Super Rover

Super Rover is a mod for Oxygen Not Included, Klei's colony simulation in which a handful of Duplicants dig for survival beneath an asteroid. Orbit taught the Scout Rover how to work.

• Client: Orbit GmbH
• Built by: Orbit (Jan)
• Period: 2026

Super Rover is a mod for Oxygen Not Included, Klei's colony simulation in which a handful of Duplicants dig for survival beneath an asteroid. Orbit taught the Scout Rover how to work.

Oxygen Not Included is one of the major colony simulations on Steam, and one of the most active modding communities has grown around the game. In the expansion Spaced Out!, there is a Scout Rover that a single base property locks for twelve work groups: It can do little more than drive around. On March 18, 2026, Orbit Super Rover is released in the Steam Workshop as an independent project, turning the Rover into a colleague of the Duplicants. Since then, the mod has grown. In October 2026, Version 1.3.0 is released, featuring a unique name for each Rover, a dedicated line in the Priorities window, power from Powerbanks and Rovers that travel through water and lava to get to work. 6,929 visitors have opened the Workshop page, 1,670 players have subscribed to the mod, 161 have it in their favorites, and 67 ratings give it four stars.

• A kit from each refined metal • Twelve work groups unlocked • A unique name for each rover • One line per rover, sorted by planets • Through water and lava • Doors following their own rules • Power from Bionic Power Banks • A second life on request • Tested with 59 other mods

Check first, then intervene

A Mod hooks into the game's methods, and a faulty intervention does not always become apparent immediately, sometimes only after a hundred hours of play in a foreign colony. Before a single line of code is written, paths, doors, and access rules are therefore read directly from the game itself. The project is guided by a single sentence that demands the same care as any client project from Orbit: check first, then intervene. The value of this approach is shown by the major overhaul prior to version 1.3.0: Every intervention of the Mod had been running twice since the first release, and two older interventions on the doors never checked anything for Rover. Both issues have been fixed, found through measurement rather than guessing.

From the kit to the colleague

A rover starts at the Crafting Station. The Scout Rover Kit requires 100 kilograms of refined metal and 45 seconds. It accepts any refined metal in the game, including nickel and metals from other mods, except solid mercury, which melts in a base, and depleted uranium. A button on the kit rolls the rover out. With the option «Auto Deploy Kit», a kit that lands loose even deploys itself, for example when it is unloaded from a rocket. The number of rovers a colony may have is set by a cap, standard ten; once it is reached, the kit displays «Max reached».

In the field, a rover builds, digs, researches, and cooks, operates machines, and chisels artworks. With the default settings, it also performs tasks that a duplicate must first learn a skill for, up to and including the construction of rockets. Only what requires a body is denied: eating, sleeping, breathing, medicine, showering, and rescuing unconscious duplicates. Whoever no longer needs a rover packs it back into the kit, and the kit retains metal and temperature, as if the rover had only briefly fallen asleep.

A name and a line of its own

Most frequently, players in the workshop wished they could lead Rovers like Duplicates. Therefore, in version 1.3.0, every Rover receives a unique name when it rolls out, randomly drawn from more than sixty: simple ones like Steve and Doris, encrypted ones like D1gg3r and K1lo, and distant relatives of famous robots like WALL-Y, Dalek Dave or Bender’s Cousin. Whoever wants to can rename a Rover in their own window, and the Priorities window adopts the new name immediately. Rovers from older save files that still carry a number receive a proper name when loaded.

In the Priorities window, each rover has its own row, with image, name, and priorities, listed under the planet where it operates. This allows the colony to decide per planet which rover takes on what task, and a job with priority zero is left untouched. The priorities belong to the rover itself and are saved with it. The Errands tab shows, as with a duplicate, what it is currently working on. And those who use the Mod Control your Robots no longer see its shared rover row: Super Rover controls each rover individually.

Where no duplicate can reach

A rover moves like a duplicate across floors and ladders, along poles, through transport pipes and teleporters, and into rockets. It does not need to breathe, and therefore no liquid holds it back. It runs across the bottom of a flooded hall and digs up a sunken block there, in clouds of air bubbles. And it wades through lava, in a column straight across a glowing lake to the wall that is to be removed. For the colony, this means: The work in the magma is taken over by whoever does not need a suit.

The doors are the tricky part. If you simply give a rover the paths of a duplicate, you bypass their access rules, and suddenly a machine is standing in the sleeping quarters. A rover therefore carries the keys that the game itself provides for robots, first its robot type, then robots in general, and each door decides according to its own settings, including one-way rules. If a rover is alone in a rocket, it counts as the pilot.

Power from the power bank

A rover runs on a battery, and an empty battery in the middle of a long task was one of the first reports in the workshop. With Rover’s Recharger, it therefore stops its work as soon as the charge falls below a threshold and goes to charge. The player sets the threshold themselves, from 5 to 90 percent, standard 20. New in version 1.3.0 is a second way: Those who own the Bionic Booster Pack and enable «Use Bionic Power Banks» send the rover first to a charged Powerbank from the storage. It charges itself there, 120’000 Joules from a full bank, and leaves the empty bank for the charger. Only when no bank has any charge left does it go to the charging station.

A second life, on request

If a rover's battery drops to zero, it shuts down and is scrapped like an ordinary rover. That is how the game intends it, and that is how it remains in the default setting. A player wished for a second chance in the Workshop, and Version 1.3.0 provides it as an option: With «Repack Shut-down Rovers», a shut-down rover can be packed back into the kit and then rolls out again with a full battery, under a new name.

Everything adjustable

Every rule of the mod can be configured in the Options window: whether Rovers can build structures that are otherwise reserved for Duplikants, whether they can research, cook and operate machines, whether the recipe appears at the Crafting Station, whether the battery lasts indefinitely, how many Rovers a colony can have, whether a kit rolls out by itself, and the three new features from version 1.3.0. A change requires a restart because the recipe is created when the game starts, and the window states this as well.

The municipality writes with

A mod lives off those who play it. 115 comments are on the Workshop page, and every report is measured against the game code before it is fixed. What the players reported and wished for, and what came of it:

Tested as in a real emergency

A Mod rarely runs alone. Super Rover is therefore tested twice: in a fresh Sandbox Colony, where each function is checked individually, and in a large save file with over 1,200 cycles, 14 Duplicants, around 20 Rovers and 59 other Mods. After loading, not a single exception may appear in the log. For version 1.3.0, another large save file with the Bionic Booster Pack was added: Three Rovers each retrieved 120,000 Joules from a Powerbank without a single error. The videos of the new features on this page come from the exact version that is in the Workshop.

Version 1.3.0 in the workshop

Since October 2026, version 1.3.0 has been available in the Steam Workshop. For players, the path is short: subscribe to the Mod, build a Crafting Station in a colony with Spaced Out!, place refined metal in the storage, and the recipe for the first Rover appears. Super Rover shows on a small scale how Orbit approaches every project: listen, measure, deliver cleanly and stay committed, even long after the first release.

It also works without Steam: Super Rover 1.3.0 as a zip (887 KB, SHA-256 880fe4e340234c71a4b59ecd08c593a6895b2b71ad277e122cf309e8e98e40be). Unzip the SuperRover folder into Documents\Klei\OxygenNotIncluded\mods\Local and enable the mod in the game's Mods menu. On the Steam Workshop it stays up to date by itself.