Channel37 has released Update 03: Curiosity Wakes for The Last Caretaker, its sci-fi survival crafting game currently in Early Access on Steam and the Epic Games Store. The update arrives on March 19th, 2026, and the game is discounted by 20% to mark the occasion, bringing the price down to $27.99.
The Last Caretaker casts you as a reawakened machine on a drowned Earth, where the ocean has swallowed everything and towering megastructures rust under a yawning sky. Your job is to recover human seeds, grow them inside a facility called the Lazarus Complex, and launch the last of humanity into orbit aboard rockets. It's survival crafting built around a specific purpose: every resource you scavenge, every defence you build, every system you restore feeds into the question of whether these people make it off the planet.
The crafting system runs on limited resources across a vast ocean world, and the choices you make shape how the narrative unfolds. Growing human seeds inside the Lazarus Complex means managing incubation temperature, nutrient flow, and memory data integration, while each seed carries emotional imprints and fragments of past lives that piece together lost human stories. Protection matters just as much as nurture. Rogue machines and environmental threats bear down on the Complex, and you build automated defences, upgrade your mobile platform, and deploy countermeasures during storms and system breaches. Strategic choices in how you protect the facility can determine whether the last generation of humans survives at all. When the time comes to launch, you restore ancient infrastructure called MOSES, scavenge for launch codes, refine fuel, and rebuild navigation AI, each launch a calculated risk that sends your nurtured humans skyward.
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Curiosity Wakes changes the shape of that mission in a significant way. Until now, the humans you launched disappeared into space without consequence. This update shatters that silence by letting you contact humanity's distant orbital haven for the first time. You can now interact with a new Council of Humanity, building committees populated by the very humans you've sent into orbit. Those committees shape life on the surface below, meaning every launch now carries structure and consequence back into the world you're still working to survive in. The system reveals one of the ultimate purposes behind the player's efforts, turning what was a one-way farewell into something with feedback and weight.
The ocean itself has grown more dangerous. Ram Sharks, Laser Sharks, and waking ArchAngels introduce new threats beneath the waves, and enemies across the board behave with more deliberate, less predictable attack patterns. You're no longer alone in facing them, though. Players can now unlock and fabricate allied support units, including Field Escort and Localized Intervention Sphere systems alongside companions called Sweethearts. New locations like the Shark Research Area and Rollerboi Factory sit alongside long-forgotten facilities to discover, new modules to unlock, fresh resources to extract, and additional progression paths for evolving your Caretaker. Cosmetic paint options round out the customisation side.
The tone running through The Last Caretaker is quieter than most survival crafting games tend to aim for. This is a game about tending to something fragile on a planet that has already lost, where discovery matters as much as defence. Curiosity Wakes leans further into that by giving the humans you save a presence beyond the launch pad, connecting the sea to the stars with something more than hope.