Windrose Reveals 2026 Roadmap, Confirms First Major Update is Called Ashlands

The development team behind Windrose has started to unveil its 2026 roadmap, including revealing signs of the first big content and story update. A pirate-themed, open-world survival crafting RPG that’s been taking Steam by storm over the last couple of weeks, Windrose still has plenty in store to reveal to its ever-growing player base, and early updates are expected soon.

Launched in early access on Steam on April 14, Windrose has been wowing early players with its naval-themed combat, rich world design, settlement growth, and more. Windrose has already hit some impressive player milestones, with an all-time peak of more than 222,000 concurrent players, and its reception has been pretty grand to boot, with the game sporting an 88 percent player approval rating among the more than 16,000 reviews left on Steam.

How to Make Money Fast in Windrose

If you want to make money quick in Windrose, forget about raiding ruins and sail for the high seas instead.

Windrose Lays Out Plans for Future Updates

Although its early access release happened very recently, Windrose‘s development team at Kraken Express is far from resting on its laurels and is already sharing plans for the game’s first round of updates. Part of that plan includes a big content update, which likely won’t be arriving until late October at the very earliest, but Kraken Express has promised that its ambitions are high to deliver on the game’s continually unfolding story. Not much can be revealed at this early stage, but one nugget of information that is ready to unveil is that Windrose‘s open world will be receiving at least one new biome, which is called Ashlands. Kraken Express also wants to see a major evolution of the gameplay, so players will have to be patient to see what else is in store, though the developer’s update states they should only have to wait a month or two for more information.

Before that big content update can happen, though, there is still a lot of housekeeping to do, which the developers plan to handle through smaller updates that will be arriving much more quickly. Some features that will need tweaking relate to Windrose‘s performance, stability, connectivity, and CPU and disk usage, along with more than 50 planned quality-of-life changes. Players should also expect to see improvements to Windrose‘s crafting and building systems, as more than 40 new building parts are planned for release in order to “fill some gaps and inconsistencies.” The developers have also identified issues with some Steam Cloud saves and are currently working on a solution. It’s likely that the dev team will be looking for some players to test out the features of the smaller updates in the near future.

Kraken Express has already been using player feedback to fuel its upcoming updates, and it’s now introduced a new tool that will provide players with a better direct line to the development team. The new windrose.support system is currently live in beta but should support several features in the future, allowing for the reporting of troubleshooting issues and game bugs. It will also provide a platform for the players to share ideas that could change Windrose for the better, and users will even be able to vote on other players’ suggestions to encourage the developers to implement them.

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The developer update did not make mention of plans to bring Windrose to PS5 or other platforms, so fans should expect it to be accessible solely through Steam for the foreseeable future. Previous comments from Kraken Express have indicated that there is interest in expanding to the console market, but the team would like to get the game through its 1.0 update at least before pursing that venture.