Encamp Devlog, August 2026

Hey everyone! August was a big month. Encamp got its first boss, a training yard, and a room system that cares what you build inside your walls.

Let's get into it.

The Barrow Warden

Encamp has a boss.

• Build a Barrow Altar out in the swamp and stock it with Withered Bones, Grave Ash and Iron-Bound Censers.
• A colonist has to be standing at the altar to perform the rite.
• The Warden is leashed to its own ground. It will not follow you home.
• The Barrow Mounds around the arena keep waking more dead until somebody breaks them.
• It drops the Warden's Maul, the Barrow Shroud, the Hollow Crown, the Warden's Seal and the Warden's Skull.
• Build the skull into a Trophy Mount back at camp.
  • Invoke it and every colonist near the mount gains the Warden's strength for a while.
  • The mount then sits dormant for a long cooldown.
• After the first kill the rite needs a smaller offering.

Training Grounds

You can drill your colonists now.

• Set a colonist's role to Training in the Jobs panel and pick Melee, Shooting or Toughness. Auto picks whichever they are worst at.
• Toughness is a new skill. It cuts the damage you take and improves dodge.
• There are nine stations across three ladders, and each one has a level cap.

• Drills cost food and ammunition. You get some of the arrows back.
• Stations wear down and drill at half pace until they are repaired.
• You get an alert when a colonist outgrows the equipment.
• Level 20 is the top of the ladder. Everything past that comes from real fights.

Production Rooms

• Workstations now need the right room. The workshop ladder runs from a crafting table up to a machine shop, alongside Hot Works, the Weavery, the Laboratory, the Kitchen, the Library and the Training Ground.
• Wall the room, add a door and put the seed station inside. It classifies itself.
• Every station in a room shares one craft queue.
• Rooms carry a bonus for the work done in them.
  • A library speeds up research, a kitchen slows food decay, a training ground speeds up drills.
• The build menu tells you what a room is missing. "This room has no door." "Nowhere to sleep in here." It also flags anything research has just unlocked.

Research

• Research burns study supplies while it runs. Scholars pull Paper, Books and Lab Apparatus out of crates in the research room.
  • When the room runs dry, research crawls until you restock it.
  • The panel shows roughly how many minutes of supplies are left.
• The Writer's Desk has to be inside a finished library. Four walls, a door, and no kitchen or workshop stations in the same room.
• Later tiers need a Laboratory with a Lab Bench in it before you can select them.
• The Research skill is now called Intelligence. It levels by studying.
• Finishing a technology brings up a card showing what it unlocked and what to research next.
• Benches take standing orders. Set one to keep 20 Paper in stock and it restarts whenever the colony drops below that.

Quests & Colony Events

There is a quest log in the toolbar now, with steps, rewards and quest points. Three story lines to work through:

• The Pursuit of Knowledge takes you through writing, your first library and your first Scholar.
• Standing Water starts when your scholar shakes a charcoal rubbing out of an old mining book that nobody in the colony can read.
• The Fourth Mouse is about the stray cat leaving dead mice on somebody's blanket. It ends with you naming it.
• Story beats arrive as event cards rather than modal popups, written about a colonist by name.
  • Some options only open if that colonist has the right trait.
  • Set a card aside into the event stack and read it later.
  • Cards expire if you leave them long enough.

The World Map

Press M.

• The map shows what your colonists have seen. Everything else stays dark until somebody walks out there.
• Drag to pan, scroll to zoom, double click to move the camera there.
• Right click to place a marker and give it a name.
• Home flags, outposts, quest locations and your colonists all show on it, plus bandit camps and ruins once you have found them.
• It saves per player and survives a reconnect.

Building & Clearing

• Buildings upgrade in place. A wooden wall becomes a stone one where it stands, with no deconstructing first.
  • The placement preview says "Upgrading" so you can tell the two apart.
• There is a new Clear tool.
  • Drag a box to cancel build orders, deconstruct buildings and clear bushes and stumps in one pass.
  • Right click a single target to do just the one.
  • Builders pick the materials back up as part of their normal work.

Food & Cooking

• Food spoils now, and storage decides how fast.
  • Loose on the ground is the worst case, a barrel or container is better, a pantry room is better again.
  • Spoilage timers survive a server restart.
• Rotten food composts into soil feed for your fields.
• Colonists return the bowl to storage after eating.
• New recipes: Boiled Potatoes on a campfire or a stove, the Antitoxin Tonic, and a Knife fitted to a Boar Tusk.

Raids & Wildlife

A big chunk of August went into raids working the way they were supposed to.

• Raids are paced by one coordinator, so wolves and bandits stop arriving on top of each other.
• Raid size scales against the defenders you actually have.
• Wolves and raiders go through structures in their way instead of walking around them.
• Fixed an issue where raiders froze mid-siege and attacked nothing.
• Fixed an issue where raiders chewed sideways along a wall with an open breach right next to them.
• Fixed an issue where pack members turned on each other.
• Fixed an issue where raiders stood at your wall forever after a failed retreat, in some cases across a restart.

Other Changes

• Every workstation has its own work animation. Colonists hold the right tool and show the item they are working on.
• Loading is faster. Textures are packed into atlases and loaded in parallel.
• New vehicle: the Automobile, an open touring car that carries four colonists. It comes with a vehicle order panel, a fire mode toggle and a halt button.
• New biome plants: Bogwort in the swamp, Sulfur Crust and Saltpeter Bloom in the desert, Cotton Grass in the tundra.
• Knocked-out colonists can no longer get themselves to bed. Somebody has to carry them.
• Colonists on soldier duty wake for an attack and pick their gear back up on their own.
• Mood, stress and adrenaline curves have been reworked and retuned.
• Bloodstains no longer pile up endlessly after a long fight on one spot.
• New toolbar icons and a new menu background.

Tell us how it went

That is everything for August. Encamp is in pre-alpha and worlds may reset.

Encamp is free and runs in your browser. Play it here, then tell us how it went on the Encamp Discord. We read everything, even when we can't reply.