Character House Update History: Every Confirmed Change
Every confirmed Character House demo update: the 21 September fixes, the 22 September counter switch, Custom Upload on 13 October and the save-corruption repair.
Character House has published four updates since the demo launched. The first arrived on 21 September 2026, five days after release. It is still the most informative one, because the developer used the same post to explain the team’s situation and to list features nobody had found yet.
A day later the counter got its off switch. On 13 October Custom Upload went live alongside a save-corruption repair. Between them came the translation pass and the two wishlist milestones, 100,000 on 24 September and 200,000 on 16 October.
What the 21 September 2026 update changed
| Change | What it fixes |
|---|---|
| Character reset from the taskbar | Characters that fell off the screen could not be recovered before |
| Quick always-on-top toggle in the taskbar | Switching the setting no longer means opening the settings panel |
| Frame-rate choice of 30, 60 or unlimited | Lets players reduce the load the desktop pet puts on the machine |
| Uninstall prompt fix on Windows | The app used to prompt for installation again after being uninstalled |
The first two are the ones players had been asking for most loudly. A character that wandered off the visible desktop used to be lost, and the developer apologised for it directly in the announcement.
The uninstall bug and what to do about it
The fourth item deserves its own note, because it produced a thread of complaints on its own. Players who had enabled the app to start with Windows and then uninstalled it found Windows prompting them to install it again.
The developer’s post gives two routes out:
- Reinstall the game and uninstall it again, which clears the leftover entry, or
- Open Task Manager, find the startup entry and disable it there.
Anyone who still has the game installed does not need to do anything; the update fixes it.
The hidden features the developer revealed
The same announcement listed seven things the team had built but few players had discovered. They are worth knowing because several of them replace fiddly manual work:
- Click the palette icon at the top right of the colour card to save frequently used colours.
- Type a colour value directly into the field under the colour card for exact matching.
- A character that has learned the shy action will act shy when you pet it.
- A character that has learned anger becomes visibly irritated if you type very fast in typing mode.
- Drag two characters together and they will look at each other.
- Typing mode can move several characters at once, which is the quick way to tidy a desktop or push a group to the screen edges.
- Right-click a character and drag to make it follow your cursor.
What the developer said about the team
The announcement is also the only public statement about how the game is being made. In it the developer says:
- This is the team’s first game.
- The team is smaller than five people.
- They did not find a publisher in time.
- They maintain every social media account themselves.
- Feedback since launch exceeded what they could answer individually.
There is no roadmap with dates attached, so treat the what as informative and the when as unknown.
The typing counter: the off switch shipped
The 21 September update did not touch the keystroke counter. The discussion threads after launch did, and the developer answered them on 22 September with a Disable Counter feature. The setting turns the keyboard and mouse counter off, and you can turn it back on at any time. While it is off, your character stops syncing to your keystrokes.
The same post added consent to the onboarding flow: counting now starts only after you explicitly agree to it. The developer repeated that no version records what you type, that the counter only increments by one, and that the demo has no network activity beyond Steam and the official Unity SDK.
One claim the developer could not confirm: players reported the counter still rising after the game closed. The team said repeated testing did not reproduce it, and thanked the player who suggested Steam Cloud saves as the cause. That remains unresolved rather than denied.
The other updates
22 September also repeated the uninstall workaround, because the Steam image from the day before was not clear. The startup entry to disable in Task Manager is the cmd.exe one, and if several share the name, the command line tells them apart.
24 September brought 100,000 wishlists one week after the demo, plus a translation pass across the demo.
13 October shipped Custom Upload. Almost every part is open for player-made art: hairstyles, facial features, outfits and accessories, with an in-game Custom Tutorial and a template page at elartworld.com. The same update handled the “no character on screen” and “only the gift box” reports: the developer confirmed both came from save data corrupted by abnormal exits, optimised saving to make that far rarer, and added a save reset so an affected player can start clean instead of being stuck.
16 October brought 200,000 wishlists in the demo’s first month, with the developer confirming a place in October’s Next Fest.
Where to read the official notes
The store page has a recent announcements block that links to every post. The developer’s posts there are the primary source; this page summarises them rather than replacing them.
If you have already uninstalled and are still seeing the relaunch prompt, follow the two steps above before assuming the fix failed.
Related reading
- The counter argument in full: keystroke counter and privacy
- When the full game arrives: release status
- Something is still broken: fixes