2026-08-24 02:25 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
Mission difficulty is respected again. Your chosen difficulty setting now correctly applies to all normal missions (cutscenes and tutorials excepted). Spirit collection fixes. Spirit Receivers reliably attract and pick up drifting spirits again, fixing timing issues where spirits could be missed. Improved mod support. Fixed corrupted text when loading mods, and mods that fail to load now recover gracefully instead of taking the game down. Crash & stability fixes. Resolved crashes on demo load (All Access Areas profile), a landscape height-map out-of-bounds, editor crashes in the landscape surf
2026-03-31 05:00 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
Bug Fixes Fixed language table corruption after loading a mod. Improved user experience when attempting to load a corrupted mod. Updated ANGLE to pull in some upstream bug fixes.
2026-03-30 17:17 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
Bug Fixes Fixed a crash on startup for some users caused by the renderer attempting to use an unsupported color format. Fixed mouse scroll wheel not working on macOS and Linux. Fixed shader compilation failures on some ANGLE configurations that prevented the game from launching. Fixed EGL initialization bugs that could prevent the game from starting.
2026-03-29 13:44 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
Gameplay Grenades and Triffid Eggs now bounce off buildings (with sound effects) Anthills: smarter about objectives. Ants are sent to clusters of spirits rather than individual distant spirits, and ants on attack orders focus on the enemy first instead of getting distracted by spirits along the way Army Ants: resume previous orders if interrupted, increased search radius Virii: no longer target Darwinians carried by ants, restored slowdown when approaching Engineers Soul Destroyer: brightened spirit render, fixed devoured souls render Spore Generator: explodes on death, with tail triangles inc
2024-04-12 11:15 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
This update contains a major bugfix for the 2.3.3 release. Major changes: Fixed broken music playback. Known issues: macOS: On MacBook Pro 14"/16" with 120Hz displays (or in fact any Mac with > 60Hz displays) there is stuttering in full screen mode. This is caused by the "Direct-to-Display" feature in Metal, which cannot be opted out of. We have implemented a partial workaround to this problem, but there is still occasional render stuttering. Players can work around this by running the game in Windowed mode, or by running an application that keeps a hidden always-on-top window running (such as
2024-04-09 10:47 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
This update contains significant fixes and enhancements since the 2.3.3 release. Major changes: Fixed crashes on macOS versions older than 14.0. Fixed a crash when closing certain level editor and options windows. Fixed some prediction bugs causing incorrect rendering of lasers and other weapons. Fixed calculation of spirits-per-minute on the Receiver map, and reduced spirits-per-minute goal to 50. Fixed a possible crash when generating the language table. Enable missing SDL feature required for Playstation DualSense controller support. Minor changes: Fixed incorrect scaling when using borderl
2024-03-06 07:51 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
This update contains significant fixes and enhancements since the 2.3.2 release. Major changes: The Vulkan renderer now requires a minimum of Vulkan 1.1. If your driver does not support Vulkan 1.1, it will try to use other renderers available on your platform. Fixed a crash on NVIDIA GPUs when running on recent graphics driver versions. NVIDIA's driver is one of the few to actually implement VK_SWAPCHAIN_CREATE_DEFERRED_MEMORY_ALLOCATION_BIT_EXT, and it interferes with older Vulkan layers (Steam overlay, MangoHUD) that were not designed with that behavior in mind. Fixed a crash when handling u
2023-08-28 13:00 UTC · GamingOnLinux
Darwinia, a classic from Introversion Software (original devs of Prison Architect) released originally in 2005 just got upgraded to keep it running nice on modern platforms. Read the full article here: https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/08/darwinia-from-introversion-software-gets-a-big-compatibility-upgrade
2023-08-27 20:47 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
This update contains fixes and enhancements since the 2.3.1 release. Major changes: Added a native OpenGL ES rendering backend. Fixed a crash triggered by entering/leaving levels several times. Fixed a bug where radar dishes would forget how to rotate if the renderer was restarted (e.g. if the Screen settings were changed while in a level). Fixed a bug where cutscenes did not correctly preserve the world state, and could cause some buildings to change team ownership. (e.g. on Temple, the Spam cubes could be assigned the wrong team and be attacked by the red Darwinians) Now supports a new NVIDI
2022-12-02 06:56 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
This update contains fixes and enhancements since the 2.3.0-25 release. Major changes: Armour will now try to avoid collisions with buildings, and will not allow deploying gun turrets too close to other buildings. Gun turrets were incorrectly accounting for Darwinians, which caused only two of the four ports to be required to operate them. Some mods do not specify any lights in their level files, which causes the landscape and shapes to render as empty black space. We now specify a default lighting configuration if no lights are defined in the level file. This should make such levels at least
2022-11-13 13:22 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
This update contains some urgent fixes for bugs introduced in the 2.3.0 release. Major changes: FIxed a heap corruption bug that was causing numerous other difficult-to-analyze failures. Fixed a crash caused by changing input bindings. Windows: Fixed a possible crash in the sound system when changing the output device in Windows sound settings. Minor changes: Fixed some gesture input rendering bugs, and increased the visual resolution of drawn gestures. Fixed a jarring camera jump when leaving the Gestures task manager view. Fixed the initial Officer vertical spawn position to always be at the
2022-11-12 21:55 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
There have been several changes since the previous release, v2.2.0-296. Major changes: Vulkan/Metal: Multi-sampling Antialiasing (MSAA) performance is dramatically improved on some systems. When supported, we now use Multisampled Render To Texture (MSRTT) instead of a render followed by an explicit blit to resolve. This benefits tile-based rendering GPUs especially (e.g. Apple M1/M2, etc), since Vulkan and Metal can both use very fast temporary “memoryless” textures for the multisampled color and depth buffers. Vulkan/Metal: Apple GPUs can now use lossless compression for textures and framebuf
2022-06-08 21:18 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
Changes since 2.2.0-292: macOS: Fix landscape render on Vulkan (MoltenVK) backend. Removed some unused and buggy features in the shader preprocessing code. Updated ANGLE and MoltenVK.
2022-06-07 04:52 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
Changes since 2.2.0-169: Vulkan: when vsync is disabled, Darwinia will use the "mailbox" present mode if available. This presentation mode does not block on vsync but also does not have tearing. You will very likely want to enable the FPS limit option to keep CPU/GPU utilization reasonable. Vulkan: improved frame latency macOS: improved color profile on Metal/Vulkan renderers, to match the macOS-default OpenGL Core color profile Map editor: fixed a crash in the landscape editor when cloning a land tile Virii: increased follow distance limit Camera: fix incorrect FOV during cutscenes Re-enable
2022-05-03 11:48 UTC · Community Announcements · Steven
Changes since 2.2.0-138: Armour units will now prioritize movement orders over collision avoidance Armour units will no longer sometimes fly into orbit when reaching their destination Spider animation fixes Fixed a possible level editor crash when editing the landscape Fixed an incompatibility with systems using a Colemak keyboard layout Implemented a new Field of View option in Graphics settings Implemented a new FPS Limit option in Screen settings, to allow running with vsync disabled and a capped framerate Implemented a new Variable Rate Shading option in Graphics settings. This feature is
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