Patch History

This page lists every update the developers themselves tag as a "Major Update" on Steam — the headline patches with their own announcement, not the routine hotfixes and dated mini-updates between them. It is drawn straight from Steam's own Major Update category, so it tracks the game rather than anyone's hand-kept list, and each entry links to the official announcement. Where a big update was tested first, the entry links the patch that actually went live, not the test-server opening. It runs newest first. For the story that ties these milestones together — the wipes, the ownership changes, the pre-Steam years — read Dev History instead. The tag reaches back to late 2019; because the game is patched several times a month, the live Steam announcements feed is always the most current record.

2026

• August 2026 Major Update: PvP Rewards, RoE Update, Penetration Overhaul & other — 10 August 2026 — A broad update touching combat, conquest and the economy at once. It introduced a per-ship Rating combining battle rating with the value of a ship’s woods, upgrades and guns, and paid rewards for sinking players in proportion to it; capped PvP attacks at six times the attacker’s battle rating; rebuilt penetration around fixed armour thicknesses and named distance thresholds; doubled the armour repair’s cooldown and its effect while barring armour and crew repairs from the opening of a battle; put NPC attacks on player-held ports on a schedule keyed to how many ports a clan holds; and rewrote every ship and cannon recipe to cost several times more and to require doubloons. It opened on the test server on 3 July.
• April 2026 Update: New Ship Montanes, new Combat, new Rules of Engagement & more — 6 April 2026 — Added the Spanish ship of the line Montanes (also sold as a DLC ship), a reworked combat pass, and returned the Rules of Engagement toward their 2016 two-sided principles (battles open to both sides for 45 minutes).

2025

• Christmas Fishing: Fishing, Port Timers, PvP Area, and More — 23 December 2025 — A holiday update adding fishing, port-timer changes, and a new PvP area.
• Major Changes, Improvements, and Bug Fixes – October 2025 — deployed to live servers 14 October 2025 — The "August 2025 Major Update," shipped after a long testing run: a new sailing model that sorts every ship into four classes, a reals-for-damage reward system with a daily leaderboard, and a wide pass of balance and bug fixes. It first opened on the test server on 6 August.
• MATERIA PRIMA Patch and Final Last Wipe and Reset — deployed 10 April 2025 — The sweeping Gunpowder / Materia Prima overhaul of resource supply and the economy, billed as the "final" full wipe and reset. The Peace server carried straight through it. It was trialled on the Gunpowder test server from late February.

2024

• Forthcoming Large Update: Naval Action Reborn — 16 May 2024 — Previewed the "Reborn" overhaul: reworked combat across ship classes, a fix for the boarding meta, a leak and heeling rebalance, and a refocus onto a few core activities — the banner the 2025 wave would land under.
• New Season Patch: Combat improvements, repairs and more — 24 January 2024 — Added a repair cooldown, raised crew requirements and lengthened in-battle repair time, and made ship and gun crafting harder for individuals and small clans.

2023

• New season! — 17 July 2023 — Opened a new competitive season with the customary reset.
• Major Update: Safe zone, Ship race, New Combat model, and various other changes — 15 May 2023 — The headline "Safe Zones" update: protected green zones along most of the coastline, a new combat model, crew-size-by-class changes, and a weekly solo ship race. First previewed in early April with an early-May ETA.

2022

• Launch of F2P – Caribbean server, seasonal resets and patch notes — 18 October 2022 — The biggest structural change since release: Naval Action went free-to-play, opened the new seasonal "Caribbean" server, and began the seasonal era.
• Major Patch – Gameplay improvements and Investments rework — 23 June 2022 — Reworked port investments and bundled a range of gameplay improvements ahead of the free-to-play relaunch.

2021

• Major Update: Holiday Truce, Bravery perk, universal upgrades, other changes — 20 December 2021 — The year-end update adding the anti-gank Bravery perk, reclassified "universal" upgrades, a wind-shadow indicator, and faster open-world speeds.
• Major Seasonal Update 2021 #1 — 27 May 2021 — The first major seasonal update of 2021.

2020

• Massive repair update — 4 December 2020 — A major rework of the in-battle repair system.
• Wind shadow update, hold no longer affects speed, and Contracts — 7 October 2020 — Eased the wind-shadow speed penalty, removed the cargo-load speed penalty so loaded and empty ships sail alike, and added buy/sell contracts to the market.
• Seasonal Patch: The Missing Links Part 1 — 21 August 2020 — Introduced battle sails and the original wind-shadow mechanic, with sailing, damage-model, and gunnery reworks. (Around this time the developers moved their patch notes from the old forum to Steam.)

2019

• Seasonal Update: Treacherous Waters Part 2 — 1 December 2019 — The second part of the first post-launch seasonal update.
• Seasonal Update: Treacherous Waters — 22 October 2019 — The first seasonal update after the game left Early Access, and the earliest update Steam carries under the Major Update tag.