Paralives 0.1.7: what the August 10, 2026 update changes and how to prepare your save

As of August 6, 2026, the latest public version of Paralives remains hotfix 0.1.6b, released on July 17. The next update, numbered 0.1.7, is dated August 10, 2026 by Paralives Studio. It has therefore not been released yet: none of what follows is playable today, and no complete patch notes have been published at this stage.

What we know comes from three announcements on the studio's official blog. The visual overhaul of babies was shown on July 28, then on August 4 came a double announcement: the overhaul of indoor lighting and a bed assignment system. The visuals released carry the caption Patch 0.1.7 Sneak Peek added by the studio, which confirms the version number — in the text of its posts, the team simply refers to its "next patch".

Here is a breakdown of what's confirmed and what isn't, what the lighting overhaul will do to your builds, and the list of things to sort out before Monday so your saves survive the update without a hitch.

What's confirmed for 0.1.7 — and what isn't

Only three areas of work have been publicly announced, all by Gabrielle Boyer-Antoni in the news section of paralives.com:

Everything else is speculation. No deployment time has been communicated, no list of fixes, and nothing indicates that 0.1.7 will be limited to these three points: for comparison, the July 16 update 0.1.6 included six announced new features but twenty-two bug fixes in its official notes. The studio's teasers never cover the entirety of a patch.

Lighting overhaul: what it changes for your builds

The comparison published by the studio speaks louder than the wording of the post. In the room on the right, the ceiling light no longer lights up a disc in the center of the floor but the entire space. In the one on the left, the wall sconce keeps its warm glow but stops burning out the wall behind it. This is exactly the twin issue the community has been reporting since launch: too short a range and overexposed walls that wash out textures and paint colors.

The practical consequence is counterintuitive. Many players compensated for the short range by multiplying light sources: two or three ceiling lights in a living room, wall sconces every two meters, filler floor lamps. With an increased range, these interiors risk ending up overexposed once the patch is installed. Three things to keep in mind:

• Spot your rooms with three or more light sources. These are the ones that will change the most. Take a screenshot before Monday, and you'll have a point of comparison instead of tinkering blindly.
• Don't redecorate anything now. Adjusting your lighting before the patch means doing the work twice. Wait to see the actual result.
• If you publish on the Steam Workshop, your showcase screenshots will no longer match the in-game render as of August 10: plan to redo them.

Good news for cautious builders: since patch 0.1.5 on July 2, the game has allowed you to restore a lot to its original appearance. Reverting is possible. One last point to avoid confusion: this is a rendering change, not an addition of furniture. No new light fixture has been announced.

Bed assignment: the logical follow-up to hotfix 0.1.6b

This new feature doesn't come out of nowhere. Patch 0.1.6 on July 16 introduced a spectacular bug where several Paras would sleep in the same spot of the same bed, stacked on top of one another. Hotfix 0.1.6b, released the very next day, fixed this stacking issue — and otherwise only added one other new feature, a group variant for each recipe.

0.1.7 goes further by putting control in the player's hands: choosing which Para sleeps in which bed, and on which side of a double bed. This solves two irritants of large households — the Para who squats another's bed because their own is occupied, and the inability to establish a stable routine for a couple.

Here again, the right strategy is to wait. If you had multiplied single beds to work around the issue — a classic move in households of five or six Paras —, you'll likely be able to go back to normal bedrooms after August 10. But don't tear anything down before seeing the interface: the studio hasn't specified how assignment behaves during a move, what happens with guests, or whether there's an automatic option for unplayed households.

Babies: a redesign announced as purely visual

The studio took the matter back up after very harsh community feedback. The three comparisons published on July 28 show faces with reworked proportions and a more readable gaze. Nothing else has been announced: no gameplay changes around infants — needs, interactions, childcare — appear in the studio's communication.

Note: time off has already been in the game since July 16

This is the most common point of confusion right now, and it's worth clarifying. The time-off overhaul isn't arriving on August 10: it has been live since patch 0.1.6 on July 16, and you can use it right now. The official patch notes describe three mechanics:

• A Para now starts a new job with a stock of days off, instead of starting from zero.
• These days accumulate over the course of work, they no longer reset.
• Requests are made by phone, for a single day off or for a longer paid leave.

An important point for anyone playing at a higher difficulty: the studio specifies that this system's behavior varies depending on the chosen Storyteller. If your vacation days fill up more slowly than what you read elsewhere, that's your narration profile talking, not a bug.

The checklist to do before Monday

Save for real, not just in the cloud

Patch 0.1.5 considerably cleaned up the situation: save file size reduced to around 30 MB from 500 MB previously, retention of the last three versions of each automatic save accessible from the load menu, and Steam Cloud synchronization. That's a decent safety net, but syncing overwrites, it doesn't archive. Copy the save folder elsewhere, with the game closed:

• Windows: C:\Users\YourName\AppData\LocalLow\Paralives\Paralives (the AppData folder is hidden by default: type the path directly into the file explorer's address bar).
• macOS: ~/Library/Application Support/com.Paralives.Paralives

Turn off your mods before launching the patched version

The studio itself states this in the known issues for 0.1.5: external extensions and mods aren't always immediately compatible with the latest version of the game and can cause malfunctions. The same patch added a button to enable or disable everything at once in the mods menu — use it before the first launch post-patch, then re-enable your mods one by one.

The obvious first suspects are anything touching lighting, shaders, or color filters.

Archive your lots and households in the library

A lot or household saved in the game's library exists independently of the save that produced it: it can be reloaded into another game or shared on the Steam Workshop. It's your best insurance if a save were to become unreadable.

Don't count on a fix for the 70-day bug

The 0.1.6 patch notes document a known issue that hasn't received any resolution date: in-game time gradually slows down after about seventy days of play. The official workaround is to manually adjust the minutes-per-real-second ratio in the Storyteller settings. The studio says it's working on a fix, but it was never tied to 0.1.7.

Partial French localization: the French labels to know

Paralives is officially translated into French — the language is listed in black and white on the game's Steam page. But localization remains a work in progress, and the studio doesn't hide it: the 0.1.6 patch notes mention both fixes for text strings that weren't displaying correctly in certain languages and untranslated strings caught along the way. If you come across English in a French menu, that's a known issue, not your installation.

The French labels confirmed so far:

• Paras: the term is kept as is in French, including in the official description of the game.
• Parasculpteur: this is the French name for the character editor, called Paramaker in English. Many French-speaking articles still use the English term.
• mode Construction and mode Achat for the two sides of editing a lot, with the outils de terrain for the outdoors, the marteau for demolishing, the pipette for copying an item, and the mode Raser for erasing.
• Paradimes for the currency, besoins and compétences for the gauges and progressions.
• Melino: the city's name remains the same in French.

On the other hand, several central terms have no stable and verifiable French equivalent in French-language sources: Parafolk (the plural used by the studio to designate the inhabitants of a household), Storyteller, Story Cards and Life Goals circulate as is. We keep them in English as long as the French client's wording has not been confirmed.

What to watch for on August 10

The full patch notes will drop that same day, on the news section of paralives.com and in the news tab of the Steam page. That's where the real substance lies: the three teasers only represent a fraction of a patch, and it's the list of fixes that will tell whether the studio has made progress on the technical debt accumulated since the May 25 launch.

Until then, the only useful work is defensive: a manual backup of your saves, your mods ready to be disabled, your lots archived in the library, and a few screenshots of your most well-lit interiors. And expect a 0.1.7b hotfix to follow shortly after: the last three major patches all got one.