Windrose breached early access late last month. As you might expect from something a few port calls shy of a full release, it’s not all been smooth sailing, with a number of Steam users saying that the pirate versus environment game has been hammering their SSDs. Thankfully, developer Kraken Express have now released a patch.
Content creator Pixel Operative brought wider attention to the issue, by running some quick tests on the game themself and sharing their findings to X and YouTube. Apparently, when compared to similar survive ’em ups Enshrouded and Valheim, Windrose exhibited “significantly [larger] read/write numbers for less than 2 minutes of game play.”
Tom’s Hardware also later covered the issue, calculating that 432 GB could potentially be written to your drive over the course of a four hour session.
This astronomical write volume could significantly shorten the lifespan of QLC SSDs (which are arguably more efficient at storing data, but generally have lower TBW ratings) or otherwise aged drives. That’s definitely not good news in the midst of a memory supply crisis. Thankfully, patch notes for version: 0.10.0.4.268-9d2ca277 say that “disk usage during gameplay has been reduced.”
Kraken Express have continued to tinker with and refine the game’s save structure since. For instance, version 0.10.0.5.120-073042fb dropped yesterday, and the patch notes say, “The game now automatically backs up all data every 10 minutes of gameplay and upon exiting.”
Even with all the aforementioned technical hiccups, the devs aren’t currently planning on any progress wipes during early access. However, the studio did recently warn, “Of course shit happens.” Arrr, just like the high seas, early access can be an unpredictable place.
As such, Windrose captains shouldn’t expect much beyond bug fixes and improvements to stability for the foreseeable future, with the next big content update being at least six months away from reaching the shore. Kraken Express attempted to manage expectations, sharing, “All the new content and features we want to deliver takes time.”
Because I’m based a stone’s throw away from Bristol in the UK, it’s definitely a pirate’s life for me, oo ar. So, with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced still a ways off from pulling into port in July and Windrose’s excessive data writing curtailed, I know exactly where I’m gonna drop anchor in the meantime.