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The Violent Frontier Update

Dawn Apart · Community Announcements · June 17, 2026

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Hey Prospectors,

Today, we're proud to share our second and biggest update yet for Dawn Apart. Over the past five months, we've worked incredibly hard to add new features and systems that bring the game closer to our original vision: a challenging yet rewarding blend of colony and automation sim, built around deep, interconnected systems and set in a dynamic, increasingly hostile world. Buckle up, Prospectors, because we stand today on the edge of a new violent frontier.

Let's dive right into the four cornerstones of this massive update: Combat, Loyalty, Weather, and Structural Integrity.

🔼Survive Raids

Starting with the second night, the It'ak - the native species of Sirius B 3 - will begin raiding your compound daily, attempting to steal your hard-earned Lucrum. To survive these escalating attacks, you'll need to fortify your colony with sandbags, palisades, and barbed-wire fences, and equip your colonists with the best weapons available through space trade.

When the It'ak arrive, you'll face a difficult choice: stand your ground and engage in firefights with the risk of casualties, or sound the alarm and send everyone to a designated safe zone, sacrificing resources in the process.

Prefer to build in peace? That's fine too. Simply disable combat in the game settings and expand your colony without hostile interference.

🔼Loyalty Over Everything

As outlined in our previous Steam post, keeping your colonists loyal now requires providing proper working and living conditions. If loyalty drops too low, workers may abandon your mining operation altogether. You'll need to monitor a variety of factors that affect wellbeing, including temperature, room quality, lighting, and pollution.

Depending on the season (more on that below), rooms must be kept at comfortable temperatures using AC units, bonfires, or stoves. They should also be well lit through artificial lighting or windows and protected from pollution by venting CO2 from furnaces through air vents and chimneys.

These systems aren't purely punitive and work both ways. Clean, bright, and comfortable rooms provide stat boosts that improve colonist productivity. Beyond that, dozens of additional perks and penalties interact with each other. A private bedroom might boost morale, while witnessing a coworker's tragic death can have the opposite effect. Discovering, balancing, and exploiting these systems is now a core part of running a successful colony.

🔼Weather the Storm

We've finally added four distinct seasons to Sirius B 3, each lasting three in-game days.

Every playthrough begins during the Hotdry season, where you'll need to cool living quarters to protect your colonists from the intense heat outside. This is followed by Colddry weather, requiring you to replace AC units with bonfires or ovens to keep everyone warm.

The real challenge arrives during the Coldwet and Hotwet seasons. Rain can now damage exposed machinery and flood furnaces, disrupting your production chain. The solution? Move critical infrastructure indoors. To support this, we've added a variety of new room utilities, including conveyor-belt inlets, vents, and chimneys, allowing you to safely operate production lines inside enclosed structures during the rainy months.

🔼Integrity or Collapse

The days of floating walls, suspended machinery, and gravity-defying structures are over. Buildings now require proper structural integrity or they will collapse. Construction follows a simple rule of thumb: start with floors, add walls, and finish with a roof. Walls can no longer be placed without floor support, and roofs require walls beneath them.

This creates a more realistic and deliberate building process while also introducing new vulnerabilities. During combat, destroying a single critical support wall may be enough to bring an entire structure crashing down.

We can't wait for all of you to make planetfall once again and experience this radically evolved version of Dawn Apart. The stakes have never been higher.

The Violent Frontier awaits!

The IT&W Team

Patch Notes (Dawn Apart v0.87.5.0)

Rooms:

Loyalty:

Structural Integrity:

Combat:

Weather:

Changes: 

General Fixes: 

PS If you made it this far and went through all the patch notes: these diary entries were found in the ruins of a factory of Sirius B 3 and will give you a vivid impression how the update affected the colonists;)

Life on the Violent Frontier

Day 3, Year 0001: The Night We Lost Taro

Last night our colony was raided by a bunch of green-skinned bastards armed with crude spheres and sling stones. These It’aks as they call themselves came straight for the stockpiles, packed with the supplies we need to survive and prosper on Sirius B 3 Me and a couple of the other prospectors grabbed our basic pistols and tried to scare them off, but they couldn’t have cared less. They charged us immediately, and my pal Taro had his skull crushed by a rock.

Still, we managed to put one of the bastards down, and that finally broke their nerves. The rest turned and fled into the darkness.

I rushed over to Taro, hoping to drag him into a regeneration pod, but his soul had already left this godforsaken plane for good. Standing there beside him, I swore to myself that I would never let that happen again.

That very night we built palisades, strung up barbed wire, and stacked sandbags around the colony. We traded some of our resources with a passing space trader for MPs and shotguns. Next time we'll be ready. Let them come.

Day 6, Year 0001: Loyalty or Bust

Ok, I’m not gonna sugarcoat it - colony life is slowly taking a toll on me, and I don’t know how many days I’ve got left in this brutal environment. Sure, we quickly made sure to get a roof over our heads and the basic necessities in place. But the honeymoon phase ended just as fast.

First and foremost, these extreme temperatures are killing me. At first it was unbearably hot. We tried to cool our living quarters as best we could with wet towels, but crafting on the workbench in that heat was rough. A few days later it suddenly turned freezing cold, so we had no choice than to heat things indoors with a makeshift bonfire. That, in turn, filled our rooms with smoke, so we had to install chimneys just to stop ourselves from passing out on the job.

We also barely had any daylight coming into the workshop. It was only after we installed lights and put in a few windows that things finally got better.

These pencil-pushers from the Kobayashi Schwarz Corporation better make sure our living and working conditions improve fast - or I swear I’m taking the next trade ship out of here.

Day 7, Year 001: Weather the Storm

Will this rain ever stop? After a hot, dry season and a subsequent cold, dry one, it started pouring yesterday. You step one foot outside and you’re soaked instantly, the day ruined before it even begins.

Worse, the furnaces we placed outside are slowly getting flooded, endangering the whole mining operation. The good news is we’ve already come up with a fix: set up machine shops indoors and put a roof over all smelters. This will cause a massive CO₂ buildup, but that won’t be too bad once we install chimneys in the roofs.

We can also craft inlets that let conveyor belts pass through the walls, so ore drilled outside can still find its way into the smelters. If there is one lesson I’ve learned, adapt fast. I’ll be damned if we can’t make it through the rainy season.

Day 9, Year 001: Integrity or Collapse

Let me tell you, unlike other planets with their weird sense of gravity, Sirius B 3 actually adheres to basic principles of physics - and today we found that out the hard way.

When building a new canteen, we forgot to place the floor tiles first, and after trying to erect the walls and roof, the whole edifice came down like a house of cards. That’s when we realized that everything we construct here must be structurally integral - and built to last.

Because when we get another visit from those damn It’aks, just one destroyed wall could become a liability, and everything would come crashing down. 

Overall, however, I’m feeling more confident with each day of turning this Lucrum mining operation into a success. Whatever this planet throws at us, there’s always a solution. Life on the Violent Frontier changes without warning, and so must we - swiftly, relentlessly, and without hesitation.

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This announcement was written and published by the developers/publisher of Dawn Apart on Steam; it is mirrored here unedited for readability, with full credit and a link to the original above. © the respective rights holders. Rights holder and want it removed? Email us — we take it down promptly.