We have made the win/loss UI text on the results screen easier to understand.

Improvements

• Tinies in the active household will not visit other lots autonomously anymore, unless the new corresponding gameplay option is enabled for the save
  
• Made it much less likely to get electrocuted while repairing when focused
  
• Made house guests always get food when called to meal, regardless of their hunger need
  
• Avocado toast can now be bought at the café

Fixes

• Fixed erroring mods not displaying their error info correctly on startup
  
• Fixed the creative child life goal only requiring 3 meals to be made instead of 5
  
• Fixed grandparents giving babies food they can't eat when sneaking them a treat
  
• Fixed putting an item down on the standing desk giving you standing desk-related emotions
  
• Fixed the character creator showing a frame of black in the menu when switching clothes

Hunters,

2025 is coming to a close, and it’s time to talk about the future of Hunt. Following our 2024 relaunch—which delivered an engine upgrade, the vast map of Mammon’s Gulch, a release on new-generation consoles, and a myriad of foundational changes—this year has been about solidifying our footing. Your feedback was clear: alongside exciting new content, the core game needed polish and a renewed focus on the heart-pounding tension that defines Hunt: Showdown 1896.

We heard you. 2025 became a year of delicate balance as we worked on the health and performance aspects of Hunt, releasing new content while honoring the game’s unique soul and executing our long-term vision. We channeled this focus into a series of in-game Events: Garden of the Witch, Judgement of the Fool, and Web of the Empress. More than just new content, these Events served as vehicles for meaningful updates, delivering foundational polish, balancing, and tweaks. Across Updates 2.3, 2.4, and 2.5, we deployed over a thousand fixes and improvements.

Now, with Web of the Empress, we’ve confidently shifted from reinforcing our foundations to forging the frontier. This update brought gameplay mechanics we’ve spent months ideating, prototyping, testing, polishing, and carefully tuning. The swarming Bileweavers, our new nest-weaving signature monstrosities, found a warm welcome from veteran and new players alike. Tarot Cards, a new system of 12 powerful Consumables that reshape the strategy of each Mission and offer great boons with great drawbacks (and new opportunities to get shot in unconventional ways), are likewise beloved.

This new direction is powered by you. From the triumphant return of Thundershower to the reintroduction of certain Legendary Skins, your voice has directly shaped the bayou and the gulch. We are listening to you through comments and surveys, at major industry events like Gamescom and TwitchCon, and on our streams. And we are committed to ensuring that every new feature earns its place, preserving the tense, tactical core you love while carefully building towards the future. The foundation is stronger than ever, and we are just beginning.

2026

Our vision for 2026 is built on a singular and powerful promise to the players: to give you more ways to live, fight, and express yourselves in the bayou and the gulch. This means deepening the strategic and tactical sandbox while ensuring the fight is fair for all, expanding the world of Hunt with deep intentionality along the way.



Fair Foundations
A level playing field is the bedrock of creative and strategic gameplay, and we believe every victory ought to be earned by skill and outthinking your opponent—nothing else. Our fight against cheating continues relentlessly: in the last 12 months alone we’ve banned over 14,000 accounts and deterred numerous cheating methods. It’s a perpetual battle, and we are committed to long-term development and implementation of new tools to protect your experience.
Our commitment to fairness extends to our matchmaking system. A balanced, tense Mission is an experience you want to come back to again and again. We made some good progress with updates to this system in 2025, and we are continuing to refine the systems that give you that singular ‘knife fight in a phone booth’ experience. Expect a series of tests and new experimental features throughout 2026 to make every encounter feel deserved, along with improvements to regional servers.

Your Hunter’s Legacy
We want you to take pride in your achievements and your mastery of the vast arsenal. To that end, we will introduce more meaningful game systems for you to express yourself. We are exploring systemic changes, such as how we can combine Consumable and Tool slots to unlock new levels of loadout diversity and encourage creative builds.
Furthermore, get ready for a significant addition to your arsenal in 2026. While we are not ready to reveal all the surprises, watch out for the glint of a new, experimental firearm that harnesses a primal and destructive force, promising to open up entirely new tactical possibilities.

Evolving Hunt
The grim world of Hunt: Showdown 1896 is ever-changing, and 2026 will see the return of much-requested content, reintroduced with new levels of quality. The spectacular Wildcard Condition, Inferno, is in active testing and nearing our quality standards. Its return will bring meaningful changes to maps and new AI interactions with fire.
We’ve also heard you asking about Tier 3 Hunters. They will be returning in phases. While remaining tied to free progression systems, they will also be part of our experimental new unlock formats to add variety and rewards. Additionally, our Legends Return initiative will continue, bringing back early legacy content with fresh twists.
Battle-proven in Web of the Empress, Bileweavers will also return to the bayou, to provide you with more…crawling pleasures. Tarot Cards have received a warm welcome, with 86% of survey respondents praising them, which means they will become a permanent feature in Hunt. When both return in future content, they will come with meaningful changes based on your feedback.
Similarly, some of the deadly old friends, like the Shredder, will be brought back into your arsenals in limited form after being carefully rebalanced.

Seasons, Events, and Experimentation

Our Events are also evolving. The 2026 Lunar New Year celebration won’t just be a DLC drop: we have built a multi-layered Event with new, storied activities to explore. New features will allow you to actively participate in a story of a bookkeeper, not a warrior, who became a changed man to survive against a skilled Hunter who plans to escape and become his own master. It’s a great story about the Game of Skill. We will announce more details on these activities soon. For now, enjoy a teaser of the main hero of that story:



Looking further ahead into 2026, we are ironing out the final details of a true Seasonal Model. Your positive engagement with longer Battle Passes has shown us this is the right direction for the health of the game and interest of Hunt players. Our goal is to create a seasonal structure that uniquely fits Hunt’s open PvPvE Corrupted nature, offering meaningful rewards and progression without a feeling of exhausting grind.
And while we get so many great (and at times crazy) ideas from the community, we don’t want to split the community by dramatically changing what makes Hunt unique. We do want to experiment with new gameplay mechanics, and therefore are planning to experiment with new gameplay ideas in limited, experimental game modes .

Technology & The Core Experience

We are pushing the technical boundaries of what Hunt can be, and in-house technology teams are constantly working on creating better development tools to help us deliver content faster and with less constraints. We are actively working to support more players in a single Mission and will have news about an upcoming technical test very soon!
Finally, we remain committed to polishing the core experience. This includes ongoing performance, bug fixes, and quality of life improvements, with special focus on new social features to help you connect and play with friends.
Our work on onboarding new players also continues. We started with Hunter Bots in 2.4, and we’re building further with new tutorial challenges and scalable bot difficulty. Our experiments are designed to help newcomers learn the game’s depth and prepare them to die in the bushes with dignity, without sacrificing the hard-won knowledge and edge our veterans have earned over thousands of hours.

Conclusion

This year, we have worked hard on the foundations of the unique Hunt experience. We fixed and polished a renewed game, and now we are working on making it a fairer, richer, and more expressive experience for everyone.

The future of Hunt: Showdown 1896 is brighter than a Flash Bomb and longer than the shadows at high noon in the bayou . Thank you for being on this journey with us and thank you for your limitless creativity building the world’s most elaborate traps.

We’ll see you very soon, for the final encore this year, right as we begin the new one.

Your Hunt: Showdown 1896 Team

Agents, the simulator is activating once again.

Step into the system and awaken your soul in the all-new playable demo of V.E.D.A: The Awakening of Souls, available first at G-STAR!

A̶ ̴n̴e̶w̸ ̸d̶e̷m̸o̸ ̷i̴s̸ ̷p̶r̵e̸p̶a̷r̶e̴d̶.

Will you rise to the challenge?

📍 Find us at Hall 1, Booth D01

🧠 Meet the developers, play the demo, and experience the world of V.E.D.A before anyone else.

🔥 Wishlist now on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2659980/VEDA

Click the “Request Access” button on our Steam page to join the upcoming Playtest🕹️

You’ll be the first to enter the AI-driven simulator when it begins!

Hello everyone!

We're thrilled to announce that The Player Who Can’t Level Up will be showcased at G-STAR 2025!

If you're attending, this will be your first chance to try out our latest demo build, now featuring new mechanics, updated visuals, and deeper roguelite progression.

Even better, our developers will be on-site and would love to meet you in person. Come say hi and share your thoughts!

📍 Booth: Hall 2, A11
🔥 Wishlist us on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/2985520/The_Player_Who_Cant_Level_Up/

We’re excited to connect with you and show you how far the tower has grown.
Your feedback makes all the difference. See you in Busan!

-The Player Who Can’t Level Up Team

* Reduced duration of War's Shatter debuff
* Mercenaries balance: cleanse spells will have priority over other buffs or heals
* Improved readability of fonts

Version 1.0.13

Save files from version 1.0.12 are fully compatible with 1.0.13. The warning when selecting such saves can be ignored.

List of changes:

• Fixed: the window close button occasionally shifted position.

• Improved: added proper cancellation of Trade when starting drag-and-drop - previously this could cause UI glitches.

• Updated Warrior stance system:

  • New stance order - Attack stance, Balanced stance, Defensive stance.

  • Stances can now be switched with hotkeys 1, 2, 3.

  • Tip: Attack stance is effective against Mages, while Defensive stance helps when retreating from battle.

• Fixed: when upgrading buildings and centers, the cost was calculated based on the tile where the player avatar was standing instead of the building's tile.

• Fixed: experience was not awarded for upgrading centers.

• Fixed: in some cases, mines continued to extract resources even after a deposit was depleted.

• Updated the game credits list.

• Updated texts: Spanish and English localizations.

Version 1.0.12

Released on the same day as the full launch - November 6, 2025. Therefore, a separate news post was not published.

List of changes:

• Added Steam achievements.

• Fixed crashes occurring during saving and loading.

• For Warrior and Leader classes, increased the interval between Hell attacks (making the game slightly easier).

• Increased the interval between the first 1–5 Hell waves by 15–20%.

• Reduced the effect of the Magic skill by approximately 20%.

• Slightly increased Mana cost for level 5–7 spells.

• Fixed a crash that could occur when exiting the game.

• Fixed parameter calculations in the Statistics window (effects of equipment and buildings).

• Fixed: a tooltip appeared suggesting the improvement of a unit that was already at max level.

• Added a unique sound effect when defeating a Hell wave monster.

• Added a Necromancer notification when enough Remains are collected to raise undead.

• Updated localization texts: Chinese, German, and Spanish.

Hi everyone
The game is finished, full version of the game will be available on November 24th, 2025.
Thanks for the support and comments.

There will be an update in December, that will add achievements and an endless mode to the game.

After completing the Invasion chapter, you can stay in the game and face a new threat.



Cheers Martin

In preparation for the 2nd season of leaderboard event, we have updated the game demo as follows:

• Added several new leaderboard achievements.

• Increased the number of equipment slots for each character by 1.

• Adjusted the effect of some cards.

• Adjusted the difficulty and score value for several leaderboard achievements.

• Reworked the art for the "Bomb" series.

• Tweaked the leaderboard display.

• Tweaked the outer glow effect for card rewards and applied the same style to the "Transform Card" interface.

• Slightly adjusted the display order of achievement entries in the leaderboard instructions.

• Tweaked the visual presentation of the victory screen animation.

Creepy and unsettling desktop backgrounds are waiting for you!

🔗 High-quality wallpapers