Devlog, Early September 2026

Hey everyone! Encamp dev here. Two weeks of work since the August post, and the two things I want to talk about are your colonists finally telling themselves apart from each other, and your first night in a new colony being a scene instead of a checklist.

Everything below is live.

Your First Night

The old opening was a checklist whose reason arrived last: chop wood, build a campfire, build a table, make a tool, raise a signal pyre. I could see it going wrong in the numbers. Of the 35 players who left inside sixty seconds of arriving, 23 had already found a tree and clicked Chop. They understood the input perfectly well and had nothing to keep going for.

So the reason comes first now, as two cards.

The first one lands at second zero. Two colonists have walked three days to get here and this is where they stop, and one line about the one you are looking at comes from the traits they rolled. A cowardly one keeps looking at the treeline and has not said why. A lazy one sat down on the pack and has not got up. An optimist says it could be worse, it could be raining. There is one answer, "Get a fire going", which is also the default, so ignoring the card costs you nothing.

The second one lands when the campfire is lit. Somewhere past the trees a wolf calls and another one answers it, and you hear it. Wolves do not bother with a camp this small, which is true as written (a two-colonist camp is never raided), and it will not stay true. Then the card tells you what the whole opening is for: smoke is seen a long way off and a Signal Pyre is seen further, so raise one and people will come.

The whole opener happens at night. Your first frame is 20:30, and the light really does keep going while you look for wood, holding just short of full dark at 21:00 so the fire has something left to be built against. Once the campfire is up the same clock keeps running down to full night, and the table, the tool and the pyre all get built in the dark by firelight. When the pyre goes up the sky eases back onto the world's real hour over about eight seconds. It is local to you, so nobody else's sky moves.

Two smaller things in the same area. The tutorial arrow used to point at a banana plant when it meant "chop a tree", which is a fun way to teach somebody the wrong thing on their first click. And the "Build 2 sleeping pads" step is gone.

Colonists Who Are Not Interchangeable

A colonist rolls up to six traits out of 47, and until this update 41 of them only moved a mood number. You read a lazy colonist as the game feeling slow. Thirty-five of them now do something you can watch happen.

A Pacifist refuses combat outright, never takes the job, never retaliates and rejects a direct attack order. Blood Phobia will not butcher, and breaks off any fight at the first wound to run for home. Bloodlust scans half again as far for something to fight and rejects a move order that would pull it out of one. A Heavy Sleeper sleeps through a raid that wakes every other fighter, while a Light Sleeper is up for a lone hostile that comes within 14 tiles. An Empath spends idle time walking to the most distressed colonist within 40 tiles to sit with them, and Abrasive starts arguments at lower strain and sours to insults sooner, with angry bubbles over both heads. Every one of these prints a line naming the trait, so you get "Arthur refuses to fight (Pacifist)" rather than a colonist standing there for no visible reason.

Colonists also draw gendered names from real name pools now, and no two in one colony share a first name, because two badges labelled Willow are two badges you cannot tell apart.

Skill level does something. Below level 10 a colonist works a skill at a fraction of full speed and banks a fraction of the experience, ramping up to normal at 10. The tutorial is exempt, so a brand new colony is not slowed down while it is still learning the controls. Recipes and buildings carry a required level that tracks the tech tier, so the panel tells you "Requires: Metalwork 26" and the colony refuses the order until somebody can actually do it.

That re-tier locked three whole branches on the way in, and it is worth saying exactly how. Medicine's cheapest recipe became the venom tonic, which needs a spider gland to exist, so every potion, bandage and poultice in the game went unreachable. Mechanics' first hand-made gear landed at level 18, which put gears, springs, machined parts, wire, lenses, engines and every vehicle behind a skill nothing could train. And three doctrines got pushed to 18 on Leadership, a skill with no experience source at all. All three are open again, and there is now a test that fails if any skill's cheapest recipe sits above a fresh colonist's level.

The payoff for raising a crafter is quality. Crafted weapons, armor and tools come out Poor, Normal, Fine or Masterwork, rolled off the best level among the colonists assigned to that station, worth 0.85x up to 1.35x on damage, armor rating and tool speed. A level 4 smith rolls Poor a quarter of the time and never rolls Masterwork at all, while past level 40 the same smith stops rolling Poor and hits Masterwork one time in five. Quality is part of the stack, so a fine sword does not merge into the plain pile beside it and takes its own slot on a rack.

The Breaking Point

Stress used to be a number that went up and did nothing at the top. It has inputs now (sustained danger, carrying more of the colony's work than anybody else, going short on rest) and it has outputs. A worn-down colonist drops a load short of the store, or ruins the work on a farm plot, and the game says who and why.

Past that it is a chain of cards rather than a status effect you notice by accident. The first one is "Stopped Halfway", where you find them hunched in a dark corner of the storeroom insisting they are fine. Give them the rest of the day, tell them rest comes after the work, or send a companion to sit down beside them.

What arrives the next morning depends on your answer and on whether they actually recovered, which makes four different follow-ups. "Working Again" is where the kindness worked and they are nervy and grateful about it, hands trembling on a crate while the whole colony watches. "Still Standing" is where you pushed and they finished, chin up, waiting to see whether anybody says what it cost. "Back And No Better" and "The Second Break" are the other two, and by the second break the colonist is finished for the day whatever you decide.

The kind answers stand a colonist down for real: twenty minutes of colony time with no jobs and no orders from you, shown as "On leave" in the bar. Danger still moves them, and a starving one still forages. Coming out of a break leaves a permanent mark on the colonist, either "Came back from it" or "Something went out of them".

Mood tiers have names now (Broken, Miserable, Unhappy, Neutral, Content, Happy, Inspired), and a miserable colonist raises an alert that takes you straight to their card.

Cards About Your Own People

Seven new kinds of card are cast on a named colonist and triggered by something that colonist did or is going through.

• Two in One Room. Two colonists share a bedroom and one of them is abrasive or volatile. Separate them, tell them to sort it out themselves, or ask the calmer one to be the bigger person.
• A Word About the Room. Somebody sleeping in a bad room while a better one exists. Promise them better, tell them a roof is a roof, or have an ascetic swap beds with them. If you promise and the room has not climbed a tier by the deadline, a second card comes back to you about the broken promise.
• A Bad Night. A nightmare loud enough to wake the room, and a companion awake nearby who could sit up with them.
• Nothing to Do. A bored colonist who will carry rocks if you want rocks carried.
• The First Time. A colonist's first kill of a person. Tell them it had to be done, tell them to clean up, let them enjoy it if they have bloodlust, or take them off guard duty for good.
• Back. Somebody home from a long trip, standing at the gate while nobody looks up from what they are doing.

The answers do things beyond mood: they put a colonist on hauling, take them off combat duty, free up a bed or swap two of them. Pacing is one of these every twelve minutes of colony time, each kind on its own longer cooldown, and never the same colonist twice running. A card you ignore expires into its default answer after twenty minutes.

The Barrow Song

The Barrow Warden shipped in August with an altar, an offering and no reason to go. It has a three-part quest line now, and the offering is the last part of it.

It opens with your scholar shaking a charcoal rubbing out of an old mining book that nobody in the colony can read. Standing Water is the literacy half: wall the Writer's Desk into a proper library, make Paper and Ink, have the desk produce a clean Copy of the Writing, and study the mining book.

The Grave-Warden's Name sends the copy out to a Grave Mound in the swamp to be held against the carved stone, then asks for 5 Withered Bones and 3 Grave Ash on the desk, then a cheap technology called The Old Tongue that nothing else in the tree needs. The copy is worn through in places, so you dig up three more mounds until you find the stone that repeats the missing lines. Your scholar reads the name out and marks the Barrow on your world map.

What the Swamp Keeps is the rite itself: an infirmary with two beds and 10 Bandages in storage, 2 Iron-Bound Censers at an anvil, then 25 Withered Bones and 10 Grave Ash. Send a squad who can take a hit. Afterwards your scholar keeps Read the Old Tongue, which speeds up their research permanently.

Invoking the Trophy Mount back home has its own card now, so the blessing arrives as a moment rather than a buff icon appearing in the corner. Swamps also have Grave Mounds, Gravestones, Ruined Crypts and Ancient Ruins standing in them.

Out on the Road

The send dialog got rebuilt around what people are carrying. You pick who goes, then their weapon, head, torso and legs, then what goes in the pack, then provisions. They pick rations and a bedroll out of the stockpile on the way out and you choose which food. Right-click something they are already carrying to leave it at home. Weapons and armor go on at the rack, and whatever they replace goes back into it.

Out there they drink a healing draught when the wound is real, take stoneskin when a fight starts, and bandage themselves or a downed companion once the fighting has moved off. There is a short advice panel before you commit that tells you what stands out about the party you picked.

Send two or more and they stay a party after they come back. The Parties tab lists them with one badge and one map dot, and you can select the whole party, flip all of them to soldier mode, or disband and leave everyone where they stand.

Someone Out There is the starter version of all of this. A trapper passing through swears there is somebody lying face down in the open, still breathing, and did not stop. Mark it on the map and send one colonist with a few days of food, or say you cannot spare anyone. Whoever you send walks out, gets the stranger upright and walks them home, and the stranger stays and works.

You can also pick any tile on the world map and send somebody to go look at it. (An early version of that could stall the server for nearly two seconds at a time when you picked somewhere it could not reach. Fixed.)

Bedrooms

A bed inside a walled room with a door is a bedroom, and a bedroom is now scored out of 32 across six things it can have. Sixteen new pieces of furniture fill those out in ladders:

How many of those slots a room even has depends on its size per sleeper. A Cell gets the fewest, then Chamber, Quarters and Apartment. Build one much bigger than its hearth can hold and it counts as a Hall and loses points for the empty space. Rooms come out Crude, Basic, Proper, Excellent or Grand, and a better one gives a sleep recovery bonus.

Click a colonist's bed to open the room panel. It shows every ladder with the rung that is built, the next rung up and anything still behind research, and clicking an upgrade hands it straight to the placement tool.

Fair warning: this rescored every room that already existed, and the old five-tile Grand bedroom comes out Basic. That one was deliberate.

Four New Biomes

Jungle, desert, savanna and arctic, with 59 new ground tile textures between them.

The bigger change is where they sit. Climate runs on continental wavelengths now, so you walk across bands of country instead of stripes, and the edges between two biomes are dithered rather than cut, so snow does not sit against grass in a hard line. Savanna is the bridge from grassland into desert.

Desert has six looks of its own (dunes, gravel plain, rock pavement, salt flat, wadi and oasis) with mesas and buttes standing out of it, plus Saguaro and Barrel Cactus, Agave, Dead Shrubs and Bleached Bones. Jungle has Palm and Kapok trees, jungle shrubs and Bromeliads. Arctic has Ice Crystals.

Two embarrassing ones on the way there. For about a week the jungle had a visible straight line running through it, because the field that picks which tiles blend into which had no sense of direction and one side could never admit the other's tiles. And a fresh colony in the jungle spawned in the sea, because the placement check counted ground cover as blocking and then fell back to a tile nobody had validated.

Perks and the Crafting Book

Twelve skills have perk trees: farming, mining, woodcutting, construction, cooking, melee, shooting, toughness, fishing, metalwork, mechanics and intelligence. Three branches of four perks each, with a capstone at the end of every branch that costs four points on its own, so one colonist can finish two branches at most. The first point comes at level 8 (it was 5) and then one every five levels, eight in all, the last at 43. An alert tells you when somebody has points sitting unspent.

The crafting panel is a book: leather tabs, a spine, one parchment page of recipe shelves. Everything you actually do with a recipe moved onto an order slip, a second parchment leaf tucked under the page's right edge.

The recipe reads as an equation, ingredient tiles with their counts, a plus, an arrow, the output, and each ingredient carries how many you have in stock. One row of buttons queues it: 1, 5, 10, All, or a custom number. Keep in stock sets a standing order that restarts whenever the colony drops below the number you gave it. The queue underneath tells you which order is being worked, which is waiting for a crafter, which is waiting on parts that are themselves queued and which is simply short, and for a missing ingredient it says whether it is crafted somewhere or comes from mining, foraging, farming, fishing, hunting or woodcutting.

The first version of that slip was a dark card with gradients, a brass glow on the output, round quantity badges and status dots. It looked like it had been lifted out of a different game and dropped onto the parchment. Rebuilt out of the page's own parts.

Orders Without Picking Anybody

Right-click a tree, a rock, an ore vein, your own quarry pit or anything foragable with nobody selected, and the ordinary Chop / Mine / Gather entry marks it for the colony instead of ordering one colonist to walk over. Marked objects wash green, and the entry turns into Cancel Chopping until you take it back. Bodies work the same way with Butcher and Bury. If nobody in the colony owns an axe, a pickaxe or a knife, the game tells you that instead of leaving the mark to sit there forever.

There is a real Gathering job now: berries, mushrooms, herbs, bogwort, plant fibre, clay, sand, deadwood, bleached bones, sulfur and saltpeter. None of that was reachable by any automatic job before, because mining only takes ore, woodcutting only takes trees, and the invisible starvation forager only eats bushes. The Gatherer role gets a filter of ten resource kinds on its row, so you can send one colonist out for clay and nothing else, and it reaches 240 tiles, because patches are small and scattered and the ground near the walls is picked clean early. Everyone else picks things up close to base when they have nothing better to do.

Burial is a hidden job that clears the yard after a raid. Colonists carry the dead to a grave, one gravedigger per body, never while a raid is still going.

Potions got two switches per colonist on a new Settings tab, both on by default. Auto-drink takes a healing draught when the wound is real and a stoneskin one when the fight is genuinely dangerous. Auto-throw lobs a flask to an ally who needs one and cannot be reached in time. The whole design is about not wasting them: four missing health does not earn a 30 point flask, the weakest flask that would do the job is the one that leaves the pack, and out of combat a colonist who can walk to a bed goes to bed instead.

Running Twenty Colonists

The colonist bar broke somewhere around a dozen. Every badge carried the same weight, so the one colonist who was bleeding was one of seventeen identical rectangles, and the row kept shrinking itself to fit until the names were seven pixels tall.

Past ten badges the bar now shows who you would act on. Anyone selected, alerted, downed, bleeding, fighting, fleeing, badly hurt or in a mood that is costing the colony work keeps their badge. Everybody else folds into a settlement chip wearing your claim flag, and clicking it opens a grid of full-size portraits.

The roster moved into a Pawns panel, which appears on the toolbar at five colonists: a sortable table of mood, health, food, rest, role and what each one is doing right now. It also has a Skills view, where you pick a skill, see who in the colony is best at it and hand them the matching role in one click, and the Settings view the potion switches live on.

Selection by number moved to control groups, so Ctrl or Cmd plus a number binds and the number selects, all nine of them. Number keys used to name the first nine slots of the row and nothing else, which left half a sixteen-colonist roster with no key at all. Pets moved behind a divider at the end of the row, since they are navigation and should not hold a colonist's slot.

New alerts cover a colonist on Manual who will not take jobs on their own, unspent perk points, no research selected, no study supplies left, a miserable colonist, somebody collapsed from hunger, and somebody who found no food and nothing to forage.

Colonists are also drawn from per-colonist layers now, so they differ in skin, hair colour, hair style and clothing, and what they are wearing shows on the sprite. The Pawns button and the Start Game button on the main menu both draw three of your own founders.

Raids, Wildlife and Weather

There is a fifth threat tier, Warband, above 500. The ladder used to stop at 300, which a colony reaches on headcount alone at thirty colonists, so past that nothing about growing changed what came at you. The relief window between major threats scales with the tier as well: eight minutes at the bottom, four at Warband.

Ambient predators now keep 48 tiles away from a colony even before you plant a home flag. That protection used to hang entirely off the flag, and a real colony paid for it: a cougar whose territory sat 55 tiles from a camp of sleeping pads killed six of the eight colonists there, four of them inside three minutes one evening. The death log only said "animal", because the killer type was never being recorded at all. Both fixed.

Weather is in: clear, cloudy, rain, thunderstorm and fog, resolved per region so everyone standing in the same weather sees the same sky. It is cosmetic for now, and built so gameplay can read it later.

There are also eleven small idle flourishes. Colonists warm their hands at a fire and poke it, stretch, wipe their brow, look up at rain or hunch against it, glance at somebody walking past, lean on a wall, pause at remains and wave at a passing traveller. Each is seeded per colonist, so one of yours has their own habits and the whole colony does not stretch in unison.

Other Changes

• French and German, alongside the Portuguese that was already there. Settings, then Language.
• Server updates are announced in game with a countdown card, the update waits for it, and clients reload themselves once the server is back.
• The welcome menu recognises you: login, register and Discord on the sign, with three of your own colonists standing on the Start Game button.
• New arrivals no longer land standing on top of whoever was east of the colony.
• Colonists move more smoothly on a slow connection. The client was restarting its smoothing on every server update, so speed wobbled with the network.
• Slow Compost rots spoiled food down without plant fibre.
• Home-territory quests get themselves unstuck if you rebuild your home flag.

Encamp is in pre-alpha and worlds may reset. It 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.