Updates & patch notes

• Send feedback from the main menu: the little speech-bubble button in the bottom-left corner. Pick Bug, Idea or Other, tell us what happened, and (if you leave the box ticked) your game log comes along so we can track the bug down.

• Accelerant is gasoline now: it soaks a trail that sits there quietly — until any part of it touches fire, then the whole trail goes up in a rush. Hose-Bots: wash a gap through it before it’s lit.
• Haul by weight: carry wood AND stone together — a tree is 6 weight, a rock 10 — and every point of weight counts at the camp (10 stone = a wall). No carry limit any more: up to 45 weight you run at full speed, past that you’re encumbered and each extra bit slows you more. A whole camp in one trip is possible… at a crawl.
• The Water Bomber flies the whole map: its water line now runs coast to coast along the heading you pick, not a short 70 m strip.
• Bots dodge strikes: when a Water Bomber or Meteor Shower warning circle is about to land on them, they scatter.
• Bots have names now — Chad GPT, Llamarama, Co-Pilot Pete, Sonnetta and friends — instead of “Bot 1, Bot 2”.
• New game icon: our little yellow robot, on your taskbar and desktop.
• Fixed: after switching to another window and back, the game could ignore your mouse until you alt-tabbed again.

• Bot Match replaces Practice on the main menu: a full match against bots, offline, on your own machine — pick a side (Hose-Bots, Firebugs or random) and 1v1, 2v2, 3v3 or 4v4, and bots fill both teams (class select, six rounds, card drafts, the halftime swap, the lot). The bots are simple for now: they push your tanks and fight whoever’s close. The old Practice sandbox is still there as Free play under Bot Match.
• Fixed: right after the warmup → match map switch, a player could be missing or frozen on someone else’s screen for the whole match.
• Teammates no longer spawn on top of each other — every base has its own spawn spots, one per player.
• Upgrade draft, reworked: clearer instructions, a gold banner + “pick 2 of 3” pips when knockouts earned your team bonus picks, and a YOUR UPGRADES strip your picks fly into (with stack counts).
• Every upgrade card is now yours alone: Short Fuse / Chain Reaction speed up your traps, Heavy Slurry strengthens your retardant, Locksmith opens chests faster for you, and Green Belt slows fire spreading near you (it used to slow fire across the whole map for your team).
• When a match ends you’re taken back to the main menu after the scoreboard, instead of straight into another warmup and match. Press PLAY to queue again.
• The minimap and the big map only show your own team’s supply: water towers for Hose-Bots, fuel tanks for Firebugs.
• Strikes, faster: the Water Bomber / Meteor Shower is up the moment your team holds a camp. Anyone on the team who stands in one of your camps and presses X (pad: D-pad down) first calls it in — no waiting on the top hauler, no charge meter. It has its own button now (M is just the map).
• No more fog on the map: the minimap and big map show the whole arena and everyone on it — teammates green, enemies red — so fights find each other fast. The Radio pickup is gone.
• The flamethrower is a real weapon now: every burst that hits a Hose-Bot does direct damage (like the hose and the Snitch Beam), and it reaches further (~13 m). Burning ground is just a light damage-over-time now — most of a Firebug’s damage comes from hitting things.
• Fixed: the flamethrower now damages water towers directly — before, only the fire burning near a tower hurt it.
• Fire is a little less set-and-forget: it hurts robots and water towers 20% less, and topping a fire back up (flamethrower or F) refuels it steadily, about 4% per second you hold, instead of jumping a dying fire back to full.
• Camps explain themselves: standing in a camp tells you exactly what to do (chop trees for wood, deliver it, build walls with stone, press X for your strike), and the first rounds open with a one-line how-to.
• How to Play in game: it’s in the Esc menu now, and the guide is rewritten for everything new.
• Screenshots: F12 saves to a folder you choose (Settings → Screenshots, from the main menu or Esc menu) and still lands in your Steam library — one copy, no doubles.
• Knockout points: every knockout scores a point for the other team (even a drowning or a self-inflicted one — no more dying on purpose to skip the walk back). Every 5 points earns everyone on that team a bonus pick at the next draft. In each side’s last round (3 and 6) each knockout instead gives the other team +2% damage for the rest of the round.
• Rounds are 6 minutes in 2v2 too (were 5).
• Enemy health bars: a bar over every enemy’s head — health, plus a purple stealth bar under it on Firebugs (what your Snitch Beam drains).
• Hit markers! A tick sound and a flash on your crosshair every time you hurt an enemy — beam, hose or flame — and a bigger red one when you knock them out.
• The Snitch Beam hits 3x harder (two beams couldn’t take a Firebug down).
• Drowning is slower (about 7 seconds instead of 2) and the screen tells you: a blue edge and DROWNING — SWIM BACK TO SHORE!
• The Hose-Bot base’s back water towers now stand on solid ground (they hung over the sea, so fire couldn’t burn under them).
• Flamethrowers and hoses now hurt a tank when the stream actually hits it, from any angle — tanks with sand or sea behind them didn’t take damage.
• Party invites: every invite you get is listed (newest first) with its own Accept / Decline, one from someone who isn’t on your Steam friends list says so, and an invite disappears on its own once that party is gone.
• Cannon skins paint the nozzle cleanly: no more jagged half-colored teeth where the nozzle meets the cannon.
• Inviting a friend while you’re searching for a match now cancels that search cleanly (it kept running in the background and padded the queue count).
• The Steam friends list no longer jumps back to the top while you scroll through it.

• Cannon skins! A new Cannon tab in the Locker repaints your arm cannons: Charcoal, Team Colors, Gold Plate and Hazard to start.
• New Locker camera: each tab turns your robot and zooms to the part you’re changing (head, face, back, badge, cannon). Drag to spin it and tilt all the way to a top-down view; the mouse wheel (or the triggers) zooms. On a controller the right stick orbits.
• The main menu shows how many droids are playing right now (bottom left).
• The hose now runs along your side and plugs straight into the fitting on the water and flame cannons (it used to stop just short).
• Cleaner paint: no more white patches on the backpacks or speckles on the Fire Helmet, the backpack sight glass shows its water level cleanly, and the free hand’s fist is fully closed.
• Supply carts lean the right way on side slopes.

• The placeholder caps and hats are retired for now — the Fire Helmet and Space Helmet stay. (Anything you earned is kept and comes back with the real models.)

• Parties of 3 and 4 can queue again! With 2v2 matches, a party of 4 now gets a match of its own (2 vs 2), and a party of 3 keeps two together while the third teams up with another player.
• Supply carts! Reservoir Masters and Ember Tenders now tow a wagon with a big water tank or fuel drum, hosed to their cannon. It rolls on its own wheels over the bumps and never snags on anything. You can spot a team’s supplier at a glance now.
• Firebugs now carry a fuel tank on their back (with its own fuel gauge window), hosed to the flamethrower.
• New robot look: a steel-gray body with your team color on the shoulders, elbows, belt, knees and feet.
• New gear paint jobs: the arm cannons, backpack and helmets now have real detail (silver and brass cannons with gauges and battery readouts, a sight glass with tick marks, a striped space helmet), with your team color on the helmet, backpack and robot.
• Reservoir Master / Ember Tender: the big tank is for sharing — their own spray or flame now burns it twice as fast (so they’re not just a bigger-tank Hose Marshal). The class card says so.
• Shorter knockout waits: 5, 10, 15, 20 then 30 seconds in 2v2 (never longer), and the same climbing to a 40-second cap in 4v4.
• The Water Bomber is in sync now: its warning rings, the splash and the hits land exactly when the plane flies over and its water reaches the ground (they used to come seconds before the plane showed up).
• Water, slurry and flame now hit mountain sides and bridges where they actually touch them, instead of sinking into the rock.
• The shovel is now a story-mode tool; Versus no longer has trench digging (it was being used on bridges and spawn walls).
• Your free hand’s fist now faces your body the right way (it was turned palm-out).

• Playtester exclusives! Play during the playtest to earn cosmetics you’ll never be able to get after launch: the Pioneer Cap for playing a match, the Field Tester hat + backpack badge for 10 matches where you really played, and the Veteran Tester hat + PLAYTESTER stencil for 50 matches and 25,000 objective points. Idling doesn’t count — get in there! Your tier also shows next to your name on the scoreboard. (Rewards are still marked Coming Soon in the Locker — everything you earn now counts and arrives when they go live.)
• Getting zapped by an EMP now looks like it: the robot gets flung into a sizzling, sideways, arms-up jolt before the stun sets in.
• The Water Bomber flies nose-first now (it was flying tail-first), with spinning propellers.
• The water towers’ garbled banner is fixed.
• New weapons: arm cannons! Hose-Bots and Firebugs now wear their water cannon, flamethrower and Snitch Beam on the right arm instead of awkwardly holding a gun. The nozzle turns pink when slurry is loaded. Your free hand now rests in a ready fist.
• New water tank backpack: the hose runs from it over your shoulder to the arm cannon, and a sight glass on the back shows how much water you have left.
• New cosmetic: the Space Helmet.
• Hose-Bots get a proper fire helmet (in team colors, with a gold shield) instead of the old cap.
• Water, flame and slurry now leave the nozzle as one solid stream, instead of a string of beads that started thin.
• The playtest now runs 2v2 matches (4 players), rebalanced for smaller teams: tanks have less HP so they still fall at a good pace, camps and strikes need fewer haulers, and rounds are a minute shorter.
• At halftime, when the teams swap sides, everyone gets to pick a new class for their new team. (Classes stay locked the rest of the match.)
• Camps no longer drift back to neutral when left alone: a camp you’ve built up stays yours until the other team hauls resources to it.
• Robots now plant their feet on hills, bumps and bridges: the uphill knee bends and the body settles, so feet no longer sink into slopes or hover off them.
• Fire now spreads by embers. Burning ground shoots glowing embers a short hop away, and whether one catches depends on where it lands: dry grass and trees go up easily, dirt rarely, paths and sand almost never, and trenches, slurry and wet ground fight it. Watch the embers to see where the fire is about to jump. (Overall spread speed is about the same as before.)
• Slurry now coats right over scorched ground: retardant scrubs the char off and keeps it from blackening again while it’s coated.
• The Locker has new Badge and Decal tabs.
• Story mode (still Coming Soon) now opens with a narrated fly-in over the Last Forest.

A round of fixes and polish from your playtest reports — thank you! Plus a peek at what’s coming.

Feel

• Robots hold the water gun and flamethrower out in front now instead of buried in their chest.
• The gun tilts with the stream — water and fire leave the nozzle along the barrel, lobbing up for long shots and down for close ones.
• Meteors look the part: bigger glowing rocks that light up the ground below and streak in with a long fire-and-smoke trail.

Camps & hauling

• Press Q inside a camp’s ring to toss your whole load on the pile — it delivers, same as holding E.
• Fixed: wood and stone dropped near a camp or a tank (like a knocked-out hauler’s load) couldn’t be picked back up.
• Practice shows the camp prompt too, so you can see how to deliver.

Strikes

• When you open the map to call a strike, the aim now starts on your own position (it used to jump to wherever your mouse cursor was).

Interface

• Class select in the warmup no longer covers your prompts: pickup, hauling, tank and camp prompts move above the class cards while they’re open, and the cards fully fade out once you lock in.
• Fixed: the Snitch Beam did nothing in Practice.

Coming soon

• A Story mode is on its way — you’ll spot its button on the home screen.
• Unlockable cosmetics and achievements are marked Coming Soon in the Locker while we finish them. Everything you earn now already counts, and unlocks arrive the moment they go live.

Meet the Hose-Bots and the Firebugs! The firefighters and arsonists have new names to match their new attitudes — and a whole new fight in the middle of the map.

Camps & Strikes

• Gather: hold E on a tree for wood or a rock for stone. Chopped trees stay gone for the round — and the fire can’t burn what isn’t there. There’s more to chop now too: new tree groves and rock clusters across the island.
• Haul: carry up to 3 wood or 2 stone. You’re slower and your weapon is stowed while carrying, and if you get knocked out you drop it for anyone to steal.
• Build: wood pushes a camp’s tug-of-war bar your way; stone builds walls that soak up the other team’s deliveries. Hold a camp for team bonuses — more tank damage, speed and faster refills.
• Four camps with a real look: a robot workshop shack, a flagpole flying the color of whoever holds it, a delivery cart, and log + stone piles that grow as you haul.
• Strikes! Holding camps charges your team’s strike. When it’s ready, your top hauler aims it on the map like a killstreak: Hose-Bots call in a Water Bomber that flies a line and puts out every fire under it, Firebugs call down a Meteor Shower that sets a whole area ablaze. Every impact flashes a warning circle 3 seconds before it lands — anyone caught, including your own team, takes a big hit, gets stunned and comes out soaked or scorched. Aim responsibly. Or don’t.
• New achievement + cosmetic: call in 50 strikes to earn the Strike Commander cap.
• Rounds are now 6 minutes (were 5) to make room for all of it.

Talk to your crew

• Voice chat! Hold V (RB) to talk to anyone nearby — yes, enemies can hear you too — or hold B (R3) for your team radio, heard anywhere on the map. Prefer open mic? It’s in Settings → Voice. Your robot’s mouth moves when you talk.
• Text chat! Press Y to talk to everyone or U for your team (Tab switches while typing). Steam’s own text filter applies your profanity settings.
• Party chat on the home screen while you get ready — Enter sends and keeps the box ready, and a Quick chat button has one-press phrases for controller players.
• Mute anyone’s chat or voice (and set their voice volume) from the Players list in the pause menu — remembered for next time.
• So reports can be reviewed, in-match text chat is kept for 90 days and then deleted. Voice is never recorded.

New toys

• Drain grenade — found in chests, either team. Empties every enemy’s tank in the blast: Hose-Bots dry out Firebugs’ fuel, Firebugs empty Hose-Bots’ water.
• EMP grenade — lies around the map for anyone to grab. Chain lightning freezes every robot it touches… including your own team — and they stagger at 70% speed for 2 seconds after. Hosed-down robots conduct it farther.
• Slurry sprayer — Utility Hose-Bots get a pink retardant hose next to the shovel. Slurry coats exactly what it hits and stops fire in its tracks.
• Accelerant sprayer — the Utility Firebug’s accelerant is now a stream: an oily slick that soaks ground, rocks and trees so fire catches and races through it.
• The laser painter is now the Snitch Beam: a properly sized ray gun (it was comically huge), and it hits harder the longer you hold it on a Firebug — up to 2.5x — while it wanders wider.
• Home turf — +50% damage to enemy players inside your team’s base.

Sound & music

• New soundtrack: a whimsical forest theme with a hint of smoke on the horizon — and as the fire spreads, the same melody turns urgent.
• The world sounds like where you are: waves and seagulls on the beach, birdsong in the woods, dry desert wind on parched ground.
• New sounds for chopping, mining, falling trees, deliveries, camp captures, strike sirens, whistling meteors and the Water Bomber’s splash.
• Refilling glugs — rising in pitch as your tank fills, so you can hear how full you are.

Fire & the world

• Fire looks like fire: flame tongues rising out of a glowing ember bed, with drifting embers.
• Burned ground chars black; hosed ground goes dark and glossy, then dries.
• Untended fires linger longer as they die down, so Firebugs have time to come back and feed them.
• Shovel trenches can no longer trap anyone — every dig ramps out into a slope you can walk up.

Tanks & classes

• Your team’s tanks slowly top you up when you’re near them (look for the ring). Hold E at the tank to fill at full speed.
• Tank health is readable: a readout up close, a floating bar at range, plus hit flashes and smoke.
• Utility and Support show their restock range as a ring on the ground.
• Utility restocking now gives from the Utility’s own tank instead of conjuring free water/fuel.

Matches

• Squads swap sides once, at halftime (rounds 1-3, then 4-6), instead of every round.
• Upgrade draft: click a card to select it, click again (or double-click) to lock in, and use Change pick if you misclicked.
• Your build at a glance: your upgrade cards show as icons next to the minimap.
• The warmup shows the next map loading in the background (“Next map ready”, bottom right).
• Throws have a short cooldown so one click can’t throw two at once.
• Clearer phase cues: a call to action on every GO!, first-time goal tips, and hints for the new tools.

Parties & friends

• Invites now ask first: Accept or Decline right on the party panel. Only your newest invite is valid.
• New Open party setting (Settings → Party): friends can Join you without an invite, from the game or Steam’s “Join Game”. Off by default.
• Party leaders can Remove a member (and invite them back any time).
• Parties stay on the same team for every match on a server, and a party that can’t fit evenly is split instead of making a lopsided match.
• The queue shows how many players are searching while you wait.

Your robot

• Pick your body in the Locker: male or female robot (the female model wears a skirt and a two-tone bow — the bow tucks away under hats). Works on both teams and with every cosmetic.
• Earned cosmetics: unlock caps by playing. The Locker shows what’s locked and how to earn it — and nobody can show off an item they don’t own.
• A bouncier, hoppier run.

Menus & settings

• How to Play is split into tabs: Basics, Camps & Strikes, Playing, Controls, Classes and Tips.
• New master volume slider, and a setting to mute game sound when the window isn’t focused (on by default; voice keeps playing).
• Keybinds: binding a key that’s already in use tells you which action gave it up and where it moved.
• Controller: A presses and B backs out everywhere; menus and the pause screen navigate cleanly.
• The game starts fullscreen properly even with another game open, and loading screens no longer flash gray.

Fixes

• You can no longer be matched with someone who already left the queue, and right after an update you can’t be sent to a server that just shut down.
• Reconnecting mid-round shows the trees and rocks already chopped and the wood / stone lying around.
• Fixed PLAY sometimes doing nothing for a party leader.
• If a friend is on a different Steam beta branch, the game tells you instead of silently failing.
• Utility Hose-Bots get their shovel in Practice too.
• 45 map props that were invisible now show up.
• Removed the old “Steam invite dialog” button — invite friends straight from the friends list.

Under the hood

• Much lighter networking and better GPU performance.
• Health, knockouts, resources and movement are checked by the server — a big step against cheating.