Captains & Caves: the first part of what I promised you
Captains & Caves
Early Access Update v1.5.6
This is the biggest update Pirate Twist has had, and the first one with work from a sound designer and an artist in it. It spent the last three weeks on the playtest, where people much better at breaking things than me broke it. If your last voyage was v1.4.4, pretty much everything below is new to you.
What I promised, and what's actually in
- Sound: I'm working with a sound designer now. The heavy cannon, the mortar, the splintering hit and Reyes's storm are theirs, and the rest of the battle got a full pass alongside them: cannon fire, impacts on hull and water, burning ships, chain shot tearing sails. Every captain ability and boss move has its own sound too
- Art: an artist has started reworking the game's art, piece by piece. Your sloop is the first thing back, repainted by hand. The world comes next
- Music: not yet. It is still mine, and it is still the next thing on the list
Your captain has a signature attack
Press H (R1 on a pad). It's ready when a fight starts and comes back 60 seconds after you use it.
- Marisol throws Greek fire off the bow
- Voss calls Ramming speed: a few seconds at half again her top speed, straight into whatever you point her at
- Sable fans the hammer and fires eight shots in a ring, all at once
- Reyes calls the storm down on ships in range. Three bolts a cast, and hers comes back in 30 seconds
- Rourke grapples a beaten ship alongside and takes it whole
Each captain also has a trait and a small passive kit now, so picking one actually changes how a voyage plays: Voss's rams hit twice as hard, a stern rake reloads both of Sable's broadsides, Reyes starts every fight on a fair wind, Marisol patches the hull once she's out of the fire, and Rourke's stern kills fill the hold.
The pirate captains answer
Bosses used to be a big hull and a bigger health bar. Now each of the six has a move, a passive, and something to say to you before you meet.
- Reaver Bron throws grappling hooks, drags you into ram range, and every ram that lands patches his hull
- Powderkeg Quinn drops kegs off the stern and shoots them under you. His magazine goes up when he sinks, so don't finish him alongside
- Ironjaw Holt lobs fire pots, and the water itself burns
- Blacksteel fires ahead of your bow and opens a whirlpool. Hold your course and the sea takes the wheel
- Deadeye Saint-Cyr marks your hull. Hold course and the ball can't miss. Put the helm hard over and the mark breaks
- Mara Vane sends boarders over the rail, and they leave with your gold
They also fire their whole battery now. On v1.4.4 a bug had every boss firing one ball a volley, which a player caught on video. That's fixed.
The Sea Cave is open, for real this time
I owe you a straight word on this one. In August I wrote that the Sea Cave had reached the live game. It hadn't. A switch I'd added so it could bake on the playtest first was still on, and no retail chart ever rolled one. That's on me.
It's open now, and it's a much better cave than the one I described back then. One per chart, twenty hand-built mazes, dark except for what you light. Fire shot is your torch, lit havens give you somewhere to breathe on the way in, and the moment the hoard is aboard, the roof starts coming down. A lone violin plays while you're down there.
Strike your colours
A pirate that strikes its colours can be plundered now. Come alongside and press F (R3 on a pad), and its hold comes over before it's scuttled. It pays better than sinking it and costs you no shot. Enemy guns also glow for half a second before they fire, so a hard turn at the right moment makes the volley miss.
A new skill tree
The captain picker and the captain chamber have new layouts, and the chamber is rebuilt around 21 skills in three lanes, up from nine. The first time each captain loads, every point you spent on the old tree comes back to spend on the new one. XP, level and Ascension stay as they are.
Controls, rebuilt
Every key and every button can be rebound now. You can also play the whole thing from the mouse: left fires, right swaps the broadside, the wheel shifts gears, and Mouse Steering in Accessibility turns the bow toward the cursor. That one came from a player who asked for it, and it's one of my favourite things in this update. Xbox, PlayStation and Steam Deck icons show up everywhere, and a pad reaches every screen.
Native Linux and the Steam Deck
Pirate Twist now ships a native Linux build, and the Steam Deck runs it instead of the Windows build under Proton. Your runs, captains and crew come across through Steam Cloud. Local settings (key binds, audio and display) start fresh once, because they lived with the Windows build. If anything runs worse than before, you can force Proton from Properties, Compatibility. Then please tell me, because I want to fix it.
Balance, the honest version
Some of this makes the game easier and some of it makes it harder. All of it:
- Regular pirate hulls are 20% thinner (Sloop 150 to 120, Brigantine 200 to 160, Galleon 400 to 320). Fights were dragging
- Enemy hits now scale with your max hull. This one is a nerf for hull-stacking builds, which were making the late seas trivial
- Each sea now starts at least as hard as the last one ended. Map 2 used to open softer than map 1 finished
- Levels raise enemy damage but not their rate of fire. Both used to climb together
- Voss's Ramming speed no longer doubles her rams. A boosted ram was sinking full-hull ships in one hit. It's a speed burst now, and her passive still doubles rams
- Reyes's storm comes back in 30 seconds instead of 60, and each bolt hits harder. She was the weakest captain by a distance
- Deckhand is properly easy now, and the first sea shows you every ship type
- A Treasure Hunt runs 90 seconds, each pickup adds 2, and the chests pay properly
- Healing a wounded hand costs 20 supplies instead of 4
Fixed, from your reports
- Plugging in a PlayStation pad no longer breaks the controls, keyboard included. A lot of you hit this one
- The little stutters the first time you fire, change ammo or ram are gone
- Window Mode has real fullscreen, and resolution lists your screen's actual refresh rate
- A sunk ship can always be stripped back to a free rebuild, so a run can't dead-end on a repair bill anymore
Still rough
- Text Size works on the menus but not yet on the port and in-game screens. It's on the list
- The new skill values and Reyes's storm are first-pass numbers. If something feels broken either way, tell me
What's next
More art: the world is next on the artist's desk, then the ships. Music: I'm still looking for the right person. More game: the next update is already built and in testing, including a new kind of Uncharted Waters encounter. And I'll keep taking your reports seriously, because most of this update started as somebody else's sentence.
Thank you to everyone on the playtest, and to the players who wrote to me, recorded their runs, or left a review that said something was wrong. You were right more often than not.
Bugs and ideas go to the Discord. Or just come and say hi. ⚓