- Darwinia 2.4.1 - 24 August 2026
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 surface editor, and a range of rare threading-related crashes. Smoother frame pacing. Reworked the frame-pacing controller to reduce cadence drift and eliminate occasional frame-time spikes. Reworked loading screen. The raytraced loading screen is now GPU-accelerated, with correct aspect ratio and smoo…
- Darwinia 2.4.0-16 hotfix release - 31 March 2026
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.
- Darwinia 2.4.0-9 hotfix release - 30 March 2026
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.
- Darwinia 2.4.0 release - 29 March 2026
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 included in the shape explosion Triffids: now properly explode when destroyed Engineers: improved building collision avoidance, reprogramming animation when adding spirits Darwinians: fixed upside-down shadows, fixed LOD jumpiness while mid-air, spectacle-watching Darwinians are now always visible Cen…
- Darwinia 2.3.3-45 hotfix - 12 April 2024
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 Notchmeister). We have an open bug with Apple about this problem and will continue to look for a better solution. Windows: Some applications (e.g. ReShade, Bandicam, Overwolf, RivaTuner Statistics Server, etc) may inject Vulkan layers into the game process, even if those applications are simply in…
- Darwinia 2.3.3-40 hotfix - 9 April 2024
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 borderless fullscreen and a non-default resolution. Fixed an unnecessary render pass break when "full" pixel effect is enabled. Updated game controller database. Updated contributing libraries. Known issues: macOS: On MacBook Pro 14"/16" with 120Hz displays (or in fact any Mac with > 60Hz displays) there…
- Darwinia 2.3.3 release - 6 March 2024
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 unexpected keyboard inputs. Fixed a very long-standing bug (probably since the original Darwinia release!) around world time handling. In a simplified explanation, the world expects to update at 100Hz, but it was actually updating at 90Hz. This caused numerous graphical glitches and strange behavior…
- Darwinia from Introversion Software gets a big compatibility upgrade - 28 August 2023
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
- Darwinia 2.3.2 release - 27 August 2023
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 NVIDIA driver feature, the DXGI present path for Vulkan/OpenGL. Should greatly improve frame smoothness and eliminate stutters. Reduced stutter caused by one-off long frames. Reworked some of the water avoidance behavior. There were some bugs in how the water avoidance decisions were made, which caused…
- Darwinia 2.3.1 release - 2 December 2022
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 playable, but they may not appear as the mod developer intended. Greatly improved game controller experience, now using much different thumbstick and trigger axis scaling methods. This was tested with an Xbox Elite controller, but it should improve the experience on any controller, including the St…
- Darwinia 2.3.0-25 hotfix release - 13 November 2022
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 landscape level. Fixed the behavior for the "Chat Log" input binding. Fixed the behavior of the "Restore Defaults" button in the input binding settings window. Improved texture quality of mouse cursors and landscape wireframe. Updated contributing libraries (SDL, MiniAudio, etc). Known issues: mac…
- Darwinia 2.3.0 release - 12 November 2022
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 framebuffers, which dramatically reduces memory bandwidth and improves performance. Vulkan: AMD GPUs can now use lossless compression for textures and framebuffers (DCC, or “Delta Color Compression”), which improves performance. Vulkan/Metal/Direct3D: On systems with multiple distinct GPUs (e.g. laptops wi…
- Darwinia 2.2.0-296 hotfix release - 8 June 2022
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.
- Darwinia 2.2.0-292 bugfix release - 7 June 2022
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 persistent mapped buffers for better performance. Previously this was disabled because of rendering glitches where the wrong meshes were rendered for some objects. I think I've ironed these problems out and it should now work better. Fixed some miscellaneous rare crashes Darwinia now automatically…
- Darwinia 2.2.0-169 bugfix release - 3 May 2022
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 experimental and is disabled by default. It requires the Vulkan renderer and driver support for VK_KHR_fragment_shading_rate with support for pipeline fragment shading rate control. This feature can improve performance for rendering meshes that don't need precise per-pixel shading. Updated ANGLE an…
- Darwinia 2.2.0-138 bugfix release - 25 April 2022
Game fixes: Armour collision is now more reasonable, and armour units should now follow orders immediately even when doing collision avoidance. Failure to resume audio after alt-tabbing back into the game is no longer fatal. When this occurs, the sound system will attempt to restart instead. The gesture input render now looks as intended (more blocky) User profile names are checked at creation time for valid characters and known reserved file names (e.g. Windows does not allow file or folder names to be "con", "aux", "com0", etc.) Level editor fixes: Input fields referring to unsigned bytes (e.g. RGB color values in the level editor) are now clamped properly Linking buildings that are not meant to be linked could cause crashes. Several of these have been found and fixed. Cloned trees were not being rendered correctly due to incorrect visibility calculations. This may also fix other buil…
- Darwinia 2.2.0-107 hotfix - 21 April 2022
A bunch of level editor fixes in this one. Fixed bugs: Leaving the level editor with the "flatten area" window open could crash the game Moving a landscape flatten area in the level editor would not automatically regenerate the landscape mesh If no lights were defined for a level (e.g. unfinished maps in mods or similar) the game could crash on entering the level The circle around SafeArea buildings was not rendering correctly in the level editor.
- Darwinia 2.2.0-100 hotfix - 20 April 2022
Changes: Static vertex buffer uploads now work without fallbacks, even on Vulkan devices with weird heap layouts. Huge thanks to the ANGLE developers for finding a solution. A user on the forums tested it and it solved the problem on their machine.
- Darwinia 2.2.0-97 hotfix - 20 April 2022
Fix for buffer upload failures in ANGLE with GL_STATIC_DRAW on Vulkan devices with unusual heap layouts Fix for OpenGL shader compilation on older GPU drivers which don't understand precision qualifiers for anything other than float/int types Update SDL game controller database Minor localization fixes
- Darwinia 2.2.0-83 hotfix - 20 April 2022
Changes: Fix crash caused by unusual Vulkan memory heap layouts on some devices. ANGLE was requiring memory types that have both the DEVICE_LOCAL and HOST_VISIBLE flags, but some uncommon devices only have very small heaps with those properties. This caused the Vulkan renderer to exhaust the small heap and fail to upload any buffers after that point. Fix possible crash when entering a location
