Canvastown

Overview

Canvastown is a new world being developed for inZOI as part of the 2026 strategic roadmap. Unlike the existing cities of Dowon, Bliss Bay, and Cahaya (each inspired by real-world urban or resort environments), Canvastown is designed as a compact, rural countryside setting with an emphasis on performance accessibility and community storytelling. It is built on a new internal engine called the Fate Engine, which KRAFTON is developing to lower the technical requirements needed to run inZOI and to eventually transfer those optimizations back to the existing cities.

Canvastown is being developed by a dedicated internal team that works in parallel with the core development team responsible for ongoing content updates and single-player features. KRAFTON has explicitly stated that multiplayer development will not take resources away from single-player development. The studio follows a "Fundamentals First" approach, prioritizing family story progression, birthday systems, autonomy controls, and NPC behavioral improvements before expanding into new territory.

Design Philosophy

Canvastown was announced as part of the "Beyond the Fundamentals" 2026 Roadmap revealed in early January 2026. The concept was born from a practical observation during inZOI's first year of development: the original city environments, while visually impressive, were too large. The sprawling layouts created empty spaces, taxed hardware resources, and made it difficult to add new buildings without degrading performance. Producer Kjun explained that internal testing revealed a simple solution. If the world contained only player-built structures created through Build Mode, performance remained stable and smooth, even at high density.

That insight became the foundation for Canvastown. Rather than inheriting the baggage of pre-built city assets, the new world starts from a clean slate. Every structure in Canvastown is a customizable lot that players can populate with their own creations. The compact footprint means every lot sits within walking distance of every other lot, and KRAFTON describes this as creating a world where "everything around your home becomes part of your playable space." This tight-knit neighborhood feel differs intentionally from the larger layouts of Dowon or Bliss Bay, where travel between distant lots can eat into gameplay time.

Canvastown also preserves inZOI's open-world structure. Players can walk freely through the town, encounter neighbors organically, and discover nearby shops without loading screens. The smaller distances mean that Zois appear more frequently in your surroundings, creating a sense of liveliness that larger cities sometimes struggle to maintain. KRAFTON has indicated that in the long term, the game could support multiple Canvastown instances with minimal loading times between them.

Size and Performance

Canvastown measures approximately one-eighth the size of Dowon. Despite this smaller footprint, internal testing showed that even with around 80 lots, the town ran more efficiently than the main city. The compact design eliminates the rendering overhead associated with large open terrain and pre-built landmark assets. By building exclusively on the Fate Engine, KRAFTON can optimize rendering, simulation, and loading pipelines without the constraints of the existing city asset pipeline.

One of the community's most consistent requests has been better performance on a wider range of hardware. Canvastown directly addresses this. The April 2026 development update confirmed that the team is expanding graphics settings options for lower-spec hardware compatibility and tackling system memory optimization to address leaks and overload issues that are common in long simulation sessions. Once validated in Canvastown, these performance improvements are planned to roll back into Dowon, Bliss Bay, and Cahaya.

The Fate Engine

The Fate Engine is the internal game engine being developed alongside Canvastown. It serves two purposes: it provides the technical foundation for Canvastown's optimized performance, and it introduces a new gameplay system centered around emergent storytelling.

the Fate Engine randomly generates an entire life setup for your character. When activated, a player presses a randomization button that shuffles world settings completely. According to producer Kjun, "You might suddenly wake up as the youngest son of a billionaire family, or find yourself in a haunted house where your smiling family insists, 'Everything's fine here.'" Another scenario involves starting as the head of a poor family with ten children. The system addresses recurring community feedback requesting a clear core gameplay loop with purpose, rewards, and repeatable progression.

The Fate Engine is optional. Players who prefer the freedom of open-ended sandbox play can ignore it entirely. For those who want more structure, it provides varied starting conditions that create goals and challenges organically. KRAFTON positions this as helping players understand inZOI's simulation systems "through trials and hardships, one story at a time."

Save-and-Share System

The key innovation tied to the Fate Engine is its save-and-share system. Life simulation games naturally produce emergent stories: unplanned, often funny or dramatic sequences of events that arise from gameplay. The problem is that these moments are fleeting and difficult to reproduce. The Fate Engine addresses this by letting players capture specific life scenarios and invite others to experience those exact moments.

Think of it as saving a "run" in a roguelike. If your Zoi's week produced an incredible chain of events (a surprise romance, a career disaster, a neighborhood feud), you can save that scenario and share it so other players can step into the same starting conditions and see how their version plays out. Players can also jump into one-of-a-kind save files that were created using mods and cheats, opening up creative possibilities well beyond what the base simulation generates.

KRAFTON describes this as preserving the genre's emergent storytelling strengths while reducing the randomness-driven frustration that can occur when probability produces experiences that feel strange or underwhelming. Direct download functionality for shared scenarios was planned for May 2026, with the full save-and-share framework undergoing initial testing during the March 2026 Fate Engine synchronization phase. Neither had been released to players as of October 19, 2026; the September 2026 demo instead showed pre-made scenarios entered through an in-world "AR Company".

Lot System

Canvastown uses customizable lots similar to the existing cities. Each lot can hold a residential property, a community space, or a commercial establishment. The January 2026 roadmap targeted approximately 40 lots in a boutique village layout for the initial release (Canvastown #1, June 2026) and roughly 50 lots with a calm, rural countryside atmosphere for an October expansion (Canvastown #2). Neither release had shipped as of October 19, 2026; the June target passed without a launch, and the first public showing came at TapTap Game Fest 2026 in Shanghai on September 12 and 13, 2026, described below.

The compact design ensures every lot is within walking distance, creating the tight-knit neighborhood feel that defines Canvastown's identity. Players can decorate entire towns and share them via Canvas. Unlike the existing cities, where pre-built landmarks occupy fixed positions, Canvastown's lots are all player-editable. This means the entire town can be reshaped by the community, turning it into a true user-generated content (UGC) ecosystem where every building reflects a player's creative vision.

Multiplayer Integration

Canvastown is tightly connected to the inZOI Online multiplayer roadmap. It is the anchor world for the online platform, meaning it will be the first environment where multiplayer features are fully realized. The multiplayer system is being built by a separate team working in parallel with the single-player development team.

The month-by-month multiplayer progression published in the January 2026 roadmap is outlined below. These were targets, and none of the listed phases had reached the live game by October 19, 2026; see the September 2026 section for what has actually been shown.

KRAFTON has acknowledged that the multiplayer frontier for life simulation games is largely uncharted. The team is navigating technical hurdles and defining the core audience for an online life sim through rigorous testing, which is why the timeline remains flexible. There are many unresolved questions that must be validated through internal and external testing before the full value of online features can be confirmed.

UGC and Modding Ecosystem

Canvastown is designed as a space where modding can thrive. Because every lot is player-built and the world runs on the Fate Engine's optimized pipeline, there are fewer compatibility risks when introducing user-generated content. KRAFTON plans to aggressively support modding within Canvastown to allow players to expand what is available and create content, with the goal of building a UGC ecosystem where the entire playerbase participates in the creation process.

Key modding milestones that intersect with Canvastown's development are listed below.

Mods will be supported in multiplayer sessions starting in June 2026, with hosts able to control which mods are active during their session. Script modding via Lua is expected to arrive by December 2026, giving modders access to deeper gameplay hooks.

AI NPC Research

The 2026 roadmap references AI NPCs as part of the "Beyond the Fundamentals" initiatives. This feature is under active R&D validation, with the team exploring how AI-driven non-player characters could enhance city life and create more dynamic interactions within both the existing cities and Canvastown. No specific release date has been announced. AI-assisted data modding is tentatively planned for testing in October 2026.

Engine Migration

Alongside the Fate Engine work, the team completed the upgrade from Unreal Engine 5.4 to Unreal Engine 5.6 in v0.8.0 on April 29, 2026. A beta branch test launched on Steam on March 5, 2026 to verify stability and compatibility. During the beta test, mods were disabled to isolate engine-related issues, but existing save files remained fully compatible. The UE 5.6 upgrade was intended to roll into the main game's March update if results were positive, and the migration underpins the performance improvements that Canvastown and the Fate Engine rely on.

2026 Development Timeline

KRAFTON has emphasized that all timelines are R&D-driven and flexible, meaning schedules may shift based on development progress, mid-stage test results, and the chosen service model. The following milestones represent the announced targets for Canvastown and related features.

Known Limitations

The compact design of Canvastown comes with trade-offs that KRAFTON has acknowledged openly. The relatively small scale limits the amount of natural terrain and environmental variety compared to the full-sized cities. Because the world is built entirely from Build Mode structures, the visual expression of natural landscapes and terrain is more constrained. There is also limited space for vehicle-oriented content, since the short distances between lots reduce the need for cars and public transit. These are intentional design decisions rather than oversights: Canvastown is meant to complement the existing cities, not replace them.

Kjun has stated that Canvastown should function as an "optional location alongside the existing city, without sacrificing the city's size or openness." Players who want sprawling urban exploration can continue to play in Dowon or Bliss Bay, while those who prefer a cozier, performance-friendly environment will find their home in Canvastown.

Current Status

As of April 2026, the development team is in a stability-focused phase. The March update included the UE 5.6 beta branch test and the initial Fate Engine synchronization with Canvastown. The April focus has shifted to full-scale stability improvement and optimization, with the team deliberately slowing the pace of adding new features to fix bugs and polish systems that were added quickly during earlier development cycles. Graphics settings expansion for lower-spec hardware and system memory optimization were the priority targets ahead of the Canvastown #1 release that had been planned for June; that release did not happen.

The core development team continues to deliver content updates focused on game quality in parallel, including UI customization options, baby features, behavioral improvements, and body diversity refinements. KRAFTON has committed to preparing a test build for the Fate Engine and Canvastown integration as soon as possible, with the understanding that the release cadence will accelerate once the foundational engine work is complete.

September 2026: First Public Showing at TapTap Game Fest

Canvastown was shown publicly for the first time at TapTap Game Fest 2026 in Shanghai on September 12 and 13, 2026, where the studio demonstrated its multiplayer capabilities and the MyHome feature inside a new game mode of the same name. In the September 11, 2026 developer letter written from Shanghai, director Hyungjun "Kjun" Kim described the name as the idea of players living together in a creator's village, and called the mode a side project handled by a small team while the studio stays focused on its core single-player goals.

The letter set expectations directly. Building an entire city from scratch or laying down roads, as had been rumoured online, is not available; decorating a city and editing terrain remain future goals. The concept shown in the accompanying video has players go online and enter pre-made scenarios through an in-world company called AR Company to take on a set role. Around 50 people can converse and interact in the same channel under mutual consent, NPC Zois act according to assigned roles, and a player can cast roles like a film director to create a scenario. Script mods are meant to support this play, and mini-games such as car racing were built with them during development, with the intention that mini-games made for Canvastown can later be added to the main game.

Kjun described the aim as a role-playing space where players coexist rather than clear a game, and said he had told the company he would decide the future of Canvastown based on the outcome of the event.

After the Event

In a reply to comments published on September 16, 2026, Kjun apologised that the build shown, which he called inZOI Canvas Town, was less polished than he had hoped because of limited time and venue conditions. He clarified that inZOI is being developed toward an online life simulation in which players gather and live together in a town, that the demo had focused on mod support and selected story-save features rather than that core structure, and that upcoming small-scale tests will evaluate whether living in a town with other players offers real value. A video attached to the reply previewed a new city in development in which every lot except the roadways is fully editable; because roads cannot yet be removed, the team is exploring a dedicated editor. Existing features are also being verified in multiplayer on the Dowon map. Full detail on the features under test is in Multiplayer and Online.

The reply also stated that the large majority of the development team remains on single-player, with only a small team adapting systems for multiplayer, and that the October 2026 update will introduce modding capabilities and daily routines for Zois, with tools to edit those schedules. As of October 19, 2026, no release date, test date, or sign-up process for Canvastown or the online mode had been published.