Hello everyone!

Now that spring is slowly thawing the land (and the bones of our dev team), it’s soon time for Barotrauma’s first update of the year. The update is currently being tested by our team, and you can also start test driving it now and give us feedback before it’s released!

There’s an important new feature coming in this update which we would be happy to hear your thoughts on: The ‘Reserve bench’ feature allows you to hire bots as ‘backup’ crew members, who only spawn when needed, for example after a player death in the permadeath mode. You can also use the reserve bench outside of permadeath, for example to keep a skilled engineer handy, just in case your current one meets an untimely end.

There are also other content additions coming – more about these a little later! In the fixes and improvements department, here are some of our favorites:

• Fixes to syncing issues in multiplayer combat, greatly reducing the amount of desync and rubberbanding.
• A long list of improvements and bugfixes to bot AI. Addressing issues with ladders, stealing, being set on fire, targeting and more!
• Various optimizations

You can already test all of the upcoming changes in our Unstable beta version, which you can access through your steam client. Simply right-click on Barotrauma in your Steam library, select “properties” and from the dropdown menu in the Betas section, select the “unstable - Public unstable version” and run the game. For more testing information, check out this forum post.

Get a deeper sneak peek into the update on our blog, take a look for yourself in the Unstable beta, and stay tuned for the release in a few weeks!