Coming next week: Blood in the Water

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!

Medicine and monsters

• 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.

Diving suit and animation changes

• 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.

Campaign difficulty and respawning improvements

• 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.

Overhauled station events, more wrecks and beacons to explore

• 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.

Our favorite small but handy improvements

• 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!