Hello sailors,
Welcome to the dark side of our moon! Barotrauma has, since February 2019, had a closed group of players who get to test unreleased builds as a part of our QA process, and we’ve now decided to make these test builds available to everyone who is interested. Read on to find out more.
Readme: Barotrauma Unstable Info
We hope everyone who accesses the test version reads this bit of text, so if you share the password with a friend, be sure to have them read this too.
Why?
- Servers on the Unstable version are incompatible for players on the release version, and vice versa. Server filtering will take care of the biggest issues here, but it’s still something to keep in mind – if you’re not seeing any servers, check which version you’re on.
- Mods made for the Unstable version may be incompatible with the release version. Again, filtering will take care of the brunt of it, but another thing to bear in mind. More about modding further on.
- The Unstable may be broken in interesting ways. Then again, it may at times also work better than the release version! This depends on which phase of our bugfixing and QA cycle we are at any given time.
Test builds are released whenever we are able to – a public update may be preceded by several test builds as we improve on the update before turning it in to our publisher’s QA. We will inform testers of a new build in our Discord, where you will find a new channel dedicated to tester talk and open to everyone.
Upon finding something askew or broken in the test version – and you will, very quickly; a Barotrauma testing round is not a testing round until you find yourself asking if anybody else is able to connect to a server, or why fentanyl is so OP AGAIN – you can discuss your find in the Discord channel mentioned above, and we hope you will also report it.
You can find a link in the game’s Pause menu that will direct you to write a report via a website form, and the most enthusiastic report writers can also make an account on GitHub to be able to submit reports straight to our issue tracker. Please read the instructions about what makes a bug report as useful as possible for us! Short version: details are everything.
The same Discord channel will also be used to announce MP testing rounds, by players and devs alike, and we hope you’ll participate when you are able to (and of course, do host your own test servers too). We’ve found a lot of bugs in the course of the last year during these sessions!
How to get it?
The Unstable version is an opt-in beta, which you can opt in and out of as needed. So, to access the test builds, you’ll need to
- Own the game on Steam.
- Head over to your Steam library > Barotrauma > right-click ‘Properties’ > Betas, and
- Enter the (highly classified) password in the “Enter beta access code” field, click “Check code” and then choose “unstable” from the drop-down:
Once you’ve opted in, the beta version will start downloading. After that’s done, you can start playing the Unstable version. Choose “NONE” in the above drop-down to opt out of the beta and play on servers on the release version again.
When the Unstable is opted into, the game will look like this in your Steam library:
Finally, there is no NDA, and you’re free to talk about what you see inside the Unstable (although it would be best to mark any “spoilers” as WIP, because anything in the unstable may end up changing before it’s released!). But please don’t just give the password to a friend and tell them to check it out; have them read this first.
About modding and the Unstable
As mentioned above, mods on the test version may not necessarily work for players on the release version, and players on the release version won’t be able to see them in the Workshop menu. We don’t recommend publishing mods for the Unstable on Steam Workshop unless it’s absolutely necessary for testing purposes and the mod cannot be shared through other channels.
You can, and are encouraged to, test out things and prepare for the next update, but we don’t guarantee that the new features/changes currently in the test version will make it to the public version – they may (rarely) end up getting scrapped altogether, or they may need to be altered in some way. In other words, there is no guarantee that the things you’ve done in the test version will work as-is in the release version, and you may need to put in considerable effort later to edit your work to make it available for players on the public version.
See you there!
We hope this will make it easier for the most interested players to get their hands on the test versions of Barotrauma and help us develop the game further. On a related note: For the newest test builds, released today, we’ve added more logging to debug the persistently annoying entity/event ID errors (“missing entity”, “invalid ID”…) in multiplayer. Now if the error happens, the server and the client write a log file with a bunch of debug data into the ServerLogs folder. If anyone gets those errors, please pass the logs to us along with your reports! The same logs will be added to the release builds later as well, but for the moment they’re only available in the Unstable.
If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to poke a Dev on our Discord!
deez
doesnt work how to make it work
deez
it tells me “invalide beta code”