Name: OpenClaw Update 4.1 (MASSIVE Critical Fixes)
Uploaded: 2026-04-02
Duration: 479 s
Description: Upgrade to 4.1 immediately if you were hit by 3.31's gateway hangs or approval amnesia — it's a fix-forward release for yesterday's breakage, not a feature release.

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Key takeaways

Update to 4.1 today if you upgraded to 3.31 — three production failure modes (gateway hang ~1 min after boot, config restart loop, approval amnesia) are fixed, and the cluster of 4 related sub-bugs (Windows crash, Slack/Discord timeouts, cron approval dead-ends) is patched in the same release.
Use `/tasks` in chat to monitor background agents — it exposes running, done, queued, and retry counts without leaving the session, matching Hermes agents' Discord behavior.
Self-host SearXNG and point the 4.1 web search plugin at your own instance if you want to keep query infrastructure off third-party APIs.
If you still hit approval walls after updating, apply Catherine's two-config-file, five-setting workaround from the X post — it's not documented in the OpenClaw changelog.
Don't expect `allow always` to cover wrapper paths or inline eval yet — Vox confirmed 47 trusted commands persist across restarts, but those two edge cases remain broken.
Skip the new macOS voice wake, Bedrock guardrails, and cron tools unless you have a specific need — the creator flags `/tasks` and SearXNG as the only features most users will reach for.
Treat OpenClaw releases as a 24-hour patch window: 3.31 shipped the registry/auth/approval changes that broke gateways, and 4.1 walked them back the next day — pin your gateway version and read release notes before upgrading.

Video summary

Companion notes

OpenClaw 4.1 is a 24-hour hotfix for 3.31's three production failures, with six features bolted on top.

## Six new features in 4.1 The release ships /tasks (a live in-chat task board modeled on Hermes agents' Discord behavior — running, done, queued, retry counts), bundled SearXNG web search (open source, self-hostable, no third-party API keys), Bedrock guardrails, agents default params, OpenClaw cron tools, and macOS voice wake. The two most useful for most users are /tasks and SearXNG. GLM model support is also added.

## Gateway startup hang — fixed After 3.31 upgrades, gateways appeared healthy then silently stopped responding ~1 minute later. Root cause: a SQLite database maintenance task was blocking the main event loop, triggered by 3.31's new task registry activity. Fix: maintenance moved off the main thread.

## Config restart loop — fixed 3.31's tightened gateway auth made OpenClaw generate new security tokens on startup, treat auto-generated values as config changes, and trigger a full restart every boot. 4.1 saves a fingerprint of generated values and only restarts on real config changes.

## Approval amnesia — fixed (4 sub-bugs) Tightened exact approvals in 3.31 caused "allow always" to behave like "allow once." 4.1 fixes the trust persistence bug, remote exact timeouts on Slack/Discord, cron jobs dead-ending in approval paths, and a Windows hard crash when no valid execution plan could be built.

## Memory and compaction bugs — fixed Full re-indexes were silently skipping session transcripts on restart; QMD collections collided due to a config preference conflict; compaction model overrides now work consistently across CLI, gateway, and cron.

## Community validation User Vox confirmed 4.1 fixed his 3.31 complaint after running 6 production agents on a single VPS — he now has 47 trusted commands persisted across gateway restarts. Edge cases remain for wrapper paths and inline eval. Catherine posted a two-file, five-setting config workaround for users still hitting approval walls.

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