# Barotrauma Out now: Winter Update 2024

- Product: Barotrauma (https://whatsnew.fyi/product/barotrauma)
- Vendor: FakeFish
- Date: 2024-12-11
- Original notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/602960/view/497181733565759530
- Permalink: https://whatsnew.fyi/product/barotrauma/releases/2024-12-11-out-now-winter-update-2024

What's New is an index, not a publisher: every entry below links to the vendor's own release notes, which are the authoritative source. Entries are labelled where they are hand-curated sample data, pre-releases, or drawn from a secondary source such as a developer blog.

Reuse: the summaries, labels and curation here are © What's New. Quote freely with attribution and a link back; wholesale republication of the corpus is not permitted — terms: https://whatsnew.fyi/terms. The vendors' own release notes remain their publishers'.

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- **added** — Added a toggle run input that can be set in the settings menu
- **added** — Added an option in settings to launch the game on a specific display
- **added** — Added option to change alarm sirens to a claxon horn sound
- **added** — Added option to refresh available audio devices in game settings
- **added** — Added one new research outpost event to foreshadow longer ruin event chain
- **added** — Ruin scan missions now show a progress bar indicating the status of scans
- **changed** — Improved environment visuals with level wall fade-to-black effect and more natural wall shapes
- **changed** — Made dry or partially dry rooms more common in wrecks
- **changed** — Reworked Berilia with layout improvements, added bottom docking port, more windows, replaced cameras with searchlights, simplified battery setup and increased reactor output
- **changed** — Reworked Kastrull drone to be less ugly, sturdier, with accessible ballast through hatch
- **changed** — Made electrician's goggles easier to get by spawning as part of sub's initial supplies, allowing purchase from outposts, and removing fulgurium requirement for fabrication
- **changed** — Game now automatically attempts to switch to another audio device if the current one is disconnected
- **changed** — Giveaffliction console command now auto-completes identifiers as well as names
- **changed** — Added new playstyle banners
- **fixed** — Fixed bandits occasionally failing to power up beacon stations they reside in
- **fixed** — Fixed non-human enemies not firing ranged weapons if there's a dropped riot shield or other blocking item in the way
- **fixed** — Fixed bots sometimes getting stuck walking towards a door if the button or mechanism is far away and unreachable
- **fixed** — Fixed bots and husks being unable to enter Barsuk, Camel and Remora through the airlock
- **fixed** — Fixed bots being unable to enter through Camel's bottom hatch
- **fixed** — Fixed bots spotting characters that should be undetectable by AI such as camouflaged Mantises

Hello everyone, and merry holiday season!

Our Winter Update has just been released, with various fixes, improvements and optimizations. Read more about the update in last week’s [preview post](https://barotraumagame.com/announcements/holiday-greetings-and-update-preview/) and find the full list of changes at the end of this text.

Be sure to update your game to the latest version to be able to host and join multiplayer games. We hope these improvements will make playing more enjoyable, and that you have fun times in Barotrauma over the holidays!

We’ll still be around for a little longer and release a hotfix if needed, and after next week, we’re heading out for our yearly Christmas break. We wish everyone a beautiful and relaxing holiday season. See you again in January!

_v1.7.6.0_

Changes:
- Added a "toggle run" input (so you no longer have to keep holding shift to run). Not bound to anything by default, but can be set in the settings menu.
- Improvements to environment visuals: the inside of level walls fades to black to make the texture tiling less obvious when zoomed far out, improvements to the shapes of the level walls (more natural shapes, less long and straight wall segments).
- Ruin scan missions show a progress bar indicating the status of the scans.
- Made dry or partially dry rooms more common in wrecks.
- Option to change the sound of the alarm sirens to a claxon horn sound (the "traditional" AWOOGA-AWOOGA submarine alarm sound).
- "giveaffliction" console command now auto-completes identifiers as well as names.
- Reworked Berilia (kudos to WJohnston): layout improvements, added a bottom docking port, more windows, replaced cameras with searchlights, simplified battery setup and increased reactor output, minor visual improvements and a lot of miscellaneous tweaks.
- Reworked Kastrull drone (less ugly, a little sturdier, the ballast can be accessed through a hatch).
- New playstyle banners.
- Added an option in the settings to launch the game on a specific display.
- Option to refresh the available audio devices (both playback and input devices) in the game settings. The game should now also automatically attempt switch to another device if the current one is disconnected. However, whether this can be done automatically can depend on the audio device, driver and the operating system, and in some cases it may be necessary to choose a new device manually from the game settings.
- Made electrician's goggles easier to get (spawns as a part of the sub's initial supplies, can be purchased from outposts, doesn't require fulgurium to fabricate). The goggles are intended to help less experienced engineers get a hang of wiring in particular, so it doesn't make sense for them to be so difficult to get.
- "Safe rooms" are no longer indestructible in beacon stations (felt confusing, especially when it wasn't apparent from the look of the walls).
- One new research outpost events to foreshadow the longer ruin event chain.

Optimization:
- Rendering optimizations that should give a major performance boost to situations in which there's lots of structures visible.
- Changes to the physics engine to improve collision detection performance. In technical terms, the game now disregards potential collisions between things that can never collide (such as two characters and most items) much earlier in the collision detection logic.
- Significant optimizations to memory usage. These will mainly reduce load times and lag spikes as the game needs to do less cleanup to free memory that's no longer needed by the game.
- Optimized character ragdolls (building them out of simpler collision shapes).
- Optimized LevelTriggers (things in the level that can react to objects and apply effects to them, such as water currents).
- Optimized the logic for refreshing the positions of items that are inside a moving inventory (such as a character's inventory).
- Miscellaneous optimizations to things such as explosions, AI logic when a bot is operating a

_[Truncated at 4000 characters — full notes: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/602960/view/497181733565759530]_