Patch Notes

Every
Update

What changed, when, and why — every Powder & Plunder release, newest first. Back to the game →

A note on the older entries: notes from v1.23.2 onward were written for this page at the time. Everything before that has been rewritten, after the fact, from the internal development changelog — the changes and dates are accurate, but the wording wasn't originally written for players. Dates are when each build actually reached this site.

v1.25.1 Current 17 August 2026
Ascension Points arrive — a whole new permanent progression system
  • New: Ascension Points — a second permanent currency, separate from Pirate Points, earned every time you take a Pirate's Pact (the rate climbs the more pacts you've taken). Spend them on nine repeatable perks — extra gold from sinkings, a stronger pact-damage bonus, cheaper Manifest upgrades, a bigger Treasure Box, heavier Broadside hits and more — each gaining a new purchasable level every 10 pacts, with no ceiling.
  • New: Tier Skips — every 10th pact also unlocks one: a permanent shortcut that starts every future voyage past a tier you've already mastered, crediting the gold and idle income it would have paid. Find both in the new Ascension panel in the Black Market, right beside the Pirate's Pact.
  • Already had pacts under your belt before this update? You've been credited the Ascension Points you'd have earned all along — nothing lost by updating late.
  • New: pop-up guides the first time you unlock the Broadside, a matey slot, Woodrot, or run into a shielded hull — plus a banner up top flagging anything newly available, tap to jump straight there.
  • Woodrot now unlocks a tier earlier, on the Navy Corvette instead of the Frigate, so it no longer lands on the same tier as enemy shields.
  • Pirate Points earned per voyage halved — spend-side prices are unchanged, so everything simply takes a little longer to afford. A deliberate slow-down after it ran too generous.
  • Taking your next pact now asks you to sail a little further each time you've taken 10 more — the trade-off that keeps your permanent pact-damage bonus free to keep growing forever, safely.
  • The show-all / show-purchasable toggle is icon-only now, no label.
v1.23.2 12 August 2026
Charted Waters, fixed for good — plus a new lifetime achievement
  • Charted Waters now works on every tier you've ever beaten, not just the first one of a fresh voyage — every past mastery keeps paying off, every future pact.
  • New: Tier Master achievement — +2% damage for every ship tier you've ever fully cleared, cumulative, up to +20% once you've conquered all ten.
  • Fixed two achievements — Storm of Iron and Master Gunner — that were quietly not boosting damage at all.
  • Gun Crew Damage and Matey Damage now scale smoothly from zero instead of jumping in with a head start. The caps themselves are unchanged (Gun Crew 60%, Matey 40% of your round shot), but if you'd already maxed either line, expect your numbers to shift.
  • The Captain's Log now shows your real damage multiplier for cannon, crew, matey and Broadside — one number each, at a glance.
v1.23.1 8 August 2026
Quick follow-up to v1.23.0
  • "Hide maxed/unaffordable" is now a toggle button — a little eye icon that grows a pirate eyepatch when active — instead of a checkbox.
  • Charted Waters no longer waits for the Fire Ship to be sunk — it's available as soon as you've taken your first Pirate's Pact.
v1.23.0 8 August 2026
Bug fixes, quality of life, and the first Charted Waters
  • Gun Crew Damage, Matey Damage and Salvage Crew now visibly lock at their caps ("Fully trained" / "Fully crewed") instead of silently doing nothing past them.
  • Gun Crew and Matey fire rate both now floor at a true 0.1s — no more invisible wall stranding your levels short of it.
  • Menus auto-close: opening a new category in the Manifest, Black Market or Captain's Quarters now collapses whichever other one was already open.
  • New "Hide maxed/unaffordable" filter for the Manifest and Black Market.
  • New: Charted Waters — spend Pirate Points to permanently pre-clear stages of your next voyage's opening tier.
v1.22.0 1 August 2026
Manifests, the doubloon store rebuilt, and 601 translated keys
  • Four new Ship's Manifest lines: Cartographer's, Deepwater, Strike and Bullion Manifests.
  • Doubloon store rebuilt — Doubloon Bullets moved to doubloons, Doubloon Strike and Count are now fixed ladders, plus new Captain's Purse and Quartermaster's Ledger.
  • Diving reworked for bigger, faster hauls — offline kills now credit dives too.
  • New discount line: Shipwright's Favour + Quartermaster's Ledger, up to 10% off every Manifest upgrade.
  • Seawater Bullets reworked into Lava Bullets — now feeds your barrel bonus charge instead of fizzling it.
  • Two new hourly boosts: Fast Charge and Twin Barrels.
  • Five new sea themes, and every locked theme now has a doubloon fallback.
  • 601 translated keys across all 14 non-English languages, full parity.
  • Fixed: the Stormjack skin and Tempest theme were completely unreachable; a translation bug had 14 languages describing the Lava effect as seawater.
v1.21.0 28 July 2026
Store restructure — premium upgrades move to premium currencies
  • Diving reworked around ships sunk instead of a gold-skim rate, unlocked by the new Diver's Rig.
  • Black Pearl shop rebalanced — Sunken Hold and Pearl Haul no longer fight each other; buying one never costs you pearls.
  • Doubloon shop grows: Multi Shot, Doubloon Strike and Doubloon Yield moved here, so upgrading them now costs the currency they produce.
  • Fixed: repeated Doubloon Exchange notices piling up on screen; the Collect and Dive buttons stuck in English in every language.
v1.20.0 Shipped alongside v1.21.0, 28 July 2026
Combat rebalance, economy caps & anti-cheat
  • Woodrot and Shield Piercer both reworked to scale off your own damage instead of the enemy's health bar — no more shots stuck dealing exactly 1 damage in the late tiers no matter how much you'd invested.
  • Offline combat now respects enemy shields too.
  • Doubloon Strike/Yield capped, and the sunken hoard limit now tracks your income instead of sitting at a flat number.
  • Permanent ad-watch bonuses capped, and the daily-reset clock hardened against manual date changes.
  • The floating bonus-ad coin appears twice as often.
v1.19.0 25 July 2026
Portuguese, French, Russian, Vietnamese & Thai — 15 languages total
  • The final localization batch — Português, Français, Русский, Tiếng Việt and ไทย join the game, all in the same roguish pirate tone.
  • New fonts for Cyrillic and Thai script, and a fix for a Vietnamese font-stack issue that was splitting accented letters apart.
  • The Overdrive bar label is now translated — it had been stuck in English in every non-English language since v1.16.
v1.18.0 25 July 2026
Japanese, Korean, Italian, German & Filipino — 10 languages total
  • New fonts so Japanese and Korean render correctly, plus smarter browser-language detection.
v1.17.1 22 July 2026
Language picker fix
  • Replaced the old cycle-through language button with a chip picker showing every supported language at once.
v1.17.0 22 July 2026
Hindi & Mandarin
  • New Devanagari and Han fonts so both languages render properly instead of as blank boxes.
v1.16.0 22 July 2026
Spanish & Indonesian — the game's translation engine arrives
  • Every piece of player-facing text now flows through a real translation system, with Spanish and Indonesian as the first two languages.
  • New language picker in Settings.
v1.15.0 22 July 2026
Accessibility
  • New Accessibility settings: a colourblind-safe palette, high contrast, adjustable text size, larger touch targets, and a one-handed layout mode.
v1.14.2 21 July 2026
Number & effects polish
  • Big numbers no longer overflow into raw scientific notation at the high end.
  • Floating damage numbers jitter and de-clutter under heavy fire instead of stacking into an unreadable pile.
  • Fixed a rewarded-ad bug that could pay out twice.

That's as far back as detailed notes go — earlier versions exist but weren't recorded for players at the time.