Windrose devs don't have any progress wipes planned for early access, but 'of course s**t happens'

Early access survival games can be dangerous for players, and not just when it comes to murderous monsters. As games get patched and updated over years of early access development, the consequences for players can occasionally be dire: corrupted saves, lost items, overwritten bases, and sometimes flat-out world wipes that sets everyone back to square one.

Windrose is the new early access survival game hotness, and today its developers, Kraken Express, wanted to reassure players that on the long voyage to a 1.0 release, they don't need to worry about losing all the piratey progress they've been making.

Probably.

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"We stated it before, but looks like it is worth repeating: NO WIPES are planned!" Kraken Express said today in its Discord. "We do our best on tech side to allow all the future updates to keep your progress intact all the way to 1.0 release."

Still, this is early access, and the developer quickly caveated that statement:

"Of course shit happens," Kraken Express said, "but our plan, intentions and our current implementation of the game is that we can roll out major updates while keeping everyone's progress and worlds. This was one of the common pain points we noticed when we started working on Windrose, and this is something we have always taken into account."

That's reassuring, mostly. As a frequent early access survival game player, I can attest to logging back into a few games (they shall remain nameless) after a major patch and finding my base was swallowed up by a change in the world's terrain system, or learning that my save file was no longer compatible with the newer version of the game. Hopefully, Kraken Express can avoid those sorts of heartbreaking (though understandable) events with Windrose over the next couple years of early access.

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