but simply being the Link creator does not itself grant Bonus.
- Origin and destination Portals are evaluated independently, and ADA/JARVIS resonators never count as owners for the calculation.

If you have questions, ask here in the comments! The community is ready to help 😊

UPDATE: The team has clarified that upgrading Resonators (both your own and others) will NOT count as a Resonator deployment and will therefore not award you any points for the +Gamma Global Challenge.

Source: https://ingress.com/news/2026-plusgamma-globalop

@IUENG

The Valentine’s Day 2026 event details have been revealed!

From 10 February 2026 (Tue) 17:00 UTC to 27 February 2026 (Fri) 17:00 UTC, two Dispatch Campaigns will be available in the Scanner:

Free Campaign: Valentine’s 2022 Redux
The Valentine's 2022 medal returns in a free Redux Campaign! If you didn't purchase the medal when it was available 4 years ago you will now be able to get it by completing this Campaign. If you already own the medal then you will earn Recursion Wings for it instead.

The Campaign Details are as follows:

For all Assignments: Complete 2 Bounties out of 3 to advance
Assignment 1/5

-Hack 15 times
-Deploy 24 Resonators
-Capture 4 Portals

Assignment 2/5
-Hack and obtain 10 Portal Keys
-Earn 60 Glyph Hack Points
-Create 12 Links

Assignment 3/5
-Capture 500 Mind Units
-Destroy 5 Opponent Links
-Create 10 Control Fields

Assignment 4/5
-Create 50 Links
-Deploy 100 Resonators
-Earn 80 Glyph Hack Points

Assignment 5/5
-Create 100 Links
-Capture 300 Mind Units
-Recharge 75000 XM

Premium Campaign: Valentine’s 2026 (15,000 CMU)

A new Valentine’s 2026 Medal will be made available via a new Premium Campaign. For 15,000 CMU you will get access to a Campaign with a single Assignment of which you have to complete 4 out of 5 Bounties to earn the new Medal!

The Campaign Details are as follows:

Assignment 1/1
Complete 4 out of 5 Bounties to complete the Campaign
-Create 20 Links
-Deploy 20 Mods
-Deploy 20 Resonators
-Capture 20 Portals
-Create 20 Fields

Source: https://ingress.com/news/2026-valentines

@IUENG

The Ingress team has removed the IFS 2x AP bonus going forward.

After Agents have noticed that the IFS 2x AP bonus didn't activate today, Niantic Spatial has confirmed with Vanguards that this bonus has been intentionally removed. This means that starting with this month's IFS and going forward for March and beyond, the Double AP period between 8am and 8pm local time will not be active anymore.

Looking back at the 2026 Q1 Event schedule, it seems like this decision was made a while ago as it doesn't mention the usual 2x AP bonus for February and March as opposed to how it was written in the Event Schedules before. The in-game announcement in the Dispatch screen has also been changed mentioning that you can only get up to 2x AP by using an Apex, not the usual 4x AP.

@IUENG

Niantic has published the final Results for the recent Shard Investigation, which was held in 9 locations worldwide on February 8th to test some new Shard mechanics.

🇨🇳 F - Shenyang, China
ENL 351 - 28 RES
🇱🇰 G - Galle, Sri Lanka
ENL 9 - 685 RES
🇱🇻 J - Jelgava, Latvia
ENL 99 - 308 RES
🇨🇿 K - Karlovy Vary, Czechia
ENL 35 - 453 RES
🇲🇽 M - Mexico City, Mexico
ENL 37 - 437 RES
🇮🇩 P - Pare-Pare, Indonesia
ENL 250 - 64 RES
🇫🇷 R - Rouen, France
ENL 525 - 22 RES
🇨🇱 S - Santiago, Chile
ENL 103 - 208 RES
🇨🇦 T - Toronto, Canada
ENL 326 - 41 RES

Total Score
ENL 1.735 - 2.246 RES

🔵 The Resistance wins the Shard Investigation

⚠️ As a reminder, no score will be added to the +Gamma Season, nor Tokens have been awarded to Agents.

Source: https://ingress.com/news/2026-q1-shardinvestigation

@IUENG

The Lunar New Year celebrations are nearing once more! Ingress is celebrating accordingly by releasing a new Medal inspired by the Year of the Horse, which is about to start!

To obtain it, Agents will be able to complete the Year of the Horse Celebration Campaign, which will be available for purchase in the in-game store for 15.000 CMU.
The Campaign is available from February 13th @ 17:00 UTC to February 27th @ 17:00 UTC, and will feature a single assignment, rewarding the Medal.

Source: https://ingress.com/news/2026-yearofthehorse

@IUENG

The team has walked back the change and is reintroducing 2x AP for each First Saturday event!

Next month will see the First Saturday event with a 3x AP boost (or 6x with Apex) as an exception, but starting April the regular 2x AP bonus will be active each IFS from 8am to 8pm local time.
---
In other news, due to issues with the Daily Bounties a few days back, a free pack of items as well as a free 3-day Bounty Pass can now be claimed in the store. This pack will be available until end of day next Monday (PST timezone). Remember that the Bounty Pass will activate instantly upon claiming the loadout, so if you don't have the time to complete the 4 additional Bounties until midnight today it might be better for you to wait until tomorrow to claim it!

Source: https://t.me/NianticOfficial/1098

@IUENG

The +Gamma Global Op is now in full swing, and Agents are already discussing their strategies to achieve the Gold Medal for this campaign.

The challenge will remain active until February 23rd 2026 @ 17:00 UTC, and Agents can receive up to 7000 +Gamma Tokens for their Season Medal, as well as help their faction obtain as many of the 1000 Series Points at stake as possible.

For a full rundown of this challenge, check out our previous posts.

@IUENG

Niantic Spatial is looking for users to join their User Panel!

If you are a user of Scaniverse, a player of Ingress, a player of Peridot, or interested in participating in future AR and Spatial AI related research studies you can fill out the form below to indicate your interest. If Niantic Spatial is conducting a study that matches your profile you might get selected to participate in that research and get rewards for it! Note that you will need to sign an NDA before participating and anything you may see in that research study is not allowed to be shared.

The exact details of how this User Panel will work or what will be part of these studies isn't known, but we might be able to infer some things, as under the old Niantic Labs a similar program exists as well. Niantic runs a Discord with players from their games (Pokemon GO, Monster Hunter Now, Pikmin Bloom) in which various surveys about said games are posted from time to time. These surveys include giving feedback about upcoming game features, filling out forms and being invited to video interviews with the person from the respective game team to share your thoughts. The now Niantic Spatial games Ingress and Peridot also had channels in that Discord, but apparently they didn't really get used.

⚠️ We want to stress that this is how things worked under Niantic Labs and that the surveys under Niantic Spatial might function completely differently. We also want to stress that this User Panel is not specific to Ingress only and is not the same as what Vanguards or XM Ambassadors did in the past, that being having a direct line to the Ingress team among other things.

If you feel like you want to give it a shot, you can sign up and show your interest via the Google Form here. Make sure that you read through it carefully, especially the NDA part as violating it may cause your Ingress account to be banned: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSczWE1j3HuTdqJzflanTgxYRkRrk4gpa964PC3ChYm6Hqbfhg/viewform

A big thanks to @PkmnTrainerJ and the Ingress Insights Podcast who broke the news and who shared their experience with the Niantic Labs User Panel! You can check out the latest Episode with some more details here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/3LQ2XV2gmoURBA9pTLJ7h7

@IUENG

Niantic announced the cities which will host an Ingress Mission Day Events in Q2 2026!

🇲🇾 Shah Alam, Malaysia — April 25th
🇨🇴 San Andres, Colombia — May 2nd
🇩🇪 Schwerin, Germany — May 2nd
🇦🇺 Sydney, Australia — May 17th [Anomaly MD]
🇨🇿 Prague, Czechia — May 17th [Anomaly MD]
🇯🇵 Kure City, Japan — May 31st [Anomaly MD]
🇺🇸 Jersey City, USA — May 31st [Anomaly MD]
🇨🇳 Foshan, China — June 7th
🇫🇮 Espoo, Finland — June 7th
🇨🇭 Geneva, Switzerland — June 21st [Anomaly MD]
🇵🇪 Lima, Peru — June 21st [Anomaly MD]

If you would like to apply for a Mission Day in your city for the rest of 2026, applications are still open!
Q3 Deadline: 17th April, 2026
Q4 Deadline: 17th July, 2026

Application Form for 2026: https://tinyurl.com/IngressMDApplicationForm2026

Source: https://ingress.com/news/2026-q2-md

@IUENG

The Lightship Developer Platform is being shut down and migrated to Scaniverse (Enterprise). With it, it is now no longer possible to manually activate VPS for a Portal.

As part of the migration to Scaniverse (Enterprise), Niantic Spatial has decided to decommission the Geospatial Browser that developers have used to find public POIs and activate VPS for them. Going forward, Scaniverse (Enterprise) will focus on private VPS sites only and will not allow users to find and use public POIs in their projects. The platform will be completely separate and POIs or Scans created for it will not affect any other product.

Ingress uses these VPS activates POIs as a marker for Portals that can be Overclocked, and as such a number of Agents have also been using the Geospatial Browser so that they can activate Overclock on Portals. This is no longer possible as the Geospatial Browser went into read-only mode today. As such, there is currently no longer a reliable way to (re-)activate a Portal with Overclock. According to the Ingress team, Portals may be able to activate themselves if they receive enough Scans, however it is unknown if this behavior will be carried over with the migration.

ℹ️ You will likely still be able to use Overclock on Portals that have already been activated.

Niantic Spatial has announced in their FAQ for the migration that they "will be following up with more news about Public Maps". It remains to be seen if this will allow users to manually request a VPS activation in the future.

Note that Scaniverse (Enterprise) is separate to the Scaniverse app that you can currently download and use on your phone. These two do not share any data with each other either.

Source: https://www.nianticspatial.com/faq/scaniverse-lightship-migration

@IUENG

A year (and almost two months, but who is counting) has passed since we last asked you for feedback about IUENG. Now we are asking you once again to fill out a short form to help us run the channel, gauge interest in potential new posts and collect feedback on how we currently run the channel!

Filling out the survey should only take around 5 minutes and helps us immensely in running the channel! Thank you very much for giving us the time!

You can fill out the form here: https://forms.gle/1EDzBmHewRWcQCU9A

@IUENG

🍞 [This is a toast notification!] 🍞

To celebrate the historical Toast Day, Niantic has prepared two campaigns, one paid and one free.

From February 26th @ 18:00 UTC to March 9th at 18:00 UTC, the free Toast Day 2026 Campaign and the paid Toast Day Redux Campaign (15.000 CMU), will be available for Agents to purchase and complete.

The Toast Day 2022 Medal (or wings for Agents who already own it) will be awarded to agents completing the Redux Campaign. Toast Beacons are the reward for completing the free Campaign.

During the celebration window, a new Kinetic Program will be available: 8 L1 Resonators can be transformed into 2 Toast Beacons.

Finally, a limited number of Toast plushies are still available at Ingress' Shopify!
Big Toastie
Mini Toastie

Source: https://ingress.com/news/2026-toastday

@IUENG

The +Gamma Global Op concluded yesterday, with a provisional result marked on the Scanner app.

The score is
ENL 48.9 - 51.1 RES
Which means that the split of Season Points between the Factions would be:
ENL 489 - 511 RES

Edit: Niantic confirmed the final results to be:
ENL 487.8 - 512.2 RES

While the final result has to be confirmed by Niantic, one thing is certain:
🔵 The Resistance captured the +Gamma Global Op!

@IUENG