ASKA's biggest update of the year has had a rocky six weeks. The Great Hall & Feasts Update landed on August 31, 2026 with wheat farming, a spline-based wall tool, a reworked whitelisting system, a much deeper Custom Game mode and the Great Hall itself. Then came seven hotfixes. The latest, the October 9 patch, finally fixes the bug many multiplayer groups ran into: the Great Hall crashing the game when a client placed it.
If you play ASKA with friends on a dedicated server, that fix matters more than it sounds. On a dedicated server every player connects as a client, so the bug did not care who was "the host". Here is what the update added, what the patches fixed since, and what to check on your server now.
What the Great Hall & Feasts Update Added
The headline is the Great Hall, the largest building in ASKA so far and an endgame centerpiece for your village. Inside it you can stage Feasts. A feast needs a serious stockpile of high-tier food, and in return your whole settlement gets long-lasting global buffs to productivity, morale and combat. It is the first real "we made it" milestone for a late-game tribe.
Around it, Sand Sailor Studio filled a lot of gaps:
- Wheat, the Windmill and bread. Wild wheat grows on the swamp islands and can be cultivated at the Improved Farm. The new Windmill grinds it into flour based on the actual wind direction, a new Milling job keeps it staffed, and the Cooking House can now bake bread.
- A new wall tool. Walls are now laid out like roads, with a spline, plus slanted variants that follow hillsides. Perimeter defenses that used to take an evening now take minutes.
- Reworked whitelisting. You can assign jobs, buildings and individual villagers with much more precision, so workers stop wandering off with the wrong resources.
- A Deep Well you can place anywhere (it needs a Water rune), a Production Chain page in the player menu, and a Mine House that holds 3 workers instead of 2.
- Save system improvements aimed at reducing the risk of corrupted saves.
Custom Game Mode Is the Sleeper Feature
The expanded Custom Game mode is the part that changes how groups play. You can tune season lengths, start with a fully leveled tribe or top-tier gear, change how often invasions hit, and set victory conditions. That opens up very different worlds: a relaxed farming campaign with no raids at all, or a brutal winter siege with warriors from day one.
For server owners the important detail is that these settings belong to the world, and you choose them when the world is created. The September 8 hotfix fixed two dedicated-server bugs here: servers could not create custom worlds with a starting chest, and game customization did not load correctly on a dedicated server the first time a player joined. If you set up a custom world in the first week and the rules felt wrong, that was the bug, not your settings.
Six Weeks of Hotfixes, Sorted by What Hits Servers
Most of the September patch notes are villager AI fixes (cooks, miners, fishermen and brewers getting stuck). The lines that matter for multiplayer are these:
- September 1: clients could see "ghost" copies of items that had already left the Great Hall tables, and Great Hall workers now only prepare feasts during work hours.
- September 8: the custom-world fixes above, plus a Nidhogg disconnect, an ogre that was bugged for clients, and local backups that did not delete with their session.
- September 30: a connection timeout when hosting large villages is fixed, players now see a proper password reject message instead of a silent failure, and Smolkrs and Kycklings no longer starve to death because they could not eat Wheat Seeds.
- October 9: the Great Hall crash when placed by a client is fixed, win condition progress no longer counts several times in multiplayer, and players can no longer get stuck in ghost mode through a win condition.
That connection timeout fix deserves a second look. It hit exactly the worlds people care most about: big, late-game villages where the server has the most state to send a joining player.
The October 9 Patch Also Fixes Your Water Supply
Beyond the crash, the October 9 patch fixes villagers who kept drinking water or mead until the fountain ran dry, which could leave other villagers to die of dehydration while they waited their turn. It also fixes breeding that sometimes spawned a fully grown animal, broken interactions after dropping a tamed Smolkr or Kyckling outside its pen, and pens accepting more animals than their limit. Cooking recipes can now be toggled on and off in game customization, the Great Hall gets quest list presets, and the save backup recovery menu has a cleaner UI.
What to Do on Your ASKA Server Now
- Back up before anything else. On a dedicated server each world lives in its own
savegame_<id>folder, and the world that loads is whichever id thesave idline inserver properties.txtpoints at (yes, the file name has a space in it). Take a full backup from your panel, or copy that folder. - Careful if you edit
save idby hand. In our testing, ASKA rewrites that line on boot and can duplicate the last character of the value unless the line ends with a single trailing space. A value that matches no folder makes the server quietly generate a brand new, empty world, which looks exactly like a lost save. Keep the trailing space. - Get every player on the October 9 build. Update the server first, then have everyone update their client. A version mismatch is the usual reason a group suddenly cannot join after a patch.
- Retest your password. Since September 30 a wrong password produces a clear reject message. If a friend still cannot get in, the message now tells you whether the password is the problem.
- Not in the server browser? ASKA joins through a relay and needs a valid Steam Game Server Login Token. With a missing or expired token the server can look online while it never shows up in the list. Our guide to joining an ASKA server walks through it.
- Size for the late game. ASKA is capped at 4 players, so RAM is driven by the settlement, not the head count. Our ASKA RAM calculator gives you a starting point.
Starting fresh for a custom world? Our ASKA dedicated server guide covers setup from scratch.
Is It a Good Time to Start a New ASKA World?
Yes. The Great Hall gives a long campaign a real finish line, Custom Game mode makes a second playthrough feel genuinely different, and the October 9 patch closes the crash that made the update risky in multiplayer. If your group shelved its world in September, this is the build to come back on.
Host Your ASKA Server with DoomHosting
Want your village to keep running while your tribe is offline? Rent an ASKA server from DoomHosting and get instant setup, full file access for backups and world swaps, DDoS protection and 24/7 support. Light the feast fires, the server will still be there tomorrow.
