Barotrauma News

Hello everyone!

The New Frontiers update has now been released. Please be sure to update your game to be able to join and host multiplayer games, check this earlier post for a summary of the update and see the full changelog below.

We hope you enjoy this update, our biggest so far, and we look forward to hearing your thoughts about it! We’re going to take some time off soon and may be a little slow to respond to comments in the coming weeks, but we are eager to read what you write.

v0.10.4.0

Improved campaign mode:
- Explorable, procedurally generated outposts.
- Interactable NPCs: things such as hiring, unlocking missions and purchasing supplies are now done by interacting with NPCs instead of just a menu.
- Multi-step, branching scripted events in outposts.
- A reputation system that affects how outposts and factions relate to you and your crew. High reputation can make NPCs give you discounts for supplies or unlock special events and event outcomes, while low reputation may turn outposts hostile towards you.
- Items can now be sold in outposts.
- Persistent bots in multiplayer campaign.
- Bots can be hired in multiplayer campaign.
- New campaign map.
- The end location is now reachable (do note that the ending is still not completely final).
- Submarines can be upgraded: for example, you can increase the durability of the walls and make devices more powerful, less prone to malfunctions or less power-hungry.
- Submarines can be purchased and switched during the campaign.
- Improved end-of-round summary.

Miscellaneous changes and additions:
- Overhauled most structure and item sprites to make the artstyle more consistent.
- Balanced economy (item prices, hiring costs).
- The currency is now called the Europan Mark instead of credits.
- 4 new background music tracks.
- Tons of new decorative items and structures.
- Sittable chairs.
- Allow characters to hear messages sent through the radio when within speaking range of the speaker, even if the characters don't have functional headsets.
- Made organ damage non-limb-specific.
- Hostile bots now take stunning into account when evaluating the weapons. I.e. switch from stun baton to diving knife if the target is stunned and back to stun baton if it's not.
- Sodium and lithium explode in water.
- Item sprites can be rotated in the sub editor.
- Purchased adrenaline glands spawn in crates.
- Allow changing audio output device in the game settings.
- Added "Is On" property to pumps to make them easier to turn on in the sub editor.
- Tuned difficulty of level events, now with a less severe difficulty curve and more account taken of intensity.
- Numerous quality of life and visual improvements for stock subs.
- Mission specific creature variants.
- Node based event editor.
- Crawlers tuned to be considerably more dangerous.
- General creature balance improvements.
- Creatures avoid targeting the same targets as other characters of the same swarm/type. Should considerably reduce the "stacking", where multiple creatures attack exactly the same target.
- Bots can rescue/heal targets when they are inside wrecks/outposts.They are not allowed to switch submarines during the objective.
- Molochs' skirts are now fully severable and collide with the sub instead of floating through the walls.
- Grenades and syringe guns can be put inside toolboxes.
- Headsets no longer consume battery power.
- Added burn and lacerations resistance for assistant clothes, removed gunshotwound resistance.
- Alarm buzzers and sirens turn off if they're deattached and picked up.
- Made chemical and explosive crates water proof to make it possible to use them for transporting water-sensitive materials.

Bugfixes:
- Steam networking fixes and additional logging to address issues with some clients being unable to join servers.
- Ignore ballast tanks when calculating flooding in EventManager. Fixes intensity going up when a submarine with large ballast tanks dives.
- Fixed gaps generating incorrectly on sloped walls that have been mirrored vertically (horizontal gaps when they should be vertical and vice versa), preventing water from getting through the wall when it's damaged.
- Fixed sub MD5 hash not getting recalculated when saving a sub, causing a mismatch when trying to host a server without restarting.
- Fixed item highlights being visible in the generated sub preview images.
- Fixed cargo spawning partially inside walls in Azimuth.
- Fixed ragdoll going crazy when trying to run a wire past the maximum length.
- Fixed LOS effect "twitching" when the cursor is close to the character's position.
- Fixed handheld sonar pinging and quickly draining the battery when holding E.
- Fixed PowerContainer's charge indicator going outside bounds if the charge is set higher than the capacity in the sub editor.
- Fixed sub editor's entity list resetting when pressing esc.
- Fixed reactors degrading all the way to 0% condition and exploding when submerged.
- Fixed dumptofile command not including error messages.
- Fixed salvage missions not considering the item to be salvaged if it's inside a container in a character's inventory.
- Fixed ragdolls going crazy when moving directly from the sub to a ruin (e.g. when parking the sub so that the airlock is right against the entrance to the ruins).
- Fixed audio staying disabled when disconnecting and reconnecting the audio device.
- Fixed inability to detach an item the same round it's attached if it's been loaded from a save as a part of a character inventory at the beginning of the round.
- Fixed trying to give an order to a character who can't hear you when using the quick-assignment on the command interface.
- Avoid giving different campaign locations the same name.
- Fixed bots sometimes getting stuck in the "get item" objective, if the item was specified with a reference instead of identifier.
- Fixed bots getting stuck in broken hatches when they climb in ladders.
- Fixed a bug where a waypoint lost all the references when it was selected and the user pressed over an UI element, like the save button.
- Fixed OnActive StatusEffects not working on Vent components.
- Fixed characters not getting slowed down when walking/running in a partially flooded hull.
- Fixed SmokeDetector's Output and FalseOutput properties doing nothing.
- Fixed characters being able to play instruments while stunned.
- Attempt to fix the game process sometimes staying active after the game is closed.
- Fixed favorite and recent server queries causing errors if there's a very high number of them.
- Fixed audio not working on some systems.
- Fixed "kill" not being marked as a cheat command.
- Added a missing platform to Wreck1.
- Fixed "failed to spawn item, component index out of range" error when an item that originally spawned in a container has been moved inside another container whose ItemContainer component doesn't have the same index as the previous one (e.g. when moving items from cabinets in a wreck into a toolbox).
- Fixed mechanic tutorial getting softlocked if the oxygen tanks are put in the deconstructor without putting them in the player inventory first (e.g. by putting them inside a diving mask and moving them from there to the deconstructor).

Hello everyone!

The New Frontiers update, the biggest Barotrauma update so far, is just around the corner now. Multiple aspects of the game have been improved to create a real sense of progression, particularly in the campaign game mode – read more about all that below, and more on our blog!

Outposts, the start and end point of a mission, become physically explorable locations that replace the old campaign menu as the trading, crew hiring and service buying hub. The new outposts come with autonomous AI inhabitants as well as randomized events that bolster lore and even directly affect gameplay.

Submarines become a new key component of campaign progression: you'll start with a modest boat and be able to upgrade its hulls and machinery as you progress in the campaign. Better vessels will also become available for purchase later down the line. All submarine progression improvements apply to player-made submarines as well, so you’ll be able to experience the campaign as it was intended even if you prefer to ride custom subs.

The AI crewmates are no longer randomized between campaign missions, making them another integral part of your crew's progress: it's going to hurt to lose a bot you paid good money for and then trained for five rounds. The AI itself has received some improvements too, as it does with every update.

The in-game economy has been improved in many ways, from allowing the player to sell items for profit to balancing prices and item availability at different locations.

The campaign map has been overhauled completely and the campaign endgame location is now accessible, with a work-in-progress ending implemented.

The update also contains a visual overhaul that touches on about half of all the sprites in the game, and we’ve taken a look at the difficulty settings to smooth out some of the worst spikes. Let us know how it plays!

All multiplayer campaign improvements also directly benefit singleplayer campaign, so the New Frontiers update should make Barotrauma more appealing to the solo player as well. This is the beginning of our planned campaign overhaul, with tons of content additions and many other improvements to follow as we approach full release.

Stay tuned – the New Frontiers update is scheduled for next week!

Hi everyone!

Besides outposts, the next major update is going to contain many other new additions too. We wrote more on the blog about them for you to read, and here are some highlights:

• Once outposts become explorable, all trading options will be moved inside outposts. That means, out with the old campaign map and store interface, in with new NPC interactions!
  
• With the overhauled store system, it will become possible to also sell items, not just buy them.
  
• And finally, in addition to buying items, you will be able to…
  

[h3]Buy submarines and submarine upgrades[/h3]
To make campaign progression more interesting and rewarding, you will be able to improve your submarine as well as buy new subs as you advance in the campaign. The upgrading system will also work with custom subs, so be it a vanilla boat or a player-made one, you can upgrade the hull and the devices within to match your progress in the game.

Sub upgrades tie in with the improved economy system where buying and selling prices vary between different outposts and will even be affected by your actions in the game. Together with all the other things in the new outposts, we hope this will bring some nice additional depth to Barotrauma!

[h3]What else is new[/h3]
The upcoming campaign update will also include a visual overhaul. This art unification pass has been in the making for some time, and we’ve now confirmed it will be released with the next major update.

Don’t forget that the work-in-progress version of the next update is already playable in the experimental public unstable version. Beware the bugs and welcome on board!

Hello everyone!

Today marks one year since we started Barotrauma’s early access on Steam. We’re so happy with how far the game has come since then, and even happier to have had so many people join us on our early access journey. Thank you for being with us and helping us make Barotrauma the best game it can be!

Your feedback and encouragement throughout this year make us look forward to the road still ahead of us – the campaign update is getting closer and closer, and we can’t wait to hear how you like it. The most eager bug hunters can now access the first, very rough version of the campaign update in the public unstable version, so you can even give us advance feedback.

We wrote a little bit more on our blog about the road so far as well as what’s coming next – take a look here and have a great weekend, whoever and wherever you are!