Windrose studio outlines pirate survival hit's eagerly awaited first major content update, but it sounds like there'll be a bit of a wait

After only two weeks out on the early access seas, pirate-themed online survival game has made quite the splash on Steam. It's already sold over 1m copies and reached a peak above 200,000 concurrent players. And now, with its most pressing launch issues addressed, developer Kraken Express has revealed initial details of what's planned for Windrose's first major content update.

In its latest community update, Kraken Express confirmed a brand-new biome, Ashlands, will arrive as part of Windrose's first content update. "The roadmap of this update is very high level now," it explained. "We're populating it with our own plans and some popular requests, and then, as it's always with the game development, we will sit down and cut out some of the stuff to make it actually deliverable. Somewhere at this point we will be ready to present it to you, captains, so expect more information to come in a month or two."

"Our philosophy now is to enrich the current gameplay systems," it continued, "instead of only adding new biomes with the respective content, so even before we have the full details, it's safe to say the game will not just grow in size – it will also evolve."

However, before you get too excited, Kraken Express is letting everyone know it will take a while to get these additions ready. "The scope of what we want to do is rather ambitious," it noted, "so our best bet right now this update will take at least six months to deliver. This might sound like a long time, but we believe it will allow us to roll out an exciting and meaningful expansion to the game of appropriate quality."

While it continues to finalise its content plans, the team is also working on Windrose's next update, a smaller patch that deals with connectivity issues, CPU and disk usage, and performance and stability. Additions include "over 50 fixes and QoL changes" and around 40 new building pieces, so at least some form of content is coming soon.

Earlier this month, Eurogamer's Matt Wales took a look at Windrose's sizeable demo and was impressed with how it was shaping up. "It's not just that Windrose feels incredibly polished for a game that isn't even out yet," he wrote, "but that there's clearly some proper thought behind it too."