Compare Revisions

11 SAND: Raiders of Sophie is an always-online PvPvE game. A run puts you on shared servers with other real players alongside the AI threats, so a stable connection and the online systems below matter as much as your build.
22  
33 Online Requirements
44  
5-The game requires a broadband internet connection and cannot be played offline. Matchmaking is based on your crew size, and the server population scales with it. The figures stated at launch were 15 players on solo servers, up to 36 on small-team servers, and up to 45 on large-team servers. The bracket boundaries themselves were redrawn in August 2026, when a duo-only queue was added and the small and large brackets became three-to-four and five-to-six players respectively. Later that month the matchmaker also began weighing a gear score built from a player's installed Trampler compartments and outfitted items.
5+The game requires a broadband internet connection and cannot be played offline. Matchmaking is based on your crew size, and the server population scales with it. The figures stated at launch were 15 players on solo servers, up to 36 on small-team servers, and up to 45 on large-team servers. The bracket boundaries themselves were redrawn in August 2026, when a duo-only queue was added and the small and large brackets became three-to-four and five-to-six players respectively. Later that month the matchmaker also began weighing a gear score built from a player's installed Trampler compartments and outfitted items. Since the September 10, 2026 update, brand-new players are matched with other new players for their first couple of matches before they join the general pool.
66  
77 Anti-Cheat and Controller Support
88  
99 FeatureDetailAnti-cheatBattlEye runs on the serversControllerFull controller supportConnectionBroadband internet required; always onlineMatchmakingBased on crew size; a gear score was added in beta on August 20, 2026CrossplayNot planned between PC and console at this time
1010 Supported Languages
1111  
1212 At Early Access launch the game supports ten languages: English, Ukrainian, German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Italian, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese.
1313  
14+Server Regions
15+ 
16+Every character is created in a server region and stays there, along with its inventory and tech tree; only Trampler blueprints follow you across regions. The game can also switch your region automatically when it thinks another one has a better ping, and the publisher's support pages note that the region picker can show a misleadingly low ping and pick a distant region for you. If a character seems to have vanished, check which region you are on before assuming it is lost, and reselect your nearest region manually each time you launch.
17+ 
18+On September 15, 2026 the developers began merging regions, after what they described as a few weeks of work to make sure characters and progression would survive the move. The maintenance ran longer than the one to two hours first estimated, and during it the team found and fixed a fault that was losing Central US characters. All of the merges were declared complete on September 16, 2026. The team has said the new layout is not final and that regions will keep being adjusted through Early Access based on player feedback.
19+ 
20+Before the MergeAfter the MergeBrazil, Central USEast USKorea, AustraliaAsiaGBEuropeUS WestUnchanged
1421 Server Stability and the Server Slams
1522  
1623 Server scaling shaped the launch timeline. Two pre-launch network stress tests, called Server Slams, ran in June 2026, drawing tens of thousands of players. The first surfaced server-scaling problems that were not visible at smaller test sizes and led the team to delay the launch and move to Early Access. A second Server Slam a week before launch served as a final check after the team shipped server-stability and bug fixes. Players who took part in a Server Slam receive an exclusive weapon skin in their inventory when they buy the game.
1724  
1825 Launch Stability
1926  
2027 The Early Access launch on June 22, 2026 drew a large player crowd and ran into heavy server problems, including outages and denial-of-service attacks. The team responded across the opening week. A server-side hotfix on June 23 added denial-of-service protections and corrected matchmaking that had placed solo players against teams, and a first update on June 26 added further protections while the developers continued investigating outages. A second update followed on July 3; the team briefly rolled back an earlier version of it after players hit connection and queue problems, then redeployed a corrected build. That update also tuned the BattlEye anti-cheat to reduce false-positive bans.
2128  
22-The team has continued to patch the live game after the opening week. A third update on July 10, 2026 added new content and fixes, and on July 12, 2026 a hotfix temporarily disabled the ability to capture rival players' Tramplers, a stopgap against a wave of cheating that relied on no-clip and teleportation exploits. The developers described the capture change as a temporary measure and said a dedicated update with protection against the most common cheats would follow. On July 14, 2026 a fourth update continued improving hit registration and how players and objects behave on moving Tramplers. On July 18, 2026 the team shipped the first phase of a broader anti-cheat overhaul, which it described as sharply reducing the most common cheats and hacks. A fifth update on July 24 followed with further anti-cheat work, terrain streaming improvements, and a fix for an item-duplication exploit, and the day before that the team removed duplicated items server-side from the accounts that had exploited it. Capture of rival Tramplers finally returned on August 3, 2026 alongside a sixth update, which the developers paired with further detection work and fixes for false positives. A seventh update on August 10, 2026 added an in-game ping system, reworked how the game handles character death and where a body ends up, corrected an anti-cheat false positive that fired when a player respawned on a moving Trampler, and made a further round of backend fixes. An eighth update on August 20, 2026 put gear-based matchmaking into beta, reworked Trampler reactors, added new armor sets and shell types, and cleared three more anti-cheat false positives that had been firing when players grabbed a ladder or started a parkour move in mid-jump, or simply fired a turret. It also closed a set of duplication exploits and one that let players swap standard ammunition for special types.
29+The team has continued to patch the live game after the opening week. A third update on July 10, 2026 added new content and fixes, and on July 12, 2026 a hotfix temporarily disabled the ability to capture rival players' Tramplers, a stopgap against a wave of cheating that relied on no-clip and teleportation exploits. The developers described the capture change as a temporary measure and said a dedicated update with protection against the most common cheats would follow. On July 14, 2026 a fourth update continued improving hit registration and how players and objects behave on moving Tramplers. On July 18, 2026 the team shipped the first phase of a broader anti-cheat overhaul, which it described as sharply reducing the most common cheats and hacks. A fifth update on July 24 followed with further anti-cheat work, terrain streaming improvements, and a fix for an item-duplication exploit, and the day before that the team removed duplicated items server-side from the accounts that had exploited it. Capture of rival Tramplers finally returned on August 3, 2026 alongside a sixth update, which the developers paired with further detection work and fixes for false positives. A seventh update on August 10, 2026 added an in-game ping system, reworked how the game handles character death and where a body ends up, corrected an anti-cheat false positive that fired when a player respawned on a moving Trampler, and made a further round of backend fixes. An eighth update on August 20, 2026 put gear-based matchmaking into beta, reworked Trampler reactors, added new armor sets and shell types, and cleared three more anti-cheat false positives that had been firing when players grabbed a ladder or started a parkour move in mid-jump, or simply fired a turret. It also closed a set of duplication exploits and one that let players swap standard ammunition for special types. A ninth update on September 1, 2026 concentrated on fair play and controls: it changed the backend to make it less likely that players who had teamed up before an expedition would land in the same one, put a player's account identifier beside their name so reports made outside the in-game tool could be matched up, added the conduct screen described below, and cleared two more anti-cheat false positives, one that fired on a Trampler ladder below a certain height and one that fired when a player resumed an expedition after backing out to the menu while crouched. It also fixed a backend fault that could strand players on a waiting-for-rival-expeditions screen that showed no expeditions at all. A tenth update on September 10, 2026 added the Threat marking described on Gameplay, changed matchmaking for new players, began issuing a reference number for every report, and fixed what the developers called one of the main reasons Voyage servers had been crashing over time, a build-up of game objects and colliders that inflated memory use and physics load. The server region merge of September 15 and 16, 2026 followed five days later.
2330  
2431 The developers have also described a planned safeguard they call an emergency parachute: if a server crashes during a run, players would keep the loot stored on their Trampler, with expedition progress saved roughly every ten minutes. As of the August 10, 2026 update it had not yet shipped. On console play, the team said in a July 2026 community Q&A that it is not planning crossplay between PC and console at this time, while adding that it hopes to share console news soon.
2532  
2633 One known matchmaking issue persisted past the first update: solo players could still be matched into larger crews. The developers acknowledged it was not fixed as of June 26 and, in early July 2026, said the fix was proving more complex than anticipated but remained one of their highest priorities. As with any Early Access release, the live service is being patched frequently, so expect both downtime and rapid fixes early on.
2734  
2835 For hardware requirements, see System Requirements. For the launch date, pricing, and platforms, see Release and Platforms.
2936  
3037 Ban Waves and Appeals
3138  
3239 Anti-cheat enforcement runs through BattlEye rather than the developers directly. In late July 2026 a large ban wave went out, and the studio published an overview explaining how to recognise it: a banned account works normally up to the point of entering an expedition, where it is kicked. The team said it reviewed the wave in detail and put its accuracy at at least 97 percent, leaving roughly 3 percent that might be false positives or cheaters its own systems had not caught.
3340  
3441 Because the bans are issued by the anti-cheat provider, appeals go to that provider rather than to the studio, and players are asked to include their account ID. The developers warned that repeated login attempts on a banned account make the penalty harsher, and said they intend to signal ban messages more clearly in a future update. They have also acknowledged that separating genuine exploits from legitimate play is difficult, since the system has to account for whether a player is on foot or riding a Trampler, whether they have grabbed a ladder, whether a machine is accelerating or has just collided with terrain, and for high ping and packet loss.
3542  
3643 Pre-Teaming and Queue Sniping
3744  
3845 Alongside the August 20, 2026 update the studio addressed reports of players manipulating matchmaking so they could be placed together on servers meant for smaller crews than they had actually formed. It said plainly that the behaviour is prohibited and that accounts found doing it are banned from the game, and set out what it was doing about it.
3946  
40-MeasureDetailFaster report handlingNew admins were brought in to manage bans and review reports more quickly, efficiently and regularlyCode of conductA code of conduct that players must accept before playing, making clear that third-party cheats and pre-teaming are prohibitedQueue protectionsWork to limit queue sniping, with the full rollout of gear-based matchmaking as the starting point, alongside queue delays and checks on players who repeatedly turn up on the same server togetherIn-game admin toolsA system that would let staff look into reports in real time and spectate a reported player for immediate confirmation, described as being at an early stageDaily bansBans for pre-teaming are now issued daily, where they had previously gone out in large periodic waves
47+MeasureDetailFaster report handlingNew admins were brought in to manage bans and review reports more quickly, efficiently and regularlyCode of conductShipped on September 1, 2026: the licence agreement and a Players Conduct screen are shown at the first launch, and again whenever either changes, making clear that third-party cheats and pre-teaming are prohibitedQueue protectionsWork to limit queue sniping, with the full rollout of gear-based matchmaking as the starting point, alongside queue delays and checks on players who repeatedly turn up on the same server together. A first backend change to reduce the chance of pre-teamed players sharing an expedition shipped on September 1, 2026In-game admin toolsA system that would let staff look into reports in real time and spectate a reported player for immediate confirmation, described as being at an early stageDaily bansBans for pre-teaming are now issued daily, where they had previously gone out in large periodic waves
4148 Players are asked to report suspected pre-teaming, exploiting or cheating through the in-game reporting system or the game's official community server.
4249  
50+Reporting is done during the expedition: open the menu, go to the players list, select the name and choose report. Since the September 10, 2026 update the game hands back a report number, which the developers ask players to quote if they follow up through the community server or customer support; they have said they will not share the outcome of a report. The publisher's support pages also spell out the difference between the three sanctions a player can run into.
51+ 
52+Kicks, Penalties and Bans
53+ 
54+SanctionWhat It MeansSuspicious-activity kickAn automated disconnect from a match. The developers say it is still being tuned and can be triggered by lag spikes and rubberbanding, by a handful of known bugs such as a character flung by a Trampler collision, or by software that stops the anti-cheat from starting. They suggest playing on the nearest region, switching off VPNs and network accelerators, and checking your ping in the debug menu, which opens on F11Temporary matchmaking penaltyBeing kicked a few times can lock you out of the queue for a cooldown that usually lasts about an hour and clears on its ownBattlEye banIssued by the anti-cheat provider, usually shown as error 41. Game support cannot lift it; appeals go directly to the provider
4355 Console Online Requirements
4456  
4557 The console listings carry their own online details. The PlayStation 5 listing states that PlayStation Plus is required for online play, that online play is required generally, that the DualSense wireless controller's vibration function is supported, and that the game supports up to 90 network players. The Xbox Series X|S listing is tagged for online co-op, online multiplayer, broadcast support, Xbox achievements, and optimisation for current-generation consoles. Neither listing carries a release date, and the PlayStation 5 entry still shows a rating of pending. See Release and Platforms for platform status.