Signs of Life Update 27

Hey folks,

Update 27 brings post-game colony management, expanded controller support, clearer tutorials and interaction prompts, and improvements across co-op, performance and modding to the main branch.

We've got a few more goodies in the works in terms of content, but this is pretty much the last feature update before we're going to call this thing 1.0!

Build a colony on Osiris

After completing the story, the powered operations computer in Pioneer Station on Osiris lets you manage a colony. Build suitable rooms, thaw more colonists and assign them to gathering, mining, cooking, medicine and other production jobs.

Your crew deliver resources to shared Pneumail storage near the computer, and they use ingredients from there to produce food, materials and ammunition.

The updated station and colony computer require a newly generated map.

More control over how you play

The new Controller settings page brings rebinding, dead zones, stick swapping, aim options and more. We've improved aiming, block targeting, the hotbar wheel and navigation through inventories, dialogue and menus, with contextual hints that follow your bindings.

World Scale and UI Scale are now separate settings, so you can zoom the game world and adjust the interface independently.

Clearer interactions and guidance

Interaction prompts show what you can do with an object, which control to use and why an action might be blocked. They follow your current keyboard, mouse or controller bindings and can be toggled under Settings -> Interface.

Co-op, performance and fixes

We've worked on joining and reconnecting, shared containers, doors, elevators and the co-op ending, alongside terrain drawing, lighting and world-generation performance. This update also adds more furniture recipes, footsteps that respond to your equipment and the ground beneath you, and a range of movement, survival and crash fixes.

The full change list is below, including Windows save-folder recovery, translation-pack improvements and mod compatibility changes.

Help translate Signs of Life

We've posted a community translation repository. If you'd like to contribute, take a look and let us know if anything is annoying or confusing. The goal is to put together packs for various languages so as many people as possible can play Signs of Life.

Full patch notes since 0.26.16

Post-game Colony

• Manage a colony from the powered operations computer in Pioneer Station on post-game Osiris.
• The updated station and colony console appear in newly generated maps.
• Build enclosed rooms with an interior at least 8 tiles wide and 4 tiles tall, no larger than 32 by 16, plus background walls, a bed, a door or hatch, and a working light to house additional crew. Windows can provide background coverage. Rooms aboard the Hephaestus do not count.
• Thaw colonists when housing is available, or freeze them again if you want your privacy.
• Assign crew to plant gathering, hunting, wood gathering, fruit, fungi and nut foraging, mining, clay digging, medicine, cooking, salad preparation, pottery, workshop processing, smelting, chemistry and ammunition production.
• Choose mining and foraging products, and set Make or Maintain orders for cooking, chemistry and ammunition.
• Production delivers to shared Pneumail storage and uses ingredients stored there.

Controller, Interface and Tutorials

• Added a Controller settings page with rebinding, stick swapping, aim inversion, dead zones, cursor speed, button prompts, vibration and optional aim assist.
• Improved controller aiming, digging and placement targeting, inventory selection, scrolling, hotbar wheels and navigation while holstered.
• Improved controller access to dialogue, menus, MEG tabs, window switching and cancellation. Window state and unfinished datapad edits are retained when switching back to gameplay.
• Expanded Steam controller keyboard access and preserved text drafts when text entry is canceled or unavailable.
• Added contextual control hints that follow your current bindings, with controller Gameplay Hints options and clearer keyboard/mouse hotbar and item-action guidance.
• Added separate World Scale and UI Scale settings. Improved text fitting, pointer targeting and HUD refresh after scale or resolution changes.
• Added repeatable on-screen instructions for the intro's Wrist Light, Grab Laser, Dig Laser, block placement and Scan Laser tests.
• AGIS can repeat the current lesson and provide guidance for escape-pod preparation, Pioneer Station, alien discoveries, ending objectives and the post-game colony.
• Added world-interaction prompts showing available actions, current controls and reasons an interaction is blocked. Toggle Interaction Prompts under Settings -> Interface.
• Clarified interaction prompts for machine components, required tools and standing positions. Crew prompts use their visible names, door panels identify the controlled door, and unbound or mouse-wheel controls receive appropriate hints.
• Improved interaction targeting and prevented blocked interactions from accidentally using a held item's secondary attack. Elevator shaft calls now use the configured Secondary action.
• Improved inventory search for containers, renamed items and their original names, and made Grid search results scroll into view.
• Fixed the Projects Menu shortcut, help text retaining old controls after rebinding, and a misleading Cybernetics shortcut hint.

World, Crafting and Survival

• Updated Pioneer Station's layout and furnishings on newly generated maps.
• Added recipes for more decorative furniture and cafe items, including Cafe Stools, Cafe Cup Racks, French Presses, potted plants and paintings, plus the Tech Wrench and Skillet.
• Added footsteps that vary with footwear and the surface underfoot.
• Alien energy now regenerates naturally at one pip per minute.
• Improved ladder exits: choose a direction when jumping away, or hold Down and press Jump to drop. Jump and crouch inputs no longer interrupt mount and dismount transitions.
• Added 60 seconds of protection after respawning, with a shield icon and countdown. Using items, abilities or kicking ends protection early.
• AGIS now warns when a growing parasite reaches halfway and unlocks the Ipecac Medicine recipe. Raw meats other than crawler meat no longer add parasites.
• Corrected item names, descriptions, crafting guidance and AGIS scan text.
• Improved decorative backdrop rendering and corrected emergency-light backup glow.

Performance, Lighting and Navigation

• Reduced terrain drawing work and moved first-seen static-light baking off the main thread.
• Improved world-generation performance and loading activity feedback, including terrain generation and point-of-interest placement.
• Improved creature and crew pathfinding around slopes, pits, ladders, lifts, obstacles and the world seam, with safer fallback movement when a route cannot be found.
• Reduced repeated colony storage scans and production update work.
• Fixed digging briefly flashing existing static lighting black, sunlight leaking through shallow cave gaps, lighting at screen edges, and gaps between background layers.

Multiplayer

• Made ending cinematics, mass-driver actions and the Osiris handoff host-authoritative. Party travel waits for everyone at the travel node, and clients see loading progress during the handoff.
• Improved joining and reconnecting, including returned ending-ship joins, saved teleporter bindings, join timeouts and registration retries.
• Prevented stale world snapshots from undoing newer terrain, background edits, door states, security changes and structure removals.
• Improved shared-container pickup, splitting and delivery handling to address item loss, duplication and stale item identities.
• Fixed co-op terrain, gravity-lift, access-card, automatic-door and elevator synchronization problems.
• Fixed Hephaestus furniture disappearing on clients and container updates reaching discarded inventory windows.
• Preserved saved ending progress when loading the returned ship and prevented Stein's post-game greeting from repeating after an interrupted conversation.

Fixes

• Corrected sound-effect resource cleanup and fade errors associated with effects going silent during longer sessions.
• Fixed shield set-detail overlap and the quick-slot frame's right border.
• Fixed an asteroid barnacle crash when it lost its target during a projectile throw.
• Fixed cybernetics surgery crashes and a grapple/jump escape that could leave the player stuck and legless.
• Fixed Xenite Lobber explosions at world seams and lighting bounds errors.
• Fixed a crash when a freight elevator was dropped into a Material Grinder.
• Fixed an ending travel crash when the minimap could not be saved, and restored the expanded minimap's display.
• Fixed the Material Grinder returning unrelated materials from blocks. Wooden Platforms recover Wood Boards and Stone Floors recover Stone. Empty Jugs recycle into Plastic and empty Small Leather Pouches into Hide.
• Fixed fruit-tree animation restoration and attached fruit remaining after tree removal. The Grab Laser can no longer pull attached fruit through walls.
• Fixed automatic hotbar selection holstering after placing the last item in a stack when another matching stack remained.
• Fixed zoomed-out placement returning items such as ceiling lights to inventory instead of placing them.
• Gravity lifts now shut down when map power is lost and resume when it returns.
• Fixed zoomed-out creatures freezing their animations, escape-pod exhaust drifting from the hull, and iris-port spawns getting stuck after leaving range.
• Corrected the Makeshift Crate description, removed the C96's unavailable stock-upgrade claim, and updated death-loot help to describe the dropped backpack.
• Fixed repeated bulb drops from kicking crawl ants, Combat Shotgun alternate-fire ammunition accounting and zoomed-out wrist-laser targeting.

Windows Save Folders, Translation Packs and Mods

• When Windows blocks access to the Documents save folder, the game can use Local AppData. Readable saves, settings and mods are copied while originals are retained, with startup guidance when existing data cannot be read.
• Expanded translation-pack coverage and long-text fitting across menus, recipes, dialogue, captions, item categories and colony displays. Fixed translated armor text being reset during startup or content reload.
• Improved isolation of malformed mod archives and failed pack loads, including rollback and corrected retries without disrupting healthy neighboring packs.
• Expanded Lua support for entity information and targeting, projectile control, status effects and structure interactions, and improved multiplayer held-item actions.
• Fixed Lua item removal quantities, projectile registration, armor-stat refresh and duplicate lifecycle callbacks; tightened script imports and exposed member boundaries.
• Added content-pack ambient wildlife spawn rules.
• Invalid crafting or grinding recipes now reject the affected mod during startup, restore its partial changes and allow other mods to load.
• Added clear feedback when Steam Workshop is unavailable or published mods cannot be loaded, while keeping local mods accessible.
• Refreshed the shipped ExampleMod. Mod packs now require modinfo.json; older Lua-only metadata must be converted.

Thanks for playing and helping us improve Signs of Life. Please let us know about any problems in the comments or Steam discussions, especially colony deliveries, co-op sessions or interactions that don't behave as expected.

As always, we really appreciate any feedback you can give us. This update pretty much ties up all the loose ends we had planned before a 1.0 launch. Now we need to clean up the new features (this is where your feedback comes in!), fix any more bugs that pop up, and call the darn thing finished!

Feel free to reach out here, on the Steam discussions, in our Discord server (https://discord.gg/T5pC9dT6My) or email us at playsignsoflife@gmail.com.

Expect an announcement within the next week with a new trailer and a release date!