Barotrauma News

Hello everyone!

Something that we have been working on for a long time alongside developing updates has been making Barotrauma available outside Steam as well. As we have seen unexpected successes with our little submarine simulator, year after year, we’ve been looking into ways to take it to other platforms eventually. Now we’re ready to make the game available through Epic Games Store in addition to Steam!

The Epic launch will not change anything for players who want to stick to Steam: When you launch Barotrauma for the first time following our EGS release, you will see a prompt asking you to enable crossplay between Steam and Epic. If you do not wish to do so, you can decline, and that will be all. You can also update your preferences at any time in the game settings.

If you enable crossplay, and if we find a lot of new users through Epic, you can look forward to playing with a lot of new people. Hosting and joining servers works seamlessly across these two platforms, so it doesn’t matter which platform your friends are on – you can play with them just the same, without needing to create a separate account on the other store.

We’re excited to be entering a second platform and hope that you are excited too! In the future, updates will be released on both platforms, but due to some technical differences between the two systems, more in-depth involvement such as Unstable testing will only happen in the Steam version.

Check out Barotrauma on Epic Games Store now, and let your friends on Epic know too!

Hello everyone!

Let’s have another sneak peek at our upcoming spring update.

[h3]Diving suit rebalance[/h3]
We always intended diving suits to be used only for acute pressure protection: during hull breaches and while swimming. However, there are not many actual downsides to wearing a suit all the time, so a lot of people do just that… which has effectively eliminated water pressure as a threat. We wanted to change that by encouraging you to take your suit off when you don’t need it. Here’s what we’re changing:

• Slowed flooding speed to give the crew more time to suit up during a hull breach. Hulls will fill with water more slowly, so the pressure will not become lethal as quickly.
  
• Added new animations to diving suits and made walking and running in a suit slower. Swimming speed has not been reduced.
  
• Obstructed vision while wearing a diving suit slightly more.
  
• Reduced the armor effects of diving suits, particularly the Regular Diving Suit.
  
• Rebalanced all the different suit types and level generation to create stronger progression and clearer use cases for different suits in different environments.
  
• Capped the crush depth resistance of the strongest suits to the same depth as a fully upgraded submarine hull. (Before, the Abyss suit could handle more pressure than a fully upgraded submarine.)
  

[h3]Animation variations[/h3]
Besides the new diving suit animations, we’ve also added a few entirely new animations which are triggered by specific afflictions and talents. Expect to see drunken people walking drunkenly, for example!

Modders can find out more about these animation variations in our official modding documentation under “Status Effects > TriggerAnimation”.

[h3]Old monsters, new dangers[/h3]
Lastly, we’ve improved the abilities of the largest monsters in the game to make them better at targeting individual characters inside the submarine, as well as the whole sub. We hope you enjoy this new feature and look forward to hearing your feedback!

You can read more about all these changes on our blog now. The spring update is planned to release in late April, and we have more sneak peeks coming your way in the following weeks, so stay tuned!

Hello everyone!

The next Barotrauma update is in the works, to be released in the late spring, and it will include some improvements to the medical system. This won’t be a complete overhaul, but we have reworked medical items to give each a clearer use case and stronger progression in the campaign, as well as added a few new afflictions to create additional late-game challenges.

Here are some highlights:

• Opiates have been rebalanced to give each a clearer use case. They also cause addiction and overdose much more easily than before, making them high-risk, high-reward treatments.
  
• Infected Wounds, a new dangerous affliction caused by Thresher attacks.
  
• Antibiotic Glue now has multiple uses, so one tube can be used to treat multiple limbs. It can also treat Infected Wounds.
  
• Deusizine has been buffed into a powerful end-game item, with added Stun reduction and Vigor.
  
• Adrenaline gets a treatment use: it causes Adrenaline Rush, removing any active stun and keeping the patient conscious for a short duration.
  
• Sufforin and Cyanide can be used to cure Husk Infection as a last resort. (Be ready to cure the resulting poisoning if you do this.)
  

The update also adds a new monster variant called the Viperling, a Spineling with venomous spikes which can cause Morbusine poisoning. The Viperling only spawns in later levels, where you should keep an eye out for green Spinelings and be ready to treat poisoned crewmates.

Read more about the medical system changes and the Viperling now on our blog, and stay tuned for more update sneak peeks in the weeks to come!

Hello everyone!

We have just released a second hotfix for the Winter Update. Please be sure to update your game to the latest version to be able to host and join multiplayer servers, and see the full list of changes below.


v1.2.8.0

Changes:
- Allow scaling most items below 0.1 in the submarine editor again. We set 0.1 as a hard limit because smaller scales caused issues with tiling items (such as labels), without realizing some sub builders have found some creative uses for heavily downscaled items (such as tiny turrets used as "dials").

Fixes:
- Fixed escorted characters trying to leave the sub if they can't find a safe hull to get to (e.g. when the sub is flooded).
- Fixed rotated structures not appearing rotated on the status monitor.
- Fixed wires getting misaligned when saving them in an item assembly.
- Fixed security NPCs being unable to swap batteries in stun batons.
- Fixed inability to edit the false output of a switch in multiplayer.
- (Finally) fixed texture offsets on tiled sprites such as background walls behaving erratically on non-default texture scales and mirrored entities.

Modding:
- Fixed crashing if an affliction prefab contains stat values with a duplicate type, or multiple stat values whose type can't be parsed.

Hello everyone!

The year 2024 has officially started in Barotrauma development, and we’d like to kick it off with a brief development poll.

We’re planning a new, optional challenge mode for multiplayer campaigns where respawning is limited and character death is permanent, and we have a few competing designs for how we might implement this Permadeath mode.

If you are interested, read more about the Permadeath mode on our blog, and give your feedback via the poll attached to the blog! You will find directions to discussion threads, where you can share your thoughts in more detail, in the same blog post.

The next update, including the Permadeath mode, revisions to multiplayer respawning rules and additional difficulty settings, will be coming later in the spring. The update will also include various kinds of new content, which we will start sneak peeking at in the coming weeks and months. Stay tuned!