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Bilge Rats PlaytestNewsPlaytest Update - 2026-09-01
Game update

Playtest Update - 2026-09-01

Bilge Rats Playtest · published 1 Sep 2026, 02:52 UTC

All newsPlayers around this dateRead on Steam

The big ones

  • Fixed the game-breaking morning where the ship could spawn beached behind the tavern after sinking. She now always rebuilds at the dock, and if anything ever carries over again the game heals it in place and logs exactly what happened.
  • Quitting to menu and continuing now reloads the SAME day - same jobs, same islands. The save was capturing the wrong board seed, so Continue could roll a day you'd never seen.
  • The AMD tavern flicker is fixed (root cause: double-sided rendering - AMD and NVIDIA disagree about edge-on triangles). Also fixes the invisible roof above the bar and the blocky candle flames.

Ship and sailing

  • Sinking on or near a shore (under ~16m of water) is now a proper CAPSIZE - she heels onto her side at the waterline, masts laid out to sea. Open-ocean and deep-edge sinks are unchanged, and being inside her when she goes down still ends the way you'd expect.
  • Standing on the bell stand and other narrow deck furniture no longer randomly drops you out of the ship's inertia - including the case where a swell drops the deck away underfoot.
  • Guests now see the ship's wake and the bell's sway (both had been quietly missing on guest screens since multiplayer landed).

Multiplayer

  • Whale and dolphin events no longer end early for one player while the other keeps watching. Pods also won't form while you're at full sail, and if you outrun one mid-visit it gives up and peels away - ease off to keep them around.
  • Spectating now follows the watched player's world: rain stops when they step into the tavern, the bilge hum comes when they go below, and it all swaps back when they leave.
  • When everyone's dead, cycling between corpses actually works - it stays on whoever you pick.
  • The bell's ring cooldown is now shared by the whole crew - no more instant back-to-back rings from two players.
  • If the host disconnects, you now get a clean "the host disconnected" instead of a wall of network internals.

Audio

  • The bilge is now fully isolated - just the hull's creaks and the slosh down there, no outside world at all.
  • The captain's quarters now muffles the outside sea and wind, with a smooth fade in and out of the room.
  • Voice sliders have a wider range: your old 80% is the new 50% (migrated automatically, it sounds the same), with real headroom above and below.
  • Learning a trade now plays a chime with the toast.

Jobs

  • The careener no longer spawns on top of a tree, and the firefight shopkeeper no longer floats over open water.
  • The dead-reckoning skull now rises out of the grave with the bones on guest screens instead of popping in after.
  • The carried survivor's icon no longer T-poses.

World and feel

  • The bilge no longer ghosts as a silhouette in the distant fog.
  • The sea surface no longer tears or races as a storm ramps up or during a bell run-on.
  • Swimming onto the bilge stairs in a flood no longer catches on the steps.
  • WASD keeps working while you hold the tool or emote wheel open.
  • ESC backs out of main-menu screens, same as the Return button.

For the log-senders

  • Mic lights on the crew list may still not work - that's expected this round. The logs now capture everything needed to diagnose it, so please send them after your session.
More from Bilge Rats Playtest

Other announcements

All news
Game update17 Sep 2026Bilge Rats Playtest - Round 4 fixesBuild 25359680. Everything you reported in the last two sessions, plus a few things the logs found on their own. If you see any of these again, say so - and keep your Player.log (AppData/LocalLow/LEAL Games/Bilge Rats). The big ones · Choppy days no longer shred the hull. A choppy (not stormy) day now opens at most two breaches, spaced out, instead of one every few seconds. Storms are untouched…Game update29 Aug 2026Round 3 Playtest Build - 29 August🏆 Steam Achievements are live 21 achievements are now in the playtest - first voyage, first debt paid, a full crew of four, meeting the dolphins, walking the plank, and more. They unlock for real on your Steam account, so expect toasts mid-session. Some are crew-wide (if the ship earns it, everyone aboard gets it), some are yours alone. Fixes · The knock-up is fixed. Getting thrown off your fe…Game update26 Aug 2026Playtest Build — 26 August 2026Everything the last round of feedback turned up is in this build, plus three new things that have never been playtested. Those three are the most likely source of new bugs, so they're worth poking at deliberately. New The ship's bell. Mounted on deck. Sound it three times within 15 seconds and the day runs on toward the storm — useful when the board is all storm work and you're stuck waiting fo…