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Submarine competition winner & Happy holidays!

Hi everyone!

The submarine building competition to design a new stock submarine for Barotrauma has concluded, and the winner is…



R-29 by rav2n. Congratulations!

We got several beautiful boats, so it was hard to pick the winner – you can see all the submarines that entered the competition with more detailed descriptions in this blog post.

Thanks to Summa Barologicae for hosting the competition and to everyone who participated! We were very impressed by the overall quality of the submissions, and we think R-29 is a great starting point for Barotrauma’s first cargo hauler vessel. The new submarine based on this contest’s winner will be added to the game during the early months of next year.

With the competition concluded, a hotfix released earlier this week and the Winter Sale going on since yesterday, we wish you all happy holidays! See you in January,

Barotrauma Team

Bugfix patch for the Beasts Within update out now

The bugfix patch v0.9.6.0 is out now. The patch includes several networking changes, so please make sure to update your servers to prevent incompatibility with players who've updated their game!



[h3]Networking/multiplayer fixes:[/h3]
- Fixed the game occasionally freezing when joining a server.
- Fixed a bug that occasionally caused clients to disconnect with an "entity not found" error in the multiplayer. In technical terms, the issue occurred when the server spawned an entity with a given ID, sent a network event for that entity, and then spawned another entity that took up the ID of the previous entity. This could happen, for example, if in the multiplayer campaign a player happens to get an item with the same ID as an item in the inventory of another player who isn't currently present, and the other player joins the server. There are still most likely additional bugs that can cause similar error messages, so this fix will probably not get rid of the errors entirely.
- Fixed start button staying disabled in the server lobby when switching from the campaign mode to another game mode.
- Fixed clients occasionally getting disconnected due to the campaign store. Happened if a location had changed from one type to another (for example, natural formation to outpost), the players had bought something that wasn't originally available from the location and a new client joined.
- Fixed clients occasionally being prompted to download subs from the server even if they already have a matching sub.
- Fixed server having a password even if the password box is left empty in the in-game "host server" menu when hosting with the Linux version.
- Fixed server name being shortened to one word when hosting from the in-game "host server" menu with the Linux version.
- Fixed server name length not being restricted when set from serversettings.xml or using console commands.
- Fixed "ready to start" tickbox disappearing if a client joins while a round is running.
- Fixed traitors remaining as traitors client-side after restarting the round, allowing them to access the sabotage interface despite not having a traitor objective.
- Fixed characters occasionally not selecting/deselecting a periscope client-side, causing them to walk in place or not grab the periscope.
- Fixed male asian heads not appearing in the server lobby.
- Fixed campaign servers never being filtered out from the server browser when filtering based on game mode.
- Fixed clients not displaying the "could not connect" popup if the initial connection to a server times out.
- Fixed door weld state occasionally getting desynced, causing the door to be welded server-side but possible to open client-side.

[h3]Electricity fixes:[/h3]
- Fixed junction boxes not passing signals to relays.
- Fixed broken junction boxes and relays carrying power.
- Fixed devices not receiving power if they're connected directly to batteries/supercapacitors with no relays or junction boxes in between.
- Fixed light components that receive power from somewhere else than a power input connection not going out when they lose power (e.g. lights on the diving suits).
- Fixed pumps and batteries operating/recharging faster when receiving overvoltage, with no upper limit, making it possible to for example operate pumps at 10x the speed by connecting them to a relay that's receiving 10x more power than is being drawn from it.
- Fixed LightComponents being toggled twice when they receive a signal to the toggle connection.

[h3]Misc fixes:[/h3]
- Fixed "last used" listbox overlapping with the entity visibility tickboxes in the submarine editor on low resolutions.
- Fixed misaligned colliders on the "Shell A Cap 0 deg A/B" wall pieces.
- Fixed links disappearing between linked subs and docking ports when loading in the sub editor.
- Fixed loading freezing for up to 10 seconds if the game cannot fetch the remote content for the main menu (update notifications, changelogs, etc).
- Fixed lights on devices (junction boxes, nav terminals, reactor) being rendered on top of characters.
- Fixed lights lagging a little behind moving objects (e.g. diving suit light).
- Fixed characters being able to grab/heal others when handcuffed.
- Character editor: don't switch to the limb mode when clicking a limb in the joint edit mode. Fixes difficulties in using the joint angle widgets when the widgets are interloping limb source rects.
- Character editor: Fixed the texture path field not being copied if the source character has no texture path defined. In this case, we can use a texture path found in one of the limbs.
- Fixed bots incorrectly reporting problems in the room they are in instead of the room the issues is spotted at.
- Fixed bots reporting broken devices or asking medical attendance even if they are taking care of those things.
- Fixed bots saying "put out a fire in hull" instead of using the name of the room when they extinguish a fire.
- Fixed AITargets staing active even if the entity is not active (for example, the sonar could still be heard by monsters after it's turned off).
- The bots now only report about issues that have not been already been reported.
- Fixed monsters attacking doors that are open.
- Monsters keep pursuing the target if the behavior is "pursue" even when they cannot attack.
- Bots stop operating devices if a player starts operating them (unless they have been ordered to operate the device).
- Fixed bots playing the rewiring sound when repairing an item with a screwdriver.
- Fixed bots sometimes stopping behind a closed door when trying to extinguish a fire.
- Fixed chat messages occasionally extending below the lower bound of the chatbox.
- Fixed searchlight and turret lights disappearing before the light is fully off-screen.
- Waypoint fixes in Kastrull and the drone.
- Fixed Kastrull flooding when the drone is undocked.
- Fixed ballast pumps in Kastrull's drone being off by default.
- Fixed enormous in-game ballistic helmet sprite.
- Fire extinguishers can't be placed inside toolboxes anymore.
- Fixed lobby screen not scaling correctly after changing to a bigger resolution.

Beasts Within – second major update out now



Hello everyone!

The second major update for Barotrauma is now live. Find the changelog in full here, also included in the game folder in a file called "changelog.txt". You can also take a look at this blog we posted last week. As always, please be sure to update your servers!

This update centers on new content, such as monsters, character customization, new traitor missions and one new submarine. It also brings a number of other improvements. Here’s a summary of the most important changes:

New content
  • New monsters: Hammerhead Matriarch, Hammerhead Spawns, Mudraptor Egg
  • Six new traitor missions
  • Several new character customization options: appearance, job gear variants.
  • New submarine: the Kastrull
  • New signal components: wire your subs in new and intricate ways!


Gameplay improvements

Server browser and server lobby improvements:
  • Find suitable servers more easily – several new features
  • Server lobby visual overhaul
  • Server lobby gameplay improvements: character customization, job selection, submarine preview, more accessible server settings

Electrical system overhaul:
  • Power distribution logic reworked to remove several issues with complex systems
  • Considerably better optimized for complex systems

Job system overhaul:
  • More balanced job distribution.


The Europan
Together with the update, we’re introducing “The Europan – Barotrauma Supporter Pack”. Read more on the DLC’s store page about what you will find inside!

Let the submarine building begin!



Hi everyone! As you may have read earlier, we’ve teamed up with one Barotrauma player community for a submarine building competition. They already hosted one successful event before, and the next one starts now. In a nutshell:
  • Join the competition through the Summa Barologicae Discord.
  • Design a new kind of submarine for Barotrauma, based on a specification written by our lead designer Ez “Chad Husk”.
  • Submit your design to the Summa Barologicae community hosts by November 24.
  • Our developer team will test and judge the top 5 submarines, and…
  • all finished, working submarines submitted by the deadline will be featured on our blog at barotraumagame.com, and...
  • the winning sub will be added to Barotrauma as a vanilla sub in a later update.*

The winner will be announced in December. Without further ado, head over to the Summa Barologicae Discord, and let us see what you build!

*The Barotrauma developer team reserves the right to make alterations to the winning submarine design to ensure it works as well as possible in the game. The author of the winning sub will have his/her name or nickname of choice added to Barotrauma's credits.

Halloween update and special content pack



Happy Halloween, everyone! We have a couple of things for you today.

The Halloween update

Rather than save everything for an upcoming major update, we fast-tracked a few things:
  • Character Editor 1.0 – making your own monsters is now easier. Too many individual changes to list here!
  • Modding improvements: Vanilla content can be replaced more easily and many things that weren’t previously editable have been exposed in XML. See the full changelog for more details.
  • Two new monster variants and one monster remake
  • Fixed the inability to change your name to something other than your Steam username, which prevented players from joining servers where the host has disallowed special symbols in names.
  • Fixed an error with starting a campaign through the dedicated server console.
  • Dozens of minor bugfixes


Find the changelog in full in our GitHub or in the game folder. As always, be sure to update your servers!

The official Halloween mod

To bring the mood of the season to your subs, you can now access our Halloween mod via Steam Workshop. As it is a mod instead of an update, you can continue playing with the Halloween looks later, if you want to!

On the topic of modding, we recently published a reference guide for modding Barotrauma. So if you’re looking to make a mod of your own, check it out here along with our other guides (currently available only in English).

A bigger update is in the works and will be released in a few weeks. Look forward to new content and server improvements, to name a couple of things. Stay tuned!