Pirate RPG game is secretly looting your SSD lifespan — new Windrose patch promises smoother sailing and addresses excessive disk writing

Windrose, an early access PvE survival game made by Kraken Express, has come under scrutiny for consuming an abnormal amount of disk I/O during gameplay that will scare even the best SSDs. Multiple users have reported this issue in forum posts, and at least one YouTuber, Pixel Operative, has complained about it, revealing that the game can write up to 108 GB per hour to your SSD due to optimization issues in how it saves data. The new patch has substantially decreased the disk usage.

Players have discovered that the game will read from and write to storage virtually nonstop at speeds of around 15 MB/s to 30 MB/s, depending on the player’s location and in-game movement. According to footage Pixel Operative shared, disk usage will spike up to 30 MB/s constantly when the player’s character is running around a base. This behavior worsens when piloting a ship. The only times the game won’t constantly write to its host drive are when the character is standing still on land or moving around areas of the map that don’t exhibit high SSD load.

If we do the math, 30 MB/s comes down to around 108GB per hour. A four-hour gaming session would result in 432GB written. The excessive writing will not endanger modern TLC SSDs. However, QLC drives or older, worn-out drives are at higher risk.

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Pixel Operative also compared the game’s storage workload against two other titles, Enshrouded and Valheim, showing that Windrose consumes significantly more SSD resources than these two games. In 60-90 seconds, Windrose read 32GB and wrote 1.3GB from the drive. By contrast, Enshrouded, within the same timespan, read 7GB and wrote 695MB to the drive, while Valheim read 1GB and wrote 5MB to the drive.

Other users on various subreddits and Steam forums also reported abnormalities, including instances where the game reached up to 100% disk utilization and in-game disk usage consumed up to 30GB per hour. However, it's important to highlight that 100% disk utilization typically indicates active time or queue saturation, so it does not necessarily imply high MB/s throughput.

The game’s significant storage demand appears to be by design, not the result of a random bug. A technical analysis by NewMaxx/BoreCraft traced the behavior to Windrose's RocksDB-backed save system. The game appears to run at least three RocksDB databases, with the Worlds database using 22 column families behind a shared 1 MB max_total_wal_size. That very small WAL budget can force frequent memtable flushes and compactions, turning modest gameplay state changes into much larger physical write traffic. The evidence points to durability-oriented persistence tuning rather than corruption, but the analysis does not prove whether the configuration was an intentional developer choice or an overly conservative/default setup.

Luckily, the Kraken Express quickly deployed a patch to fix the issue. In the latest Patch notes for version 0.10.0.4, the developer has reduced the disk usage during gameplay. According to Pixel Operative's new findings, the game writes at between 10 MB/s and 16 MB/s. When the character is standing still, the write speeds drop below 1 MB/s. It represents a 60% to 75% improvement compared to the previous version of the game.

If you're playing Windrose, make sure to update your game to the latest version. Your SSD will appreciate you for it. With skyrocketing prices for SSDs, you have to take extra care of your SSD, after all.

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