Barotrauma News

Hello everyone!

The final Barotrauma update of 2022 is arriving next week, with a new campaign tutorial mode, a reworked talent system and lots of smaller fixes and improvements.

[h3]Campaign tutorial[/h3]
We’re adding tutorial features integrated into the singleplayer campaign mode. The new campaign tutorial guides new sailors on their first mission with hints, tips and dialogue.

[h3]Reworked talents[/h3]
Thank you for all the comments on the talent rework announcement we made a few weeks ago! After further testing and reading all the feedback we got, we’ve made a few adjustments to our plans. Here’s an updated preview of the upcoming talent overhaul:

• More talents. We’re adding 50 new talents in total.
  
• New generic talents for all jobs. You must unlock a few of these generic talents before picking a specialization, and if you want to, you can even unlock them all.
  
• More streamlined specializations. You can still get talents from several different talent trees, but you must complete each tree before moving on to the next.
  
• All talents can now be unlocked and used by bots. Recipes unlocked by bots can be used by the entire crew.
  
• Brand new talent-related items, such as the new Scrap Cannon and Arc Emitter weapons.
  

About the Captain’s third talent tree: It is on the way! However, as it relates to the various factions of Europa, it will only be added with the faction overhaul coming next year.



[h3]What else is new?[/h3]
Here are some of our favorites from the smaller changes coming up in the Holiday Update:

• Hull breach shrapnel makes monsters that can’t get inside your sub more dangerous to players.
  
• You can now fabricate multiple items at once with a convenient slider.
  
• More varied creature loot, including loot from big monsters.
  
• New weapons: the Rifle, Heavy Machine Gun, Machine Pistol and Harpoon Coil-Rifle.
  
• Flashlight attachment for rifles.
  
• VoIP improvements, including distance-based radio chat quality.
  
• Fixed the Chinese and Japanese typing method to display the candidate box properly while typing.
  

Read more about the update and our seasons’ greetings on our blog and stay tuned for the Holiday Update next week!

Hello everyone!

Another new addition coming in the next update is a new campaign tutorial. It complements the basic and job tutorials we added in the previous update to help new players get the hang of campaign gameplay, mission structure, and the lay of Europa.

• Guiding new players through starting a campaign. The campaign tutorial places you at a simplified outpost and guides you to gear up and complete your first mission.
  
• Tips and hints along the way. The new tutorial makes use of hints to highlight important NPCs, items, and submarine systems that are important for all jobs to understand.
  
• Integrated into the singleplayer campaign. The tutorial mode is enabled by default when you launch a singleplayer campaign and can be turned off in the settings.
  

We’ve also made some final tweaks to the new tutorials from the previous update by adding some extra text, exit popups upon completing objectives, and overall small improvements. We’re very excited about our completely overhauled tutorials and hope you will find them helpful!

The campaign tutorial will be released along with our December update, and you can already test the upcoming changes in the Unstable test version. Read more about the new additions on our blog and stay tuned for the update, coming in a few weeks!

Ahoy!

It's once again that time of year – the Steam Autumn Sale is in full swing, and Barotrauma participates with a deep discount. The sale period also comes with its annual celebration of video games: The Steam Awards.

That's where you come in. During the Steam Awards nomination period, you can nominate games for awards in various categories. Barotrauma is eligible for the Labor of Love category, intended for games with a long development history.

Our Barotraumatic story spanning soon eight years, with over three years of it in Early Access here on Steam, we are proud to say we develop Barotrauma with all our hearts. If we have also captured yours, you can now nominate us for the Labor of Love award.

Thank you for sharing in our Early Access for another autumn season! Stay tuned for more news about the next update and everything that next year will have in store.

Hello to Chinese-speaking Barotrauma players!

It has recently come to our attention that typing in-game in Barotrauma has been inconvenient for Chinese versions for an extended time, with the candidate box to suggest Chinese characters not appearing as it should. We're very sorry for the the trouble and have prepared a fix to this issue, to be released in the next update.

While we are still developing the next update, you can already try this fix in the Unstable test version of Barotrauma. This allows you to get the fix early, and we will also work to accommodate your feedback in the public release. It would be very valuable for our development to get feedback from you, as we have no Chinese speakers in our development team, so we encourage all interested players to test the fix now!

[h3]How to get the Unstable beta[/h3]
Opt into "unstable", a free beta version available to everyone who owns Barotrauma on Steam:

• Head to your Steam Library and find Barotrauma in your list of games in the left sidebar.
  
• Right-click Barotrauma and choose Properties.
  
• Choose the "Betas" heading in the Properties window.
  
• Select "unstable" from the topmost dropdown. This initiates the download of the beta.
  
• When "unstable" is successfully opted into, the name of the beta is displayed in square brackets in Barotrauma's title in the left sidebar of your Steam Library.
  
• To return to the regular game version, simply repeat these steps and choose ""none"" in the beta selection dropdown.
  

To give us feedback about Chinese typing, please write on the Unstable forums or our GitHub issue tracker. We hope this fix improves your experience with Barotrauma!

Hello everyone!

For the last update of the year, we are balancing and polishing Barotrauma’s talent system. The talent rework will introduce lots of new talents, and almost all existing talents have been reworked to some extent. We’ve focused on four aspects of the talent system in particular:

Additional talent levels and more talents. We’re adding two levels of more generic talents for each job, and some of these early talents must be unlocked before picking more specialized talents. The overall number of talents increases, too: we’re adding 50 talents in total.

More powerful final talents. As the talent trees get larger and take a longer time to complete, the final talent of each tree must be extra valuable. The new talent trees will offer a powerful boost or item when you unlock the final talent.

Greater specialization. We want all the different jobs to stand out better, and to support this, the talents of each job have been streamlined into more thematic talent trees. As the talent trees are expanded and offer more specialized talents, each character can now only choose one specialization.

Talents for bots to support singleplayer. Until now, the use of talents has been effectively limited to multiplayer. To remedy that, we’re adding support for talents for bots in singleplayer. Many talents have been reworked slightly to make them usable by bots.

You can read more about the talent rework on our blog and try it out already in the Unstable test version! The talent rework will be released as part of our December update.