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.

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.)

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”.

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!

Hello everyone!

We've just released a hotfix to address issues in last week's Winter Patch. See the list of changes below, and enjoy the holiday season!


v1.2.7.0

- Fixed an issue that sometimes caused the game to crash without generating a crash report (which would lead to a "pipe was broken" error if the issue happened server-side). The issue had to do with a stack overflow when throwing specific kinds of console errors: one common case was when the game failed to connect to our server to check the GameAnalytics consent, which lead to a crash on startup.
- Fixed piezo crystals sometimes spawning right at the start of the level.
- Fixed assistants not being able to pick all tier 1 and 2 talents.
- Fixed location names disappearing when locations change their type in saves started in pre-1.2 versions.
- Fixed selection rectangle disappearing from items when zoomed in by more than x2 in the sub editor.
- Fixed "killcrawlerswarmlarge2" mission not having a description.
- Fixed bots sometimes choosing to wear broken diving suits.
- Fixed currently visible particles freezing when lowering the particle limit.
- Fixed dragged characters always colliding with stairs, making it impossible to drag them past the stairs.
- Fixed "drunken sailor" talent not nullifying the negative effects of drunkenness.
- Fixed stun from the "lightning wizard" talent activating if you cause damage to yourself (e.g. by breaking a wall and taking damage from the shrapnel).
- Fixed escorted security officers sometimes inspecting the crew for stolen items during escort missions.
- Fixed basics tutorial sometimes getting stuck in the "weld leak" objective.
- Fixed ancient weapon not flipping horizontally when aiming it to the left.

Hello everyone!

The Winter Patch 2023 has just been released, with quality-of-life changes, balancing, optimizations, bugfixes, and a bit of new content sprinkled in as well. You can find the full list of changes at the end of this post, and a more comprehensive preview of the update in our previous post about it.

Make sure to update your game to the latest version to be able to host and join servers, and have a great holiday season, everyone! We will be taking a couple of weeks off for Christmas, so we’ll see you again next year.

v1.2.6.0

- Added some more logging to diagnose the mysterious "pipe was broken" crashes. These seem to happen when the server crashes in some way that prevents it from generating a crash report or communicating the reason of the crash to the clients. Now the "pipe is broken" crash report should include the exit code of the server process, giving us more clues for diagnosing the issue, and the server should create simplified crash report if there's some kind of an issue with creating the normal crash report.

Changes:
- Structures can now be rotated in the sub editor!
- Outpost security is now better at catching thieves: they can do random inspections to check for stolen items (more frequently if your reputation is low or if they've caught someone in your crew stealing), and notice if you're visibly carrying or wearing any stolen items.
- Option to get the items you're buying from an outpost store in your inventory immediately, as opposed to them being delivered to the sub at the start of the round. There's also now an anti-griefing setting for disabling this, in case you want to make sure a griefer can't easily gain access to dangerous items in the outposts. Players with campaign management permissions aren't affected by the setting.
- Added new variants of the Monsters Nearby and Submarine Flooded tracks.
- Minor adjustments to level layouts: all the levels now slope down a bit to give the impression you're actually heading deeper.
- Clicking on a door that's set to not toggle when clicked (= door that just send out an activate_out signal when clicked) doesn't activate the door's "toggle cooldown".
- Bots operating turrets can now lead targets (i.e. aim ahead of a moving target). Bots with a higher weapon skill are better at estimating the future position of the target.
- Minor balance change to sub vs sub combat. AI-controlled subs get at least 2 security instead of 1, so more turrets will be manned.
- Bots can see through windowed walls (also making it easier for them to spot stealing).
- Added bilge pumps and duct blocks throughout outposts. Otherwise the outposts can never drain if the player causes a flood.
- Removed karma restrictions from jobs. This feature wasn't communicated anywhere, and it often just seemed like a bug when someone didn't get assign the job they wanted due to their karma being too low.
- Added bullet casing particles to firearms.
- Adjusted default throwing pose a bit: characters don't extend their arm as high up, because it could cause the throwable item to hit the ceiling in roughly door-height rooms.
- Most message boxes can be closed by pressing enter (more specifically, all boxes that are created with just the "ok" button).
- ID cards left in a duffel bag are automatically removed at the end of the round.
- Added a light to handheld sonar to indicate when it's on + made the ping a bit higher in pitch to differentiate it from the sub's sonar.
- Reduced the forces applied on characters by fractal guardian's melee attacks. The previous values were so high they often lead to characters getting stunlocked when the attacks threw them against the walls of the ruin.

Traitors:
- Three new Danger Level 1 traitor events: Exhibitionism, Firing Blanks, The Original Honkero.
- Five new multi-traitor events: Gnawing Cold, The Clobbery Robbery, Husk Roulette, Duck Side of the Moon, Powered by Faith.
- Fixed "Insurgency" achievement not unlocking when completing a traitor event.
- Fixed traitor-specific items sometimes being requested by stores.
- Fixed visibility checks in some traitor events having infinite range.
- Don't allow the victim's body to despawn in the "dead or alive" event because it'd interfere with completing the event (others finding the body).

Optimization:
- Significant optimization to situations where a bot is idling and has trouble finding a path to another hull. Caused performance issues in colonies in particular.
- Fixed a memory leak that caused the memory usage to increase every round.
- Fixed firing turrets (or doing any other action that spawns lots of new entities) causing an enormous performance drop in some situations. Had to do with specific scripted events re-checking their targets whenever a new entity spawned, which was needlessly heavy and was done unnecessarily often.
- Miscellaneous small optimizations.
- Optimized labels (large labels with a scaled down texture in particular were unnecessarily heavy).
- Optimized Watcher's status effects.

Multiplayer:
- Option to hide servers from the server list.
- Option to report inappropriate servers on the server list.
- Added "MinimumMidRoundSyncTimeout" server setting. Determines how long the server waits for a mid-round joining client to get in sync before disconnecting them.
- Fixed workshop item downloads sometimes getting stuck when opting to install server mods from the workshop. Happened if the mod had already been installed, was in the process of being installed, or if it couldn't be installed for some reason.
- Fixed dedicated servers with lots of mods enabled not showing up in the server browser.
- Fixed Text and NPCConversation files being required to be in sync between clients and the server, meaning if you were using a mod that changes the game to a different language, it'd get disabled when you joined a server that's not using the mod.
- Fixed lack of unban option in the "manage client" menu and the client context menu.

Talents:
- Five new assistant talents: Starter Quest, Mule, Jenga Master, Indentured Servitude, Tasty Target.
- Fixed "junction junkie" not working on sonar monitors.
- Fixed a couple of inaccurate talent and mission descriptions in Russian.

Skill gain balancing:
- Now takes longer to reach max skill level, the Helm skill especially was leveling way too fast.
- Helm skill levels up based on the submarine's speed.
- Added an exponent factor to the skill increases for diminishing returns at higher skill level.
- Increased skill gains at lower levels to compensate.
- Welding gives more skill.
- Fabricating items gives less skill.

Fixes:
- Fixed "camera zoom effect" taking a very long time to appear when pressure is increasing inside the sub, giving you very little time to react when the pressure gets to a lethal level.
- Fixed turret lights always being forced on at the start of the round.
- Fixed lighting artifacts that looked like thin slivers of light and strange jagged lighting that sometimes occurred in corners of rooms or places where multiple walls meet.
- Fixed lights shining through obstacles in some very specific situations (one common spot was the windowed door at the left side of Dugong's command room).
- Fixed turret lights sometimes disappearing from view when you're far from the turret (but still close enough to see the light).
- Fixed "bad vibrations 2" event getting stuck if you choose the option to sleep.
- Fixed components disappearing from a circuit box if you delete one in the sub editor and undo the deletion.
- Fixed a rare crash when you'd selected text in a textbox and changed the language of the game to one where the word in the textbox is shorter than in the previous language.
- Fixed handcuffs appearing to continuously drop from characters in certain situations in multiplayer (more specifically, if the character has been disabled and re-enabled during the round).
- Workaround to a rare mystery issue that seems to sometimes cause save files to get corrupted. It seems in some situations the submarine doesn't get included in the save: now the game checks whether the submarine is included before attempting to save the file, and refuses to save if it isn't. This does not solve the underlying issue, but should make it easier for us to diagnose why the submarine gets left out, and prevent corrupting the save when it occurs.
- Fixed "operate turret" orders showing the order marker on the turret instead of the periscope.
- Fixed respawn shuttle lights shining through the top of the level.
- Fixed flares (or other "provocative" items) not attracting monsters when you're wearing a diving suit, because the diving suit was also considered a "provocative" item.
- Fixed ability to put items into circuit boxes by dragging and dropping and with the inventory hotkeys. This caused the components to end up in an invalid state, leading to errors when loading the next round.
- Fixed custom ID card tags not getting applied to ID cards when switching subs.
- Fixed subinventories constantly opening and closing when you're hovering the cursor over the inventory slot with 2 different containers equipped (e.g. 2 storage containers).
- Fixed bots being able to take ammo out from non-interactable items or items whose inventory is set to be inaccessible.
- Fixed progress bars being visible through walls when someone uses a repair tool, damages an item with a projectile or a melee weapon, or crowbars a door open.
- Fixed crashing if you're in an outpost level with no outpost. Should normally never happen, but can occur with e.g. outdated save files or mods.
- Fixed ballast flora spores (or any other level object with no actual sprite) not being visible.
- Fixed bots "cleaning up" items from inside artifact transport cases.
- Fixed ability to sell components from inside circuit boxes in outposts.
- Fixed outpost NPCs not caring about the players starting fires.
- Fixed purchased items sometimes spawning in the cargo crates when you've got a cargo mission active, making them potentially very hard to find.
- Fixed inability to select a component you've just placed in the circuit box until you move the component for the first time.
- Fixed health scanner HUD texts overlapping on high resolutions.
- Fixed "maintain position" marker being misplaced on the navigation terminal on some resolutions.
- Fixed chance of tainting the genetic material when refining sometimes being displayed incorrectly on research stations.
- Disable the health interface of the patient in the "good samaritan" event. Prevents being able to heal the opiate overdose "normally" before triggering the event.
- Fixed item hover texts (e.g. "[E] Repair") not refreshing when changing keybinds.
- Fixed fabricator listbox scroll always resetting to the top when someone selects the fabricator.
- Fixed bandoliers not affecting pulse laser fire rate.

Modding:
- When running an outdated executable (i.e. a mod that overrides the game executable, but hasn't been updated yet after a new vanilla update has been released), there's a notification in the main menu and the "host server" menu warning you about the potential issues caused by running an outdated executable with the other up-to-date vanilla files.
- Console errors and warnings caused by modded content include the name of the mod to make it easier to diagnose which mod is causing some issue or whether it's an issue in the vanilla game.
- Support for overriding texts. Works using <override> elements, the same way as overriding any other content.
- Fixed decorative sprites not being visible on items placed in a container. Did not affect any vanilla content (there were no decorative sprites on any item that can be visible in a container).
- Fixed characters with no AI defined causing crashes.
- Fixed inability to make StatusEffectAction modify the properties of an ItemComponent (only worked on the actual Item).
- Option to have multiple conditionals in CheckConditionalAction.
- Option to limit how many times a GoTo action can be executed (i.e. to create loops that only repeat a given number of times).
- TutorialHighlightAction can now be used in multiplayer too, renamed it as HighlightAction.
- Fixed first matching Containable definition of an ItemContainer determining the hiding, position and rotation of a contained item, disregarding which subcontainer the item is actually in. E.g. if a weapon had 2 subcontainers for magazines, both with a different ItemPos, the ItemPos defined in the first subcontainer would be used for both magazines.
- Fixed stun batons not accepting modded batteries because the RequiredItem s were configured using identifiers instead of tags.
- Fixed Character.CameraShake setting the camera shake regardless if the character the effect is being applied on is the controlled one or not.
- Location names can now be translated. In the vanilla game the names are only translated if you're playing in Chinese.
- Fixed some ConversationAction options going outside the bounds of the dialog if there's a very large number of them.
- Fixed inability to use %ModDir% in LevelGenerationParams.ForceBeaconStation.
- Fixed status effects configured to spawn an item in ContainedInventory not spawning the item if it can't go inside the first item in the contained inventory.

Hello everyone!

The year is almost at its end, and we’ve one more update left to release before that. This Winter Patch will be focusing more on quality-of-life changes, balancing, bugfixes and optimizations, with a sprinkling of new content as well. See some of the highlights below, and read more on our blog.

Rotatable structures in the sub editor, opening up a whole world of possibilities for all of you mad scientist sub editors out there.

Option to buy items straight to your inventory. No more need to wait for the next round to get your items, or rush to the cargo bay to beat your crewmates to the goods.

Outpost security is better at catching thieves. Security will perform random checks for stolen items in your inventory, and they will do a better job noticing acts of thievery aboard stations.

Revised skill EXP gains. We’ve made gaining skills faster towards the beginning and more intuitive on the whole: for instance, practical jobs like welding will give more experience, while fabricating items now increases skills less than before.

A bunch of other additions, changes and improvements, such as:

• Five new talents for the Assistant.
  
• More traitor events, including new multi-traitor events.
  
• Options for hiding and/or reporting inappropriate servers from the server list.
  
• Multiple fixes to lighting, such as lights shining through obstacles, turret lights disappearing, and lighting artifacts in rooms with intersecting walls.
  
• Adjustments to level layouts.
  
• A long list of optimizations, and a large assortment of bugfixes.

The update is planned for release next week, and you can already access all of it in the Unstable version as always.

Hello submariners!

The Steam Autumn Sale starts today, and with that, the Steam Awards nomination period also begins: it’s time to nominate your favorite games for awards. If you’d like to nominate Barotrauma for an award, read on!

Barotrauma is eligible in a number of categories since we reached 1.0 this year. Which one do you think is the best fit? You can nominate us for “Better With Friends” right through this post – the part about needing someone to watch your back, or someone who you can stab in the back, really resonated with us, particularly following last month’s traitor update. You can also pick another category, if you feel a different one is a better match.

Either way, we hope you’ve enjoyed this year, with our long-awaited 1.0 release and the subsequent 1.1 update. It’s been a momentous year for us, and we’re still going to round it off with a smaller update before Christmas. More about that a bit later; for now, enjoy the Autumn Sale, and remember to nominate all your favorite games for awards!

Hello everyone!

We've just released a second hotfix for the Treacherous Tides update, now with a longer list of changes to address issues discovered since the update's release. Please be sure to update your game to the latest version, and see the full list of changes just below.


v1.1.19.3

- Fixed shrapnel from flak cannon ammo always launching upwards.
- Fixed wall damage shrapnel going through walls and being a little excessive overall.
- Fixes to pressure distribution logic: fixes pressure sometimes being lethal in breached rooms that weren't full of water.
- Fixed clients not regaining control of their braindead character after rejoining if the character's taken any amount of damage while braindead.
- Fixes to inconsistent stack sizes (e.g. certain ammo types stacking up to 12 in character inventories, but only 8 holdable/wearable items like backpacks and toolbelts.
- Fixed console errors when switching subs with circuit boxes on board.
- Fixed items that are inside a container that doesn't get transferred getting duplicated during item transfer when switching subs.
- Fixed bots not cleaning up circuit boxes from the floor.
- Fixed stack size being displayed incorrectly in the tooltip when dragging a stack of items to an already-occupied slot.
- Fixed nav terminal's docking button not working if the signal is routed from the terminal to the docking port through a circuit box.
- Fixed double-clicking a component while a circuit box is equipped making the component vanish inside the circuit box.
- Fixed chat messages sent when accusing someone as a traitor not triggering the spam filter.
- Fixed connection names not being translated in circuit boxes (always showed up in English).
- Fixed right-side crew panel overlapping with the mission panel in the PvP mode round summary.
- Fixed depleted and fulgurium fuel rods stacking up to 32 (should be 8 like all other fuel rods).

Modding:
- Added "UseHumanAI" property to characters (can be used to enable the human AI on characters other than humans). While using the human AI on non-humans isn't a fully supported or tested feature, it was previously possible to do that by creating a human prefab using a different species than human, but that no longer worked as of the Treacherous Tides update.
- Attachable holdable items don't count as "HoldableOrWearableInventories". Fixes e.g. tanks only stacking up to 1 in things like movable cabinets and shelves. Does not affect any vanilla content.
- Fixed fabricator reducing the condition of all the available ingredients if the crafting recipe reduces condition instead of consuming the whole item.
- Fixed TagAction continuing in some situations when it can't find targets, even if it's been configured not to with the "ContinueIfNoTargetsFound" attribute.