Dev Blog #32 - Happy New Year & December Patch Recap

[p]Header Credit: Midnight Aether, from the ‘Build-a-Boat’ screenshot contest![/p][p][/p][p]Hello Voyagers! Stephiroth here, and happy New Year! We're back from the holidays with a lot of new learnings and ready to tackle 2026.[/p][p][/p][h2]Ships and Spirits Update Recap[/h2][p]Our December patch brought a ton of new players into Nera - thank you so much for your support and for all the feedback you've been sharing! It's been incredible to see the response - we had tens of thousands of new Voyagers join the fight against The Deep, over 1700 streams of seafaring shenanigans on Twitch, and the average stream length was 4.5 hours! Not to mention a community organized Raid Train! HYPE![/p][p]We're seeing a lot of excitement about ship customization, the companion spirit updates, the new trials and more. It has been so fun to watch players build wild custom vessels, experiment with their builds and share what they think is the most OP, and also watch the community come together and share things like game guides, tips and tricks, and fun new suggestions for the game![/p][p][/p][h2]Seeing Painful Issues[/h2][p]Unfortunately, it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. We've also been seeing some new sources of major player pain that fit into a few categories:[/p][h3]Performance Issues[/h3][p]This has been the most prominent concern, and it's coming from multiple causes:[/p]

[p]The crab FPS issue that's affecting many players[/p]
[p]Boat performance on servers[/p]
[p]FPS instability in the second and third biomes[/p]
[p]Compatibility issues and crashes with specific GPUs[/p]

[p][/p][p]Check our forum post to see more info about the issues, and understand how you can help![/p][p][/p][h3]Offline Mode & Data Issues[/h3][p]Steam and Epic had outages around Christmas that our game didn't handle well, which led to lost progress for some players. This is unacceptable and we're working on better handling for these scenarios.[/p][h3]New Bugs[/h3][p]As expected with any major update, we're collecting data on plenty of new bugs and working through fixes.[/p][p][/p][h2]What's Coming Later this Week[/h2][p]We have a patch dropping in the next few days that addresses many of these issues:[/p][p]Performance & Stability:[/p]

[p]Lots of bug fixes[/p]
[p]Crash fixes[/p]
[p]Improvements to boat performance[/p]
[p]Hopefully have the crab FPS issue fixed![/p]

[p]Quality of Life:[/p]

[p]Rebinding controller buttons (still got some work to do on this)[/p]
[p]Emote wheel for controller[/p]
[p]Naming boat storage[/p]
[p]And more![/p][p][/p]

[h2]Looking Ahead to 2026[/h2][p]We're doing broader planning for how to organize our major patches this year. Look out for a revised roadmap coming soon that will give you a clearer picture of what we're working toward![/p][p]Thank you for sticking with us through these growing pains. Your patience and detailed feedback help us improve Voyagers every single day.[/p][p]See you on the waves![/p][p]Steph and the Treehouse Team[/p]