Oxygen Not Included 744825 — macOS

You start on an asteroid with a handful of duplicants, each with their own character traits. Some are good at creative problem solving, others pick up planning quickly. From there, it’s about keeping them alive — managing oxygen, food, and waste before it turns into a chain of diseases. The game calls itself a hardcore survival simulator inside a strategy framework, and it earns that label.

Dig, build, and keep your duplicants alive across different asteroids

• Base building and resource loops — dig, build, research, and keep everything from spoiling or running out.
• Duplicant management — each colonist has individual traits that affect how they work and learn.
• Asteroid selection — the world you start on changes the challenge.
• Waste and disease chain — consume too much without recycling, and the colony spirals.

Current version (744825) changes

This release is a hotfix. It fixes duplicants teleporting to the bottom left of the map after rescue, corrects the Masterworks skill string so it mentions Masterpiece artwork quality, resolves a gasket deconstruction bug that spawned the wrong element, and addresses a liquid rendering issue on older graphics cards. A navgrid memory leak was also patched.

Run it in a window alongside Discord, a wiki, or Activity Monitor

Oxygen Not Included runs as a full-screen game, but it doesn't need to take over your whole machine. You can keep it in a window and have Discord, a browser with a wiki open, or Activity Monitor running on the side. The game respects macOS virtual desktop switching, so I usually keep the colony on one desktop and research notes on another. If you use a multi-monitor setup, the game remembers which display you last put it on, which saves a few seconds each time you launch.

The save system works with macOS file management — saves are standard files you can find in the usual game data folders. That means Time Machine or any backup tool you run will catch your colony progress if you set it up right. I'd recommend making a manual copy of the save folder before trying experimental base layouts, especially once you have a big colony going.

Match the resolution to your display and adjust settings for limited RAM

Before you start your first serious colony, visit the game's preferences and adjust a few things. The game defaults to a resolution that might not match your display, so check that first. If you're on a Mac with limited internal storage, the game lets you pick where saves go, so point them to an external drive if that suits your workflow. Turn off any tutorial tips if you've played a colony sim before — the game respects your experience and doesn't force hints on you.

One setting I always change is the autosave interval. The default is fine for casual play, but if you're trying tough asteroid conditions, set it to a shorter interval. Losing an hour to a single bad event is frustrating, especially when the game is as demanding as this one.

Rescued duplicants now reappear where they collapsed instead of far away

This hotfix makes a few noticeable differences once you're into a session. Before, duplicants you rescued and resuscitated would sometimes reappear at the bottom left of the world, far from where they collapsed. That wasted time walking them back. Now they stay where they were revived, which keeps your rescue flow moving.

The Masterworks skill string fix is small but matters if you're training duplicants in art. Before the patch, the skill description didn't mention Masterpiece quality artwork, so you might have missed that a duplicant could produce top-tier pieces. Now the text is clear, and you can plan your art colony more deliberately.

On older Macs, the liquid rendering bug caused weird visual glitches around water and oxygen pipes. That's gone now. The texture optimizations and the navgrid memory leak fix mean the game uses less memory over a long session. If you tend to leave the game running while you step away, that alone makes the update worth installing.

• This release is a hotfix.
• Fixed duplicants teleporting to the bottom left of the world after rescue and resuscitation.
• Fixed the Masterworks skill string to mention Masterpiece artwork quality.
• Fixed a gasket deconstruction issue that spawned the wrong element.
• Fixed a liquid rendering bug on older graphics cards.

• macOS version not specified by developer
• Architecture: Intel and Apple Silicon