Roadmap
Guide to Windrose's current Early Access roadmap situation, covering what Kraken Express has actually confirmed, what the March 23 pre-launch post did and did not guarantee, and which features are still planned for later.
Loading...
Loading...
Windrose does not currently have a date-by-date public roadmap. What Kraken Express has published instead is a broad Early Access direction: the game is expected to stay in Early Access for about 1.5 to 2.5 years and grow by roughly 50 percent before the 1.0 release. The studio has also said it wants to turn launch feedback into a more detailed roadmap later, rather than locking one in before enough players have touched the live build.
That distinction is the whole point of this page. Several Windrose pages and third-party articles blurred together three different things: current launch-state facts, pre-launch work-in-progress intentions, and genuine future roadmap promises.
Topic | Best Current Public Answer |
|---|---|
Early Access length | Roughly 1.5 to 2.5 years |
Total growth target before 1.0 | About 50 percent more content than the Early Access launch build |
Detailed date-by-date roadmap | Not published yet |
Future biome direction | At least one future biome is part of the plan; Ashlands is the clearest named example |
Console version timing | No concrete console schedule or platforms announced |
Official mod support | Still planned for later; the studio talks about making modding technically feasible |
The March 23, 2026 Steam news post is one of the most cited Windrose sources, but it is often misread. Kraken Express explicitly called that list work in progress and said some of the mentioned features could change or never make it into the game. In other words, it was a pre-launch status update, not a final contractual launch checklist.
That is especially important for multiplayer interpretation. The March 23 post discussed ideas like more players in co-op and co-op on one ship through battery manning, but the safer current official baseline after launch still comes from the FAQ and launch-facing messaging: up to 8 players total, one player commanding one ship, and broader shared-ship roles still being explored.
The March 23 update is still useful because it showed the studio's immediate pre-launch priorities in unusually concrete language. Kraken Express highlighted more players in co-op, co-op battery manning on one ship, randomized loot, hold-to-gather, an FOV slider, rougher backing vocals for shanties, a dedicated Signal Fire building piece, DLSS and FSR support, controller improvements, a dismantling workbench, and target-lock switching. But the studio paired that list with a direct warning that the items were still work in progress and some might change or never make it into the game.
That means the list is best used as roadmap context, not as a launch checklist. It tells you what the team believed players cared about most after the demo, and it gives useful insight into design priorities, but it does not override cleaner launch-facing sources when there is a conflict.
The multiplayer bullets from March 23 are where most downstream confusion came from. The post said the team was introducing battery manning and testing a higher co-op limit, while also warning that real performance would depend on player connections and server hardware and that the best gameplay experience still seemed to sit in the 1-to-4-player range. After launch, the official FAQ and launch messaging settled on a clearer public baseline: up to 8 players total, dedicated servers supported, one player commanding one ship, and broader multi-crew features still in the exploration stage.
In practical wiki terms, that means you should not read the March 23 post as proof that Windrose launched with a fully realized shared-ship role system. It is better evidence of what Kraken Express wanted to test and pursue than of what it had definitively locked in.
Bucket | How To Treat It |
|---|---|
Launch-state facts | Use official FAQ, launch post, Steam news, and dedicated-server guide. These describe what players can rely on now. |
March 23 pre-launch improvements post | Use as context for what the team was trying to ship or improve, but not as a guarantee that every bullet landed exactly as previewed. |
Future roadmap promises | Use only where Kraken Express clearly frames something as later Early Access or post-launch work. |
More biomes beyond the launch three, with Ashlands remaining the most clearly documented planned biome
More ships, ship equipment, and broader naval progression beyond the current launch lineup
More enemies, bosses, and points of interest across the Caribbean archipelago
More weapons, armor, and general build diversity
Additional story content beyond the Chapter 1 launch campaign
Continued quality-of-life work, onboarding cleanup, optimization, and multiplayer polish
None of those categories currently have public dates attached to them. That is the central roadmap fact as of April 16, 2026: the direction is clear, but the sequencing is still intentionally open. Players should expect the studio to respond first to live friction and only later publish a more formal long-horizon schedule.
Ashlands is not live. It was revealed during the Crosswind-era August 2025 pivot messaging and remains one of the clearest future-biome ideas in public developer communication. But as of April 16, 2026, it is still planned content rather than current content.
Deep multi-crew role play on a single ship as a settled, official launch feature
Any player-cap expansion beyond the current official 8-player messaging
Stronger permissions, storage security, and broader social-governance tools for larger communities
This does not mean the team is against those ideas. It means Kraken Express has not yet published the kind of hard confirmation that should let the wiki describe them as current features.
Launch week also showed which roadmap items may get pulled forward by reality. Server-link issues, discovery friction, onboarding confusion, combat complaints, and social-trust complaints around chest security all surfaced immediately. Even without a formal roadmap, that response pattern gives strong evidence that early patches are likely to keep leaning toward stability, onboarding, and friction reduction before the biggest content expansions arrive.
That reading is reinforced by the launch-day hotfix itself. Hotfix 0.10.0.1.6 dealt with localization, Nitrado link correction, and safer server-info visibility rather than new content. It was an operations-first update, which is exactly what you would expect from a team still stabilizing a popular Early Access release.
Windrose remains a PvE-first game. PvP is not part of the current core roadmap.
The business model remains buy-to-play, not microtransaction-driven or live-service-driven.
The team is prioritizing the PC build first, with console work only discussed as a later ambition.
Which quality-of-life fixes come before the first major biome-sized content update
Whether deeper multi-crew ship play becomes a near-term or late-term Early Access goal
How much of the next content wave will focus on story progression versus systems expansion
When, if ever, official mod support graduates from technical possibility to documented feature
Whether console work remains post-1.0 only or starts overlapping with the later PC Early Access phase
Those unanswered questions are not surprising when the live build is only days old. Kraken Express is still choosing not to over-promise. Until the studio publishes a more explicit roadmap, that restraint is part of the roadmap story.
If you read the launch-week response closely, the first roadmap pressure points are obvious: onboarding clarity, combat feel, hosting ergonomics, and trust tools for multiplayer worlds. That is an inference from player and press reaction, not a quoted roadmap promise. But it is the clearest way to understand what kind of updates the community is likely to prioritize before bigger biome-sized expansions arrive.
The launch-day hotfix already supports that reading. Kraken Express used its first post-release update on operational issues such as localization, Nitrado link correction, and safer server-info visibility rather than flashy new content. That is exactly how a team behaves when it is still stabilizing the live foundation.
The official Steam news feed for launch posts, hotfixes, and future roadmap messaging
the official website for long-form announcements
The official Discord for fast-moving clarifications and community pain points
Early Access - the live-launch state and current pricing/build facts
Launch Reception - what launch week revealed about player priorities
Multiplayer - current co-op reality versus later co-op ambitions
Ashlands - the best-documented future biome so far
On April 17, 2026, Kraken Express shipped Hotfix 0.10.0.2.54 as a scheduled online-maintenance update. The Steam news post warned players that online modes would be down for approximately one hour during the rollout; offline/solo play was unaffected. The hotfix focused on connectivity fixes and bug corrections rather than content additions, continuing the operations-first posture from Hotfix 0.10.0.1.6 on April 14.
Alongside the hotfix, the studio pushed an ISP investigation into the co-op connectivity failures affecting some European and North American players. In an April 16 Steam post, the developers said: "We've received multiple reports that some of our server addresses and backend services used for co-op may be restricted or blocklisted by certain ISPs across Europe and North America. We don't yet have a clear answer, but we're doing everything we can to get to the bottom of it." Kraken Express explicitly asked players with ISP contacts to help broker introductions, a direct community-help request that the press flagged as a notable first-week signal of how the team is handling operations issues.
This is the clearest real example of the roadmap principle stated elsewhere on this page: Kraken Express is responding first to live friction and leaving formal long-horizon content planning until launch-week dust settles. Two patches in four days, both focused on stability and localization rather than new systems, match that stated priority.
April 14, 2026. Hotfix 0.10.0.1.6: Launch-day stabilization. Minor localization fixes, corrected Nitrado integration link, server-info fields hidden by default with reveal buttons so players were less likely to expose details on stream.
April 16, 2026, 500,000 sales milestone post: Not a patch, but a community-facing update that coincided with the ISP-blocklist acknowledgment.
April 17, 2026. Hotfix 0.10.0.2.54: Connectivity fixes and bug corrections. Online modes offline for approximately one hour during rollout; offline unaffected.
April 19, 2026. Hotfix 0.10.0.3.104: Connectivity and QoL hotfix. Added a manual connectivity server picker with reachability indicators, a Direct IP connection option, and an automatic save-backup system that keeps up to 30 rolling backups per launch. Fixed a main-menu block for non-Unicode Windows usernames, a Plague Witch feather simulation bug, trader model and armor clipping issues across several sets, and HDR activation. No new items, enemies, or biomes shipped in this patch.
Hotfix 0.10.0.1.6 is a useful reference point for how Kraken Express is treating Early Access operations. The patch contents, per the Steam news post, were narrowly scoped: disable the access token generation cooldown for dedicated servers to improve dedicated-host connectivity, add a client-side check for server version so outdated-server joins show a UI error instead of failing silently, and remove the 8-character minimum for invite codes so that codes between 1 and 32 characters all become valid. Alongside the patch, the studio announced that further connectivity fixes were in testing and publicly asked for help reaching contacts at major ISPs because some of the game's backend addresses appeared to be blocklisted in parts of Europe and North America.
That posture fits the wider roadmap read on this page. Two hotfixes in four days, both narrow and operations-focused, match Kraken Express's stated plan to absorb launch-week friction before publishing a more detailed long-horizon roadmap. The 48-hour commercial proof points (500,000 copies sold, roughly 88 percent Very Positive on Steam, 69,544 day-one and 113,930 day-three peak concurrent players) give the studio room to keep treating stability as the first-wave priority.
By April 19, 2026, Windrose had passed one million copies sold and briefly hit a new concurrent-player peak of 202,000 on Steam. The cumulative picture at day six is three hotfixes (none adding new content), two sales milestones (500K on April 16, 1M on April 19), and a stated studio priority order of connectivity and stability before any content patch. The first content-bearing patch (new items, recipes, or mobs) is not expected before May 2026.
The second week of Early Access reinforced rather than reshuffled the roadmap pressure points already visible at launch. Concurrent counts, sales, and engagement all kept climbing through the launch fortnight, which gave Kraken Express more telemetry to inform the first content-bearing patch but also raised the bar for what that patch will need to deliver.
Metric | Value as of April 26 |
|---|---|
All-time concurrent peak | 222,134 on April 19, 2026 |
Cumulative sales (10-day) | Roughly 1.3 million copies sold |
Gross revenue (10-day) | Approximately $30 million on Steam |
Daily active users (peak) | 527,000 on the first Sunday |
Daily active users (floor) | Roughly 450,000 across the launch fortnight |
Steam top sellers (week of April 14) | Number two by revenue, behind Counter-Strike 2 |
Patches shipped April 14 to 26 | Three (0.10.0.1.6, 0.10.0.2.54, 0.10.0.3.104) |
First content patch ETA | Not before May 2026 |
The engagement profile is the most consequential roadmap input. Roughly a third of the 1.3 million purchasers had logged 20 or more hours by day ten, with about six percent past 50 hours. That depth of play tells the studio that the live audience has reached the mid-to-late launch content (Cursed Swamps, High Priestess, Blackbeard treasure chains) in large enough numbers to make the first content patch's content-target a measurable bet rather than guesswork.
Three roadmap pressures hardened during the second week. First, the post-Cursed-Swamps content vacuum is now a measurable problem rather than a speculative one, because the late-game engagement floor is large enough to make the absence of new biome content visible in retention metrics. The Ashlands biome remains the most clearly named future content, but no public release window has been confirmed. Second, combat-feel feedback (stamina cost, stun-lock, blocking utility) has moved from launch-week noise to a sustained discussion topic across community channels, which makes it likely to appear in a near-term tuning patch even before the first major content drop. Third, dedicated-server quality and chest-locking remain the most-cited social-trust gaps and now have ten days of corroborating community reports behind them.
None of these turn into dates on the roadmap by themselves. The studio's stated position is still that it wants to absorb feedback before publishing a more detailed schedule. But the second week tightened the gap between what players are asking for and what the existing content can satisfy, which makes the first content patch the most consequential post-launch decision the team has on the table.
Late April 2026 was the first time Kraken Express published a clearer roadmap signal since the launch window. The official communication came in two pieces: a community update on April 28, 2026 that talked about both immediate technical-stability work and the next major content beat, and a follow-up acknowledgment alongside the 1.5 million sales milestone on April 30, 2026 that the studio was leaning into the same operations-first cadence.
The single most-cited line from the April 28 update is the framing of the next major content drop: the next big content update will introduce the next biome called Ashlands, and the studio described it as scoped to take at least six months to deliver. The phrasing was deliberate. Kraken Express paired the timeframe with a stated philosophy of enriching current systems rather than adding biomes at speed, and explicitly said the next major drop will lean into technical stability and quality-of-life work first before unlocking new content.
Ashlands is the only future biome named in the late-April communication. The roadmap remains intentionally high-level, and the studio said more information will come in the following month or two. No specific release date has been attached. The article on Ashlands continues to hedge enemies, items, and bosses as projected and not confirmed in the current build, because there is no playable Ashlands content in any live build yet.
The six-month minimum framing is the main practical takeaway. Players reading the roadmap should plan around the launch-three biomes (Coastal Jungle, Foothills, Cursed Swamps) holding the live build for most of 2026, with Ashlands arriving as a major content drop later in the year or into early 2027. The studio specifically warned against treating the timeframe as a deadline; six months is the floor, not the target.
The April 28 update also previewed the bridge work that has to ship before the next major content drop. The first concrete piece of that bridge was Hotfix 0.10.0.4.268 on April 30, 2026, which delivered roughly forty new wall-triangle pieces, three new floor-triangle pieces, four Seedbed variations, a Force Relay Connection toggle, idle-CPU and disk-usage fixes, and over fifty quality-of-life adjustments. Hotfix 0.10.0.5.120 on May 4, 2026 followed up with the Steam Cloud save overhaul and a Data Recovery interface. See Patch Notes for the full change lists. Both patches sit firmly in the technical-stability bucket the late-April update described.
The April 28 update launched Windrose Support, an official feedback site that is now the primary channel for bug reports, suggestions, and feature voting. The platform is built around three duties: a troubleshooting database with grouped issue and solution write-ups, a category-routed bug-report form, and an idea-suggestion-and-vote function that surfaces what the live audience wants prioritized. The studio said the platform will gradually replace the Discord help server during the second half of Early Access. The site is English-only at launch.
The practical effect on roadmap reading is that the feature-vote function is now the closest thing to a public preference signal players can submit. Items that climb the vote stack are not automatic roadmap commitments, but the team has said they will use the data to prioritize among quality-of-life and content options when the bridge patches close out.
The non-negotiable design direction stayed intact through April. Windrose remains a PvE-first game with no PvP plans on the public roadmap. The buy-to-play model continues with no microtransactions or live-service plans. PC remains the primary platform; console work is still discussed only as a later ambition without a date. The 1.5 to 2.5 year Early Access window from the launch communications is unchanged. The April 28 update did not promise additional biomes beyond Ashlands; the more-biomes-and-systems-beyond-Ashlands language remains directional rather than scheduled.
On May 14, 2026, Kraken Express announced that Windrose had crossed 2,000,000 copies sold and that full production has begun on the next major content update. The studio framed the milestone post as a status update rather than a schedule change: the next major drop remains the Ashlands biome originally introduced in the April 28 community update, and the six-month-minimum framing from that communication has not been revised.
In practical roadmap terms, the May 14 post is the clearest public signal so far that the bridge-patch phase (hotfixes 0.10.0.4.268 on April 30 and 0.10.0.5.120 on May 4) is closing out and that the team is moving from stabilization-first work into content production. The studio still has not published a date-by-date long-horizon plan and reiterated the position that it wants live telemetry to keep informing prioritization before any dated roadmap is locked in.
The 1.5-to-2.5 year Early Access window from launch communications is unchanged
The roughly 50-percent-more-content target before 1.0 is unchanged
The PvE-only design direction is unchanged; PvP remains off the public roadmap
The buy-to-play model is unchanged; no microtransactions, no battle pass, no cosmetic store
PC remains the only confirmed platform; console work is still a later ambition without a date
The six-month-minimum framing for the Ashlands content beat is unchanged
No new client patch shipped between the May 4 save-system overhaul (Hotfix 0.10.0.5.120) and the May 14 two-million-sales post. The next patch after the milestone was Hotfix 0.10.0.6 on May 18, 2026, a small stability and quality build that reduced disk writes, fixed a cluster of ship artillery and battery bugs, switched action-panel inputs to commit on press instead of release, and resolved the character-deletion edge case that 0.10.0.5.120 had flagged as a known issue. Players should still expect more small hotfixes to land between now and the next major update, with the studio's stated priorities pointing at follow-up save-system polish and combat-feel tuning. The Windrose Support platform continues to be the primary feedback funnel, and the feature-vote function is now the closest thing to a public preference signal players can submit to influence which quality-of-life items land in those bridge patches.