OpenClaw 2026.5.5 fixes session routing, plugins, and gateways

OpenClaw 2026.5.5 is a broad maintenance release with fixes across routing, chat sessions, gateway behavior, plugin updates, provider compatibility, and channel-specific integrations. The changelog lists dozens of changes aimed at making sessions more reliable, reducing duplicate messages, and preventing false errors during startup and reconnects.

On the messaging side, the release tightens behavior for several channels. In Feishu, OpenClaw now hydrates missing native topic starter thread IDs before session routing so first turns and follow-ups stay in the same topic session, according to the release notes. For LINE, the system now rejects dmPolicy: "open" configurations that do not include wildcardallowFrom, so webhook direct messages fail validation instead of being acknowledged and then silently blocked.

OpenClaw also changed how it handles Discord and Telegram traffic. For Discord guilds, plain text control commands such as /steer now pass through the normal authorization and mention gate instead of being dropped before an agent session can see them. In the Discord streaming path, reasoning text now appears in progress drafts rather than showing only a generic reasoning status line.

Several fixes target chat progress rendering and session history. The Control UI now keeps assistant progress text visible when a turn also contains tool-use metadata, so older replies do not disappear after the next message. It also makes compaction counts clearer, showing a compact “N Checkpoint(s)” disclosure and expanded session details with checkpoint history cards across responsive table layouts, according to the changelog.

Performance and responsiveness were another theme. The Control UI now keeps chat and channel tabs responsive while history payloads and channel probes are slow, marks partial channel status, and records slow render timings in the event log. In the TUI, OpenClaw now skips the generic CLI respawn wrapper for interactive launches, exits cleanly on terminal loss, and avoids restoring heartbeat sessions as the remembered chat session.

The release also includes changes for session cleanup and recovery. The doctor --fix flow can now repair instances stuck on agent:main:main heartbeat history by moving poisoned entries to recovery keys and clearing stale restore pointers. Separate cleanup work prunes old transcript, compaction checkpoint, and trajectory artifacts during normal sessions cleanup so crash or restart leftovers do not pile up outside sessions.json.

Gateway behavior was adjusted in several places. OpenClaw now measures Discord heartbeat ACK timeouts from the actual heartbeat send, which reduces false reconnect loops while the channel is still waiting for readiness. It also cancels delayed post-ready maintenance during shutdown, suppresses maintenance and cron startup after quick restarts, and avoids marking fast repeated health samples as degraded based on CPU or utilization alone until the system has enough sustained samples.

The provider layer got compatibility fixes too. For xAI, OpenClaw now stops sending OpenAI-style reasoning effort controls to native Grok Responses models, and it clamps the bundled xAI thinking profile to off so live Gateway runs do not send unsupported reasoning levels. Fireworks requests for Kimi models are also constrained so they do not include rejected reasoning parameters.

On the plugin and install side, OpenClaw now keeps installed official npm and ClawHub plugins such as Codex, Discord, WhatsApp, and diagnostics plugins synced during host updates, even when they are disabled or previously exact-pinned. It also repairs stale managed npm-root peer packages before plugin installs and reasserts plugin peer links after shared-root npm operations.

The update includes additional fixes for iOS pairing, Slack reconnect logging, Matrix approval retries, Windows approval-file handling, and generated media flows. According to the changelog, these changes are meant to reduce silent failures, preserve error context, and keep media or approval messages from being duplicated or lost.

Taken together, OpenClaw 2026.5.5 is mainly about making existing workflows behave more predictably under load, during restarts, and across different chat systems and providers.