Barotrauma News

Hello everyone!

The Blood in the Water update is finally ready and coming next week. It introduces a lot of new dangers and customization options to offer suitable challenges for veteran submariners and new players alike. The update also adds new content, even a surprise monster some players may remember from early, pre-Steam builds of the game. Let’s take a final look at everything that’s coming next week!

[h3]Medicine and monsters[/h3]

• Medical system “mini-rework”. Rebalanced medical items, a couple of new afflictions, and new use cases for a few items.
  
• Two new monsters. We’re adding two monsters that employ poisons in their attacks: the Viperling, a new Spineling variant… and the cave-dwelling Mantis, a monster that used to exist in early Barotrauma builds!
  
• New attacks for Abyss monsters. The largest monsters in the game are better at targeting characters inside the submarine for added danger.
  

[h3]Diving suit and animation changes[/h3]

• Diving suit rebalance. We’ve rebalanced all suit types for clearer use cases and made changes to reduce the usefulness of a diving suit as round-the-clock equipment. Flooding speed has been reduced slightly to give you more time to react during a hull breach.
  
• Conditional animations. We added a new animation for walking in a diving suit, as well as a handful of other new special animations. Modders can use this new conditional animation system to create their own custom animations.
  

[h3]Campaign difficulty and respawning improvements[/h3]

• New campaign difficulty settings. Adjust campaign difficulty to your liking using one of four presets or by fine-tuning various parameters yourself.
  
• Improvements to the respawning system in multiplayer: We’re removing Reaper’s Tax and replacing it with customizable respawning skill loss, making the skill loss penalties of respawning fully customizable.
  

[h3]Overhauled station events, more wrecks and beacons to explore[/h3]

• Event system overhaul. Scripted events now play out visually, thanks to volunteer codework submitted by one of our long-time players. We’ve also made some additional improvements to events.
  
• New wrecks and beacon stations, and a new kind of wreck mission.
  

[h3]Our favorite small but handy improvements[/h3]

• Option to make messages in the text chat show in a speech bubble above the character who is speaking.
  
• A new order for bot crew members to deconstruct items.
  
• A highlight system for interacting with loose items on the floor more easily.
  
• A “drop item” hotkey to quickly drop any item you’re holding.
  

Besides these, the Blood in the Water update will also include the usual list of bugfixes and smaller changes – find the full list of changes on release day next week. Read more about everything coming in the update now on our blog, and see you next week!

Hello everyone, we've just released a second hotfix to address the multiplayer server crashes ongoing since last week. We are very sorry for the trouble and will continue to monitor the situation, but we are hopeful this fix should complete our countermeasures against these exploits being used to crash servers.

Please make sure to update your game to the latest version – the fix may take some time to apply as both clients and servers need to restart and update, so if you are still experiencing the server issue immediately after the update, please restart Barotrauma and Steam, and request that the server host do the same.

Please note that some source code mods, for example the very popular Lua for Barotrauma mod, need to be updated following this update. Servers using these mods will have some additional delay in the fix taking effect.

We wish everyone smooth sailing and thank you for your patience!


v1.3.0.4

- Fixed another exploit that allowed crashing servers by sending them specifically crafted malformed data.

Hello everyone, we've just released a single-change hotfix to address an exploit that was discovered recently:

v1.3.0.3
- Fixed an exploit that allowed crashing servers by sending them specifically crafted malformed data.

We're sorry for the trouble this exploit has caused to some multiplayer servers in recent days. This fix should allow you to get back to playing normally!

Hello everyone!

The next update is just a few weeks away now, and we have more new features to sneak peek at. We also wanted to give a little update on the development of the Permadeath mode that we polled you about earlier this year. Let’s take a look!

[h3]Respawning changes and Permadeath[/h3]
As we wrote before, Reaper’s Tax gets replaced with customizable respawning skill loss. This makes skill loss on respawning entirely customizable, via two separate sliders in the server settings.

The Permadeath mode unfortunately had to be postponed, as it took more time to develop than we thought. Thus it will not be included in the next update, but you will still get to try it out soon: we are aiming to have Permadeath, as well as the related Ironman mode, available for testing in the Unstable version soon after the update goes live.

Thank you everyone who took our poll and participated in the early feedback discussion about Permadeath! We selected the design alternative which allows you to take control of a bot when your character dies. Here’s a quick recap of what these upcoming, optional high-difficulty multiplayer modes will mean:

• Permadeath: any character death is permanent, and you can only respawn by acquiring a new character – either one of your bots, or a new character hired at an outpost.
  
• Ironman: any death is permanent, and there is no respawning at all. You can only spectate after you die. Intended for crews who want to try no-death runs.
  

[h3]New campaign difficulty settings[/h3]
We’re adding a lot of new customization options to the difficulty settings in campaign mode:

• New difficulty parameters: adjust common item consumption rates, world hostility, character vitality, and a couple of other hazards for added or diminished gameplay challenge…
  
• ...Or choose from a list of presets for balanced difficulty levels.
  
• Added a new “Abyssal” difficulty preset.
  
• New server lobby layout to make these and all the other settings easier to find and use.
  

We hope that these changes will make Barotrauma enjoyable to players of various experience levels and difficulty preferences. Read more about all of them on our blog and let us know what you think!

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!