Windrose is a smash hit — it’s sold over 1.5 million copies in just over two weeks.
The pirate survival adventure game hit Steam in early access form on April 14 and immediately shot up the most-played games chart on Valve’s platform. Now, developer Kraken Express has announced the impressive 1.5 million sales milestone.
“The team at Kraken Express is incredibly grateful to all the captains that have set sail on their pirate adventures so far and excited to continue growing the game during the journey through Early Access,” the developer said in a statement.
In an update released today (patch notes below!), Kraken Express added over 40 new building pieces to fill some gaps and allow players more consistent builds along with over 50 fixes and quality-of-life changes. Other improvements made to the game address connectivity issues, reduced load on SSDs, stability, and performance.
Kraken Express said it will release a content roadmap in the coming months, but today confirmed the first big content drop will include the Ashlands, which it described as “a dangerous new biome taken over by undead and covered in volcanic ash.”
Here’s the official blurb:
In the current Early Access version of Windrose, you and your co-op mates can explore three diverse biomes full of quests to complete, enemies to fight in souls-lite-inspired combat, and handcrafted points of interest to discover in a procedurally generated world. Take down epic bosses with an armory of unique weapons, including sabers, maces, muskets and more. Improve your reputation with various factions, trade, farm, fish and build a pirate haven of your own – and command your own vessel in thrilling naval battles with boarding actions. The high seas are yours for the taking!
Setting sail in Windrose? Avoid Davy Jones’ locker with these essential Windrose tips and tricks, which will take you from the Coastal Jungle biome all the way through the Foothills and Cursed Swamps. Keep track of discoveries you’ve made in each biome with our Windrose Progression Guide and hunt down essential resources for crafting recipes, including gunpowder. Plus, you’ll find information on clearing every point of interest so you can find the Best Weapons and Armor.
Windrose update 0.10.0.4.268-9d2ca277 patch notes:
Important bits
- Added a new setting: Force Relay Connection. Doesn’t work with Direct IP connections. Sometimes players are unable to connect directly to their friends’ games because P2P traffic is blocked along the route. This can happen for many reasons, such as router settings, ISP restrictions, firewall restrictions, and more. This option forces the use of our relay servers instead of a direct P2P connection, which can improve stability at the cost of higher latency (ping)
- Fixed a bug that caused connection issues for players with non-English Windows usernames
- Fixed unnecessary CPU usage on idle servers and clients
- Disk usage during gameplay has been reduced
- Several improvements to ship performance when hosting a server
- Fixed a rare crash caused by invalid inventory slot IDs
- Fixed a crash that occurred when killing Drowned with ship cannon fire
- Reduced the crafting cost of a wide range of building pieces across all building sets (this applies to construction costs, not vendor prices)
New stuff
- Added around 40 missing wall triangle pieces for various roof angles
- Added 3 missing floor triangle pieces to different building sets
- Added 4 new Seedbed variations
- Added new sound effects for when crops transition between growth stages
- Added new sounds for harvesting grown plants at your farm
- Added audio cues for Drowned ranged attacks; they now yell before hurling a projectile
- Added new visual effects for when crops transition between growth stages
- Added new visual effects for harvesting grown plants at your farm
- Bonfire ambient music track has been extended by 3 minutes
- Ship travel ambient track has been extended by 40 seconds
Interface
- Fixed FrameGen stuttering that occurred when closing the inventory or map
- Fixed a video memory (VRAM) spike when opening certain UI windows
- The Disassembly station no longer displays equipped items in the list
- Fast travel markers will now appear on the top layer of the map when fast travel is available
- Fixed remapping issues for the O and L keys
- Arrow key inputs no longer rotate the character camera
- Mouse inversion now correctly affects ship and ship battery controls
- Sensitivity settings now correctly affect aiming with ranged weapons
- The “[Shared Quest Progress]” tag will no longer appear in the journal if the shared progress setting is disabled
- Added remapping support for more actions: secondary interactions, inventory management, HUD toggle, etc
- Two-handed firearm controls can now be remapped as well
- The “Hide UI” toggle now only hides the HUD and no longer affects the inventory, journal, or other menus
- Added a dedicated setting to adjust safe zones for widescreen monitors
- Fixed a bug where settings could change value even if not directly hovered over by the gamepad cursor
- Fixed a mapping issue for accented letters
- Improved support for accented letters in player and ship names. We are working on expanding our custom font to natively support more languages soon
Building & Terraforming fixes and improvements
- Decorative Canopies now count as roofs for crafting station requirements
- Fixed cases where digging under a tree could cause it to “hang in the air”
- Fixed a bug that allowed players to dig under Divi stumps or certain trees in swamps
- Fixed the shovel flatten tool, it now correctly uses the ground under the character’s feet as a baseline
- Building integrity now correctly recalculates if a destructible object used as a support is destroyed
- Fixed a bug that caused Crocodile sculptures (Jolly Crocodile Sculpture, Wise Crocodile Sculpture) to levitate slightly
- Fixed clipping issues with 26-degree Mahogany stairs
- Fixed snapping issues for 26-degree roof corners in the Jungle Survivor set
- Fixed collision issues for 26-degree and 45-degree railings, they can now be correctly placed on foundations and floors
- Fixed square pillar collisions (existing player-built structures should not be affected)
- Fixed the visual offset for pier pillars (existing player-built structures should not be affected)
- Signal Fire now has the correct collision preset (you can now walk over it)
- Saplings can now be planted with higher density (reduced spacing requirements)
- Signal Fire now shares the Comfort buff with other fire-related entities. Pier decorations now correctly provide their own Comfort bonus
- Fixed a bug that occasionally made certain building blocks indestructible
Other bug fixes and improvements
- Improved the drop rate for Tainted Bile
- Hardwood drop rate increased by approximately 20%
- Ship disassembly now requires the player to have enough inventory space (or a nearby chest) to store all returned resources, preventing item loss
- Fixed the Boar’s second strike combo animation: it now has a clearer telegraph but a longer reach. Be careful!
- Fixed the Alpha Wolf’s bleed effect, it now correctly applies only at the end of the grapple
- Bleed damage will no longer affect players while they are being grappled
- Fixed a visual bug with the Outnumbered effect while it is active
- Fixed a bug where the “Special Attack” damage bonus on jewelry did not work, it now correctly applies to all [F] attacks
- Fixed Rosalinda Mercer’s perk: the 30% chance to proc on a purple elixir now correctly grants a purple elixir instead of a blue one
- Fixed a bug that could cause a teleport when jumping over a growing tree
- Fixed several ore respawn bugs, ores should now always respawn correctly
- Cycling through shanties will now always result in a different song
- Fixed several audio issues that occurred while using the F-camera on a ship
- Ship crew barks (voice lines) can now be heard even when using the F-camera
- Weapons are now correctly unequipped if the player removes a backpack containing them
- Fixed several ship interaction animations that caused sailors to clip into objects
- Fixed clothing clipping bugs when interacting with shrouds on a ship
- The quest to board the “Unsinkable” can now be completed even if the player stays on their own ship’s deck during boarding
- Fixed an issue that caused Jim Godart to spawn extra copies of himself
- Fixed a rare error in sea quest battles that occurred if a player left the game mid-fight
- Fixed a bug in the “Forgotten Relics” quest caused by receiving all three mural messages from a single ruin (excess markers will now disappear)
- Fixed an incorrect tooltip for the Iron Caverns in Foothills; it will no longer display XP
Visual improvements
- Fixed distorted visuals for several weapons on low graphics settings
- Grass will no longer be removed when planting trees or shrubs
- Grass will no longer be removed under piers and wharves
- Updated the Wolf Head Trophy model and textures
- Fixed fireplace visuals
- Fixed clay wall textures
- Slightly updated smelter visuals
- Fixed bean sapling visuals, vines should now correctly attach to the wooden supports
- Improved the visibility of decorative beams for the Old World and Lost Tribe sets
Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected].
