OpenClaw 3.1 Update: You Won't Believe What Can Do Now (Must-Know Features)

Summary

OpenClaw 3.1 brings a set of updates that are mostly behind the scenes but genuinely useful if you're running AI agents daily. The biggest change for Claude users is adaptive thinking, which automatically scales the intelligence level of the model up or down depending on the complexity of the task. If you're currently running Opus for everything, this means you can drop down to a cheaper base model and let OpenClaw decide when to dial up the horsepower. The hosts estimate this could save 20-30% on API costs, which adds up fast when you're spending $30 a day on Anthropic bills. The logic is simple: you don't need a PhD-level model to handle routine maintenance tasks, only for complex work like designing system architecture. This update also brings meaningful improvements to cron jobs. A long-standing bug where cron output was delivered even when set to none has been fixed, so you'll no longer get unexpected messages from silent background jobs. Cron job failure notifications are now clearer too, so when something breaks, you'll actually know about it. Internationalization support has been expanded, with localized output now available in English and Simplified Chinese, and broader language support improving semantic search for non-English users. Docker support has been extended as well, making it easier to deploy sub-agents in isolated containers. The hosts highlight this as particularly valuable because sub-agents tend to perform better when their context isn't overloaded, and Docker containment helps keep things clean and cost-efficient. On the update process itself: the recommended approach is to run the openclaw update command directly on your VPS terminal rather than asking your agent to update itself. Telling the agent to self-update can cause it to loop or become unresponsive, especially if the package manager is slow. The update itself takes about 100 seconds. If you don't have a server setup yet, the hosts recommend a basic $3/month VPS as the cleanest and most affordable way to run OpenClaw.