Summer greetings and upcoming changes

Hello everyone!

After the release of the Summer Patch and subsequent hotfix, we’re shifting gears towards our summer vacations. Our team will be taking some time off in the coming weeks, so we will be a little slower to respond on social platforms. We’ll be back in full force in August!

Before heading out for some sunshine and relaxation, however, we want to preview a change which is coming in the next update. The meat of that update will be the traitor overhaul, and we’ll write more about that later; the topic that we want to discuss now has to do with item stack sizes and storage containers.

Upcoming storage changes

As storage containers can be placed inside cabinets, it’s possible to hoard massive numbers of items in a sub by filling containers with items and cabinets with containers… but the user experience of finding the items you need in a cabinet full of containers is far from great, and the resulting number of items on board a submarine also has a habit of hurting performance badly.

So, we’re going to remove storage containers from the game. We anticipate this may be a contentious change, as it does cut back on the number of items you can store on board your sub. To make up for the loss, we’re adjusting item stack sizes – and we’re making the upcoming storage changes available in the Unstable test version now to have extra time for playtesting and feedback. We hope many of you will take an early look over the summer, so we can still make adjustments before the update’s public release in the autumn!

Let’s walk through the storage changes that are currently in the Unstable version:

• Storage containers are removed entirely, as they aren’t even obtainable through normal gameplay anymore and only exist for backwards compatibility.
• Stack sizes of materials and meds stored in cabinets increase to 32 (from the current 8) to compensate for the loss of storage containers. This should still allow you to store a healthy stash of items, and when placed inside cabinets without a storage container in between, you can see what’s where and find it more easily. This limits the maximum capacity of a cabinet to roughly a third of what it has been with storage containers – still plenty of room, we hope!

• The maximum stack size of character inventories and wearable/holdable items remains 8, so you can’t hold stacks as big on your person as you can store in a cabinet.
• The newest Unstable build fixes “packet size exceeded” errors when there’s too large a number of items in an inventory. With the new separate limit for inventory item stacks, this error can happen due to stack sizes being increased beyond the limit by a mod.
• Related to the above, we’re also adding a way for mods to bypass the 8-item limit in inventory stacks, and we’ll continue keeping an eye on other things we may need to adjust to allow mods to keep working following these changes.

Wishing you a great summer!

We look forward to hearing what you think about these changes. Any feedback is good feedback; you can discuss the stacking changes in the #baro-unstable channel of our official Discord server, post your feedback on the Unstable subforums on Steam, or send us issue reports and more technical critique in our issue tracker on GitHub.

On a parting note, we’re also adding the first iteration of the overhauled traitor system to the Unstable version now. That’s to say, you can already test the new system and the first batch of new traitor missions during the summer, and we’ll write a preview of the traitor mode changes for everyone to read after our vacations.

Happy summertime, everyone!