Here are the approximate release times in a few time zones for 13 April 2026.
Los Angeles: 3:00 am PDT
New York: 6:00 am EDT
London : 11:00 am BST
Paris : 12:00 pm CEST
Japan: 7:00pm JST
Australia: 8pm AEST (Melbourne/Sydney)
10:00am UTC
Wishlist and Follow the game and you should get a notification from Steam! We'll do another post at launch so if you follow the game that should show up for you as well.
Install the game on Steam, load it up, and press New Game from the main menu!
The starting story determines how many characters you start with, what resources you start with and the condition of your characters. This makes the early part of the game easier or more difficult.
"Fresh Start" is a good option for the default difficulty.
"Smooth Sailing" if you want an easier time or just want to chill.
"Punching Sharks" is a nice place to start if you want a little extra stress 😄
Remember: you control ALL of your characters, if there are 3 characters in your starting group you can customize all 3 characters!
Choose their name, hair etc.
Survive the apocalypse in style with our fabulous beard-stache system. There's also more than 40 hairstyles, be sure to share your characters, we'd love to see your creations!
Choose from the 7 available backgrounds.
The background determines your starting skill and can give your characters unique traits that you can't get any other way.
Choose their traits.
Now fine the tune the traits. There are negative and positive traits. If you choose too many positive traits you will need to take a negative trait to balance things out.
Feeling adventurous? Take 4 negative traits, i dare you!
Finally, name your colony!
You can also choose how difficulty the playthrough will be. If it's your first time, you probably want to leave everything on default. There are also presets to choose from, or you can customize each setting.
Oceaneers has a little bit of a learning curve due to the surprising amount of depth, once you learn the ropes it will be smooth sailing. We've got a few types of tutorials to help you get the hang of things.
These hold your hand, and tell you where to click. They are also yellow, neat! There only around 3 of these and we only use them for the most important things.
These popup right in your face, ready to annoy the information directly into your brain. You can also find these in the handbook.
These are the same as the popup tutorials, but they just shown on a list to the side. They don't popup so won't go directly into your brain, you'll have to click them. You can also find these in the handbook, and you can dismiss them by clicking the X.
Tutorials are front-loaded, so you'll get most of them in the first few days. After surviving for the first few days you won't notice many popup tutorials or interactive tutorials.
I know tutorials can be annoying if you don't need them, so if you just want to figure things out for yourself right from the start, press escape to open the menu and turn them off.
Even if you turn them off, you can find most of the information in the handbook. If there's something you cant find that needs explaining, let us know, we'll add it.
You can adjust the options from the start menu, or even once you are in the game. The defaults are pretty good, but you may want to adjust:
Audio volume (Sound tab)
Camera pan speed (General tab)
If you are on a low-end device you might also like to lower the graphics settings, though you may not need to do this until your colony gets bigger.
There's also keybinds which you can change. If there are any new keybinds you would like to see in the future, be sure to let us know.
You're now slightly more informed than you were before!
We hope you are as excited for release tomorrow as we are.
See you on the raft!