[Game Update] - Public Testing - 716056

[JarrettM]

Hey friends, 

It's public testing time for the March 2026 Bug Fix Update!

This free update features (you guessed it) a bunch of bug fixes. Because we're testing changes to the sim in this update, some fixes are more experimental and may be reverted before public testing ends. We also upgraded the version of the Unity engine that we're using.

Highlights include: 

In the sim: 
We've modified the temperature exchange formula to be consistent between tiles and debris. This should feel the same as before, only more stable and less buggy. 
Small masses, i.e. micrograms, now exchange temperature. That means there should no longer be issues when using the Conveyor Rail Element Sensor to separate out cooled elements from hot elements. 
We fixed a series of bugs related to liquids off-gassing, including: gases being emitted in the wrong amount or at the wrong temperature; removing more liquid than intended; and/or deleting mass from the tile below them. 

Other bugs: 
Power system fixes include Joint Plates now being considered when calculating the maximum safe wattage for an electrical circuit. Disabled power transformer buildings will no longer incorrectly display the No Wire status, and electric circuits with a broken Wire Bridge will no longer initialize as connected when loaded from a save game. Power Shutoffs built on inactive logic networks will now default to deactivated. 

Domesticated plants will no longer consume fertilizer while they're wilted, and batteries will no longer function when they're entombed. In new games, POIs that are hidden behind fog of war will now be revealed correctly. Temperature exchange through doors left open in a vacuum will no longer occur.

Oh, and Duplicants with the Ugly Crier stress response will now produce the expected liquid volume of tears. (Do what you will with that information.)

Thank you all for your help in making sure things are working as intended! Feedback from players with bleeding-edge, physics-defying builds is going to be especially valuable on this one... if that's you, please scrutinize these changes and tell us what you think. 

This free update will be in public testing for about two weeks. Send us your feedback and bug reports here!

Here's what you'll find in the update so far:
 

Changes and Improvements

• All versions
  • Made adjustments to the Printing Pod sidescreen UI Layout and added a Research button.

Fixes

• All versions
  • Simulation
    • Removed lower mass limit for temperature exchange in the sim for tiles and debris.
    • Unified temperature exchange formula between tiles and debris, and reduced the amount of inaccuracy introduced by floating point precision issues.
    • Fixed a bug where material that didn't exchange temperature would not consider changing state.
    • Fixed bugs where off-gassing liquids in the sim could emit the wrong amount of gas, emit it at the wrong temperature, remove more liquid than was intended, and/or delete mass from the tile below them.
  • Batteries no longer function when entombed.
  • Percentages displayed in the UI no longer round up to 100%, to avoid confusion in cases where the real number is actually slightly lower (e.g. 99.6%).
  • Domesticated plants no longer consume fertilizer while wilted.
  • Nosh Beans, Sleet Wheat Grain, and Mimillet will now rot while marked for compost, and retain their rot value if the compost request is cancelled.
  • Adjusted mouse drag threshold before a click is interpreted as a drag, to reduce misclicks on buttons.
  • Hidden fog of war tiles associated with POIs will now be correctly revealed. This will not fix errant tiles in existing saves.
  • Duplicants with the same name will no longer share logging of stress modifiers in UI screens.
  • Ugly Criers will now weep the correct volume of tears.
  • Doors
    • Fixed doors exchanging temperature while open in a vacuum due to automation signals causing them to be in an incorrect state.
    • Fixed an issue where door temperature would be incorrectly calculated during state change (open/close).
    • Door access control change requests will now persist in save files.
    • Fixed issue where applying copy settings to both tiles of a door resulted in the settings being applied twice, undoing the settings change. This may fix other copy settings bugs as well.
  • Power System
    • Computing the maximum safe wattage of a building on an electrical network (Properties tab > Circuit Overview), now considers joint plates that are part of that circuit, as well as wires. Prior to this change, joint plates were not considered.
    • Disabled power transformer buildings will no longer incorrectly display the No Wire status.
    • An electric circuit with a broken Wire Bridge will no longer initialize as connected when loaded from a save game.
    • Fixed an issue where a Power Shutoff constructed on an inactive logic network would default to active. The default behaviors are now:
      • No logic network: active.
      • Inactive (red signal) logic network: deactivated.
      • Active (green signal) logic network: active.
  • Critters
    • Fixed Pacus playing idle animation when a wrangle errand is created or cancelled.
    • Fixed Bammoth and Hatch missing ropes when wrangled.
    • The "No Critters Available" status for Shearing Station, Grooming Station and Milking Station is now "No Critters Ready." This avoids confusion in situations where there are shearable critters nearby who are not yet ready to have their shearables harvested.
    • The Critter Fountain's contents no longer exchange temperature with the environment.
    • The Milking Station description has been updated to include Husky Moos and biodiesel.
  • Pitcher Pump
    • Fixed a bug where Pitcher Pumps would report incorrect volumes of available liquids.
    • Fixed Duplicants occasionally becoming infinitely stuck using Pitcher Pump at single tile depth.
    • The Pitcher Pump will no longer extract liquids from outside the visually indicated area of interaction.
  • Story Traits
    • Fixed a bug where Fossil Fragments marked for excavation were not creating an errand on load.
    • Fixed Somnium Synthesizer not consuming small amounts of Dream Journals correctly, which was preventing it from accepting delivery requests for more Dream Journals.
    • The Wall Chart prop in the Printerceptor POI now unlocks only the next journal entry. It previously had a specific entry to unlock first.
  • Fixed a bug that was causing Command Capsules and Spacefarer Modules to fail to show player-customized names in the Details screen title bar.
  • Previews for striped and curved drywall blueprints under construction will better match the completed building.
  • Splash effect now plays correctly when things fall into liquid.
  • Fixed bug preventing certain plant seeds from being displayed on Pedestals, Shelves, and Sweepies.
  • Fixed an issue where timers on Filter/Buffer Gates were inaccurate.
  • Fixed items no longer exchanging temperature with their environment after being removed from a Refrigerator.
  • The Liquid Shutoff will now retain the current flow it was saved with rather than resetting to 0 on load.
  • Duplicants with the Banshee stress reaction will now wail if the reaction triggers while they are standing in water.
  • Fixed building lights appearing invisible when loading saves.
  • Minor adjustments to Research sidescreen layout on research stations.
  • The Apothecary's Effects panel now mentions that it produces medical supplies.
  • Fixed "Plant" sidescreen button and Emulsifier building translations in Korean localization.
• Base game only
  • Fixed a crash that would occur when selecting a space destination with a modded element no longer present in the game.
  • The Telescope building's description no longer mistakenly states that it produces Data Banks.
• Spaced Out! only
  • Fixed an issue where deconstructing a Solo Spacefarer Nosecone and building a Spacefarer Module resulted in some tiles not being buildable.
  • Fixed an issue where the Orbital Cargo Module was not requesting materials upon landing.
  • The Telescope and Enclosed Telescope buildings' descriptions now both specify that they produce Data Banks when revealing starmap hexes. They also list Data Bank production in their Effects panels.
  • Added Data Bank production information to the Enclosed Telescope's database entry.
  • Fixed the "Thrilling Flight" status item persisting on Duplicants even when they were no longer in space.
  • Fixed Hatches not having shadows in the Critter Cargo Bay.
  • Selecting a roundtrip rocket while it's mining a Space POI will now show the name of the pending roundtrip destination in their UI.
  • Corrected a typo in the database entry for Plug Slugs.
• The Bionic Booster Pack
  • Fixed an issue where Bionic Duplicants would not consider power banks, oxygen canisters, or Gear Balm inside rockets if they were on the main asteroid.
  • Fixed Flydo attempting to pick up things through doors and then failing because they can't reach the specific cell.
  • Fixed a crash that could happen when Flydo evaluated errands.

Modding

• Upgraded Unity version to 6000.3.5f2
• Fixed the infinite loop of "restart to re-install mod" in the presence of disk I/O errors.
• Handle file I/O errors that may occur when installing a mod from its source.
• When a mod is pending a re-install, it will display its version as "Re-install Pending" to avoid confusion over what version is installed or loaded.

What is public testing?

"Public testing" means players get to test-drive new content early and give us feedback and suggestions before it goes live. Because this is an unfinished and in active development version of the game, it's pretty likely you'll encounter bugs, crashes or balance issues while playing these builds. We'll try to fix any problems that crop up as quickly as we can, but it's possible you'll lose progress in your games while playing on the Testing branch.

Regarding performance, the Testing branch has additional debugging tools enabled to help us track down crashes. This makes the game run more slowly than the live version of the game.

Please also be aware that once a save is loaded in the Testing branch, it cannot be reopened again in the previous Live branch or previous builds.

Do I have to play the public testing build?

Nope! If you'd prefer to only play a stable build, you can continue to play in the current Default branch until the game launches in full. Playing the Open Testing build isn't necessary, but it helps us a lot to receive your feedback and reports - if you're interested, try it out!

How do I become a public tester?

There's no sign up or registration for becoming an open tester. If you own Oxygen Not Included and want to join the Testing Branch, all you have to do is play the Open Testing build on Steam.

How do I play the public testing build?

You can switch your branch on Steam using the instructions below:

Spoiler

How to change branches in Oxygen Not Included (Steam)

• In Steam, click on Library > Games.
• Scroll down to Oxygen Not Included.
• Right-click and select Properties.
• Go to the Game Versions & Betas tab.
• In the dropdown, select the name of the branch you want to play. In this case, the branch name is "public_testing"
  • This branch does not require a password.
• In that same Properties window, go to the Installed Files tab and press Verify integrity of game files.
• Your game will be updated to the the new beta version.
• Launch and play Oxygen Not Included

View full update

[Tigin]

PLib broke from the unity upgrade (which a lot of mods were using for configuring options) which ends up crashing most mods on the workshop right now. Finally able to get into the game to try this spicy new sim. I was greeted with a lovely bug fix where insulated door temperatures no longer got stuck though, which I had been accidentally abusing :P 

[Primalflower]

Rip plib 😕

[Tigin]

I've been maintaining a "reactor" setup that didn't actually require the reactor to run at all, as there appears to be a heat duplication bug from high mass somewhere here and the temperatures do not shift from 393.6C despite being cooled from 15 steam turbines. I was hopeful this patch would fix but does appear to be an issue still. Some quickmaths, 7257570 x 7.44 x .1/(15 x877.9) means it should've taken about 410 seconds to change 0.1C, but it's been several cycles with no change in sight.

heat dupe.sav

Edited March 6 by Tigin

[EricKlei]

The PLib crash will be mitigated in the next hotfix by adding the missing property. No guarantees there won't be further compatibility issues with the Unity upgrade, but at least mods that were crashing due to this missing property appear to be working.

[HarryMcCleave]

I don't expect we can (reasonably) fix that instance of heat duplication, ultimately we are using 32 bit floats to store temperature (so 23 bits of precision), one part of the update involved shifting some of the temperature exchange calculations to use 64 bit floats for the computation but ultimately the output of that is getting stored back into 32 bits, which means for a temperature exchange to have an effect at 396c, it must shift the final temperature by at least 669 / 2^23 (lets call it 0.00008k),  at 7257570 kg x 7.44 shc, that's about 4400 kw of energy transfer, or enough to raise the temperature of 1kg of steam over 1000 degrees each sim tick (5x a second), you are going to need a lot more steam to manage to eat into that massive quantity of heat fast enough to not get ignored by the implicit rounding that floating point math entails.

[ghkbrew]

3 hours ago, JarrettM said:

Removed lower mass limit for temperature exchange in the sim for tiles and debris.

I'm glad debris will exchange heat now, but... RIP Aerogel 

 

[Tigin]

21 minutes ago, ghkbrew said:

I'm glad debris will exchange heat now, but... RIP Aerogel 

 

Indeed they're no longer perfect insulators, but the element-to-element clamps are still in place, and 0.1g of glass would still only leak something trivial like 30 DTU/s for a steam room setup which is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

[ghkbrew]

30 minutes ago, Tigin said:

Indeed they're no longer perfect insulators, but the element-to-element clamps are still in place, and 0.1g of glass would still only leak something trivial like 30 DTU/s for a steam room setup which is nothing in the grand scheme of things.

Yeah, It's only the extremes builds where perfect insulation matters, but those are the fun ones  .  Off the top of my head I have 2 builds that don't work any more (and I've only ever built the second one in survival):
1. A pre-space rock gasifier that uses aerogel as insulation, the glass will just melt at those temperatures.

2. The absolute best "radiation window" for the research reactor is 100mg of solid nuclear waste holding back 200C steam without letting any heat through.  And only blocking 9% of the radiation. 

Spoiler

 

[asurendra]

6 hours ago, JarrettM said:

• Hidden fog of war tiles associated with POIs will now be correctly revealed. This will not fix errant tiles in existing saves.
•  

At last! It  was extremely annoying...

[Babxbba]

"Small masses, i.e. micrograms, now exchange temperature. That means there should no longer be issues when using the Conveyor Rail Element Sensor to separate out cooled elements from hot elements. "
Oh god yes finally.

Fixed bugs where off-gassing liquids in the sim could emit the wrong amount of gas, emit it at the wrong temperature, remove more liquid than was intended, and/or delete mass from the tile below them.

So this means i can no longer fill the steam room of a cooling setup with co2 and let the steam delete it himself without the need to vacuum?

[gigamoi]

Keep up the good work. It is great to see this kind of fixes this far into the game's life.

[memeenjoyer]

10 hours ago, JarrettM said:

Fixed bugs where off-gassing liquids in the sim could emit the wrong amount of gas, emit it at the wrong temperature, remove more liquid than was intended, and/or delete mass from the tile below them.

Does this include the infinitely duplicating liquid nuclear waste?

[myxal]

Quote

Small masses, i.e. micrograms, now exchange temperature.

Hm, this has me worrying what happens to game performance if you release some gas in a large-ish vacuumed area. Particularly the case where the gas condenses and potentially solidifies - releasing CO2/chlorine in tundra-level frozen biome, or rock gas escaping into temperate areas.

Anyone played the beta with these situations occurring?

[JDL]

12 hours ago, JarrettM said:

Fixed bugs where off-gassing liquids in the sim could emit the wrong amount of gas, emit it at the wrong temperature, remove more liquid than was intended, and/or delete mass from the tile below them.

Tested and confirmed this fixes the longstanding Claymator bug found in 2020 which allowed creation of 1,000% mass of oxygen from polluted water.

Gas mass multiplication from off-gassing layered liquids appears fixed in this release.

[ghkbrew]

Is anyone else having an issue putting numbers into building settings (fluid valve throughput, compactor capacity, etc.)?  The number keys are working, but also activating their associated hotkeys, like bringing up the building menus.

[BaZERGer]

Oh goodie, beta branch crashes when clicking the Intracosmic Blastshot ammo on the Meteor Blaster, guess i won't be participating in this today

[RomenH]

Hi there!

I just wanted to put out the heads-up nice and early that the switch to Unity 6 seems to have broken all the mods in a dozen ways. Nobody should expect stuff on the workshop to work as-is with public_testing. I'm working with a bunch of the major modders to gather the problems and "road blocks" we're hitting, and plan to make a post this weekend detailing all of that info and proposed solutions.

[sakura_sk]

3 hours ago, ghkbrew said:

an issue putting numbers into building settings

This one?

[myxal]

Has anyone else noticed corner-swap-pumps not working properly?

U57:

Spoiler

 

 

This beta:

Spoiler

 

 

 

[HarryMcCleave]

Looks to me like the change to allow sub gram objects to exchange heat and change state in the sim is probably boiling the 100 mg packet of superheated water that was driving the pump in u57 hard to be sure just looking at the videos but the displacement logic in the sim hasn't been changed this patch so my gut says the state of the drop is changing earlier.

[myxal]

I tried stepping through the sim. The displacement is not happening (in this setup, I mean; without superheated liquids it does work as expected) - the droplet appears superheated on the naphtha, and just boils off. Sometimes in the very next tick after appearing, sometimes sticking around for 2-3 more ticks.

I also seem to be getting water droplets/condensation/teleportation ex nihilo (the airflow tile is well up to temp), in turbine room here where no such water appearance happened with U57. No idea where this is coming from.

 

Save: water ex nihilo U58.sav

My previous post's geyser is the only geotuned one from the lower group of 3x2, the one above is the lower left one of the group.

EDIT: Wait, is the steam interacting with the insulated tiles before it interacts with the airflow tile or anything in that cell? 🤔

EDIT2: Yep, that seems to be the case. Here I filled the lower part first with 110C steam at 10 kg/cell, then at 0.5 kg/cell. 2nd time droplets sporadically appear above the upper row of tiles.

Spoiler

 

 

 

 

Edited March 6 by myxal

[Tigin]

Generally speaking, "swap-pumping" seems fine. My sour gas boiler lives on

 

 

[HarryMcCleave]

Shame to see a cool build go though, it certainly wasn't the target of enabling heat exchange on micro quantities, but it does look to be that since the temperature update pass happens first in the sim, by the time the liquid pressure pass happens that previously pumped and boiled the water droplet it is already steam in the build provided by myxal.

The mystery water seems to be coming from the liquid valve being too hot, still investigating the details on that though there is definitely shenanigans happening there but not sure the flavor yet, but first lunch time.

[myxal]

2 minutes ago, HarryMcCleave said:

The mystery water seems to be coming from the liquid shutoff being too hot, still investigating the details on that though there is definitely shenanigans happening there but not sure the flavor yet, but first lunch time.

I edited my post - seems like micro-amounts of steam first interact with cold insulated tile and condense, not letting the hot airflow tile and ribbon bridge to keep it from condensing.

Bummer if superheated swap-pump dies in this update, guess I'll adopt one of zarquan's builds with hydrocarbons extracting steam