Packmates news & patch notes

Hey Packmates!

Our first major update is here! Including a new hero, Cockatiel, events, fixes, item changes, and some other spicy features to shake things up a bit.

Cockatiel

Cockatiel is our new master of auras. He may look cute and happy but make no mistake, he is a menace and wants nothing more than to watch everything burn around him. He comes with his own progression tree and two classes. Bard and Jester.

Bard

Bard buffs cooldowns of both him and his allies. Who doesn't like party wide DPS increases?

Jester

Jester distracts and applies exposure to enemies around him, increasing your party's crit chance against them.

Class Changes

Barbarian

Wolf's Barbarian alt class hasn't felt very rewarding or unique, especially since it was very similar to the Thirsting Ruby charm. As such he has been reworked into a primal damage and health regen stacker, getting stronger as long as he can keep hitting his primal attacks.

Palette Swaps

All alt classes now have their own color palettes to distinguish them from the main class of a Hero.

Charms

Lasting Lapis Charm

Lasting Lapis is a new charm unlocked from the Cockatiel tree that makes healing items also provide barrier.

Health Potion Charm

Health Potions is a charm that adds crit chance to restoration items.

Tuning Peg Charm

Tuning Peg is a charm that reduces crit chance but in return provides a large boost to crit damage. Perfect for high crit scaling builds.

Items

Auras

• Flute now provides your team with Critical Chance instead of Cooldown Reduction.

• Ukulele now scales all damage types, including Bleed, Burn, and Poison.

• Cooldown as a stat has been removed from Aura items, instead they now use Aura Interval for determining the delay between aura ticks.

Untuned Violin

Untuned Violin is a new aura weapon that serves as the starting item for both Bard and Jester. Create a noise so painful it causes damage to your enemies!

Jungle Mask

Jungle mask is a new item designed for mages who wish to tap into their Primal side.

Megaphone

Megaphone is a trinket that increases the Aura Radius bonus that Aura items provide. You probably want to give this to Cockatiel, however I would recommend not giving one to a real Cockatiel.

Tuning Fork

Tuning Fork is a trinket that increases the Aura Interval of adjacent auras, increasing the time between ticks, but massively increases their damage output.

Damage Trinkets

This is continuing on from a change in the last patch, the final few trinkets that used to provide flat damage have now been changed over to providing more damage based on the stats of the item they are applying to. This means that slow moving, hard hitting weapons will scale much better from these items.

Adventure Changes

Breakable Crates

Breakable crates now spawn alongside jars in both Standard and Endless adventures. Instead of gold these crates contain rerolls! Perfect for getting those Level 4s.

Endless Mode Enemies

Endless mode now rolls the enemies you will encounter randomly for each floor (Excluding Bosses) leading to brand new enemy combinations that were not possible before.

New Chest Events

New chest types have been added to both Adventure types that provide different types of rewards.

• The Standard Chest that drops random items from the pool, the same as the previous chest

• A Gold Chest that drops a large sum of gold

• A Class Chest that drops items weighted more toward what your class would generally use.

• A Trinket Chest that only drops trinkets (Infuser says hi)

• A Royal Chest that drops items as well as gold, gems, and legendary shards.

• And one other chest that can only be found in Endless Adventures...

Fixes

• Fixed Item Rewards incorrectly displaying item levels above max

• Fixed Item Infusions not saving

• Fixed a bug where Relics were disappearing* *If you were affected by this issue you can get them back by clicking the Reset Relics button below your Relic Stash

Good luck in your adventures!

~ Aureliq

Hi Packmates! We have been hard at work and have a pretty significant patch ready for you that aims to address some of the feedback we have received as well as giving you some new things to play with!

System Changes:

Adventure Saving!

• The ability to save the adventure you are currently playing has arrived! Simply open the system menu and choose Leave Game. Your save will be waiting for you in Adventure Select the next time you play, in both Singleplayer and Multiplayer!

Item Reward Choices!

• Item rewards are now presented as a choice between 3 different items. Included with this is the chance that some options could be a higher level than normal. Who doesn't want a level 2 item on the first floor?

• Bosses on Boss floors now also grant item rewards when defeated!

Hero Gems are now available in Endless!

• Hero Gems can now be earned alongside Legendary Shards in Endless Adventures

• Increased Hero Gem drops from bosses

• Legendary Shards can now be found in breakables during Endless Adventures

Other:

• Tailor now sells Alteration Kits which can be used as a wild card for combining items at the forge. They aren't cheap!

• Quantity, Pierce, and Chain attributes with non-whole number values will now work out the value to use by rolling the remainder.

  (For example, a Repeating Crossbow with 3.2 Quantity will spawn 3 projectiles, with a 20% chance to spawn a 4th)

Classes:

New Pyromancer class for Raccoon!

Incinerate your foes and burn your way to victory in a blaze of glory!

• The Pyromancer focuses on stacking burn damage, stacking up heat each time they ignite an enemy to increase the power of subsequent burns.

• Raccoon's Progression Tree layout has been adjusted to include the Pyromancer as well as a new charm for burn builds which is noted below.

Charms:

New "Little Cinder" Charm!

• Added a new charm to Raccoon's Progression Tree that allows Burn Damage ticks to Critically Strike!(!!)

Items:

Volcanic Core replaced with Bamboo Torch

• Volcanic Core was far too strong for such a small item, instead of removing the effect completely it has been moved to a new item that is larger but provides a very similar effect.

Volcanic Core Reworked

• Volcanic Core has been reworked into an item that triggers a fiery explosion when defeating a burning enemy.

  It has no cooldown, get those ignition chains going!

Damage over Time Trinkets:

• The strength of Damage over time Trinket items (such as Singed Tome) is now based on the damage of the item the effect is being applied to.

  They are weaker up front but the damage scales much better into the late game, as well as making them viable on heavy hitting, but slower items

Inventory UI:

• Added highly requested settings for showing and hiding the Inventory Side Panel while in maps

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed some abilities not being able to damage breakable pots

• Fixed the game unpausing when window focus is lost while paused

• Improved performance of damage numbers

• Fixed some of the Potion and Pet buffs not applying their stat changes correctly

• Mouse cursor can now leave the game window while the system menu is open (alt + tab quality of life change)

• Re-added fade to black map transition effect (currently only works for lobby host, will be added for clients at a later date)

• Fixed background side panel inventory hovers interfering with Victory / Defeat screen inventories

• Fixed the Unreal splash showing again after being disconnected from a game when you are not the host

• Temporarily removed fade to black transition as it was having issues with loss of window focus. Resulting in being stuck on a black screen.

Hi Packmates! Firstly I'd like to welcome you all to the game and hope you are enjoying your time creating weird and wonderful builds while defeating the enemies of the forest! We have seen the builds you have been sharing in the Discord and have been incredibly impressed with your dedication and creativity.

This patch aims to address some of the feedback received as well as some of the balance issues with the end game as well as giving Summon builds a bit of help (plus some new toys to play with)

General Changes:

• Adjustments to late game enemy health scaling

• Adjustments to enemy health scaling in co-op

• Fixed item tooltips for some items becoming very wide

• Fixed an issue where attribute details on item tooltips would not appear

• Added a new Action Speed stat to Summons that determines the speed of actions such as Attacks

• Potionmaster and Pet buffs now also apply to Summons

• Fixed some in-game typos

• Maggie (Summoner's Magpie Summon) no longer displays a health bar as she cannot be damaged

• The level of item rewards dropped by chests now starts increasing in Endless

• Improved Summon targeting and movement logic

• Fixed the Best Friend achievement only unlocking for hosts

• Fixed Slime Queen getting stuck in environment or falling out of the map after charging

• Fixed a bug where an item on the cursor that had been moved or destroyed would still remain on the cursor and could be placed into an inventory

• Temporary buffs are now displayed below health bars

• Added a fade to black effect to map transitions

• Changed the game to use DX11 to fix issues with some hardware that doesn't support DX12 but otherwise would be able to run Packmates

New Items:

Summocha

• A new Trinket for Summons!

• Increases Summon Action Speed and reduces cooldowns

  (Safe for Summon consumption)

Beehive

• A friendly Bee will follow you around, shooting poisonous projectiles at nearby enemies

Item Changes:

Toxic Coating

• Now applies to Sharp items instead of Weapons

Titanic Greatbow

• Increased base Physical Damage

Titanic Maul

• Increased base Physical Damage

Ukulele

• Reduced damage scaling

Wooden Ruler

• Reduced Range and Area increase

All Summon Items

• Increased base damages

Charm Changes:

Thirsting Ruby

• Reduced healing

Enemy Changes

Mushroom (New Enemy Type)

• Replaces the Slime enemies in the Swamp map

• Deals Physical Damage and applies Poison on hit

Elites

• Elites in Endless Adventure now spawn with random Aura effects!

  Deal with them quickly as they buff all enemies in their aura range, including themselves

We're very excited to finally bring the full release of Packmates to all of you. You have waited patiently. Your reward is more content, more danger, more loot, and significantly more reasons to blame your inventory layout.

More Packmates Expand the Pack

The full roster are now available to unlock and play:

🐺Wolf — Master of Melee Combat: He enjoys sharp blades, close-range violence, and making personal space everyone else's problem.

🐰Rabbit — Master of Ranged Weapons: A crack shot with a bow, and more than a little smug about it.

🦉Owl — Master of Defense: Equal parts feather, heavy armor, and bad news for anything hoping to get through the front line.

🐱Cat — Master of Summons: Uses her charm to convince half the forest to do the fighting for her.

🦝Raccoon — Master of Magic: Always seems to have a new spell up his sleeve.

…and each Packmate comes with an additional Hero Class to unlock, for even more ways to play!

Act 3 & Endless Mode

Standard Adventure: Now includes an entirely new third act. Featuring new enemies, new areas, and a new boss with fresh mechanics (designed specifically to kill you).

Endless Adventure: As foretold by prophecy, wishlists, and people asking us about it repeatedly - Endless Adventure has finally arrived! Keep looping through the Acts as long as you can stay alive. Enemies are harder, faster, and more than ready to kill you. In exchange for the new risks, you'll be rewarded with Legendary Shards for unlocking powerful Legendary items. See how far your build can scale, and compete with your friends or the world on the Steam Leaderboards.

Item Infusing & Legendary Items

Keep running out of inventory space? Shove your trinkets inside your items with Infusion. Don’t worry about how it works. Just enjoy the freshly reclaimed inventory space, ready to fill with even more swords!

Use Infusion to merge items with Trinkets, transferring powerful adjacency effects onto the item.

Still hungry for power? Hunting for something obscene enough to break the game?

Take your Legendary Shards from Endless Adventure and unlock a Legendary item (or three). Each comes with a unique mechanic that opens up new build paths, new synergies, and new opportunities to look at your backpack and whisper, “This cannot possibly be intended.”

Pylons

Want even more loot and a bigger challenge?

Pylons have been improved, activating them now summons angry bosses to battle - INSIDE regular levels! The rewards are there for you to take - but you'll have to earn them.

Pets

Pet the cat. Pet the dog. Unlock the terrible and unstoppable power of friendship*. (*friendship with the cat may be one-sided)

Why does the Wolf have a pet dog? Or the Cat a pet cat? Don't ask too many questions… we’re just game developers, not philosophers.

Achievements & Progression

41 new achievements now lie locked, waiting for you to take on their challenge.

Each Packmate also comes with an expanded progression tree. Unlock their alternate class, Charms, and bonuses - that will buff not only you but your whole party in co-op!

In other words, your future victories can now be carefully planned, permanently upgraded, and shared with friends. (Assuming your friends pull their weight and aren’t being carried by you along with your backpack)

We're delighted to finally be able to share all this with you. Now go make a build that is clever, beautiful, or even deeply broken! And when you do, let us know your favorite builds and strategies!

Packmates launches on April 16th, 2026 with a huge wave of new content, systems, and replayability that goes far beyond what you’ve played in any demo so far.

Make sure you wishlist Packmates to get notified on release day!

What's coming in the full release:

• Act 3 - including a brand new boss!

• Endless Mode

• New Packmates (Heroes)

  • Cat, the Summoner

  • Raccoon, the Mage

• Legendary items, with powerful effects

• Sub-classes for all Packmates, providing new playstyles

• New Enchantments, Items, and Progression options

• Leaderboards

• Steam Achievements

• And so much more!

Hi Packmates! A few changes have been packed into this update. The main goal here is to address some of the feedback we have received by improving the feeling of melee while also reducing the sudden spike in difficulty later on for both melee and ranged characters.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug that made the Severed Shortbow unable to be unlocked

• Fixed a bug that stopped Charms from being unequipped

• Fixed a crash on Intel Iris Plus Graphics and other rendering hardware that does not support SM6

Gameplay Changes

• Adjusted artifact merchant item weights to add more diversity to offered items

• Curses now have a red background to make them stand out against relics

• Added a UI tracker for obtained Hero Gems during an adventure

• Added a sound and effect that plays when the Forest Tear charm triggers

• Added unlock challenges for Paladin and Archer classes to add class progression rather than having all classes available from the start.

Collision Changes

• Adjusted layout of Swamp and Fire maps to give more room for movement and clearer collision

• Reduced Hero collision size to make navigation around and between objects easier

Balance Changes

• Reduced the amount of cooldown reduction the Shattered Hourglass curse applies to enemies

• Reduced the size of Elite Ice and Fire Golem Area of Effect abilities

• Increased range of all melee weapons

• Reduced the number of enemies that spawn in Act 1

• Reduced the max health of basic enemies

• Herb Pouch trinket no longer applies to Summons

• Sharpening stone physical damage increase has been increased from 20% to 30%

• Bottled Lightning trinket chain limit has been increased from 1 to 2

• Titanic Greatbow cooldown has been reduced to make it a more reliable weapon

New Items

• Added Bodkin Arrow trinket that increases physical damage and adds sunder to projectile weapons

• Added Food Bowl trinket that grants health and health regeneration to Summons

Thanks for playing and providing feedback! It has been incredibly helpful for improving the game as release gets ever closer!

Good luck in your Adventures, ~Aureliq

Hello Packmates!

A small update has gone live that includes fixes for a few issues from the previous update as well as some balance adjustments for enemy abilities, including bosses.

As an added bonus, this update also includes a new Gemstone Node map objective you can smash open for Hero Gems!

New

• Added new projectile sprites for Static Lance and Forcebolt Wand

• Added new Gemstone Node map objective that grants Hero Gems when destroyed

• Added a new Adventure Overview screen at the end of a run which displays some statistics as well as builds of all players in the party

Changes

• Adjusted abilities of some enemies to be more in line with new movement speeds

• Adjusted Slime Queen fight timings

• Some new Golem abilities in the Golem Twins fight have been added. These changes give melee characters more windows of opportunity to deal damage to Frost as well as adding more interaction with Ignis.

Fixes

• Fixed a bug causing save data to duplicate and create very large files

• Potential fix for enemies appearing in camp

Happy Gem farming!

~ Aureliq

Hey Packmates!

First of all, a huge thank you to those of you who played the Packmates Demo through Steam NextFest and an extra thank you to those of you who posted feedback in Steam Discussions, Reviews, and our Discord server. This is a quick update to keep you guys in the loop as to what the goals are for the next patch as well as a brief overview as to what will be included.

Patch Goals

There are two main goals for this patch, the first goal is improving progression by building out the passive trees and adding more than just stat increases to make them feel more meaningful.

The second goal is to adjust balance to make the game feel faster, more difficult, and engaging. As part of this, balancing the game such that progression actually matters. Later acts will feel a lot harder but that is where the new Hero Trees will come in.

Upcoming Changes

This is a list of some of the changes coming to the patch, this is not a complete list as the patch is still being worked on.

• Based on feedback, movement speeds have been greatly increased

• The first Forest Map that included only Slimes has been removed so you can jump right in to the action sooner

• The Overgrown Treant boss has been removed

• Enemy spawn rates have been increased as well as a complete re-balance of their stats

• Map objective areas are much larger and take longer to capture. While capturing these objectives, waves of enemies will spawn to make them much more engaging

• Enemies, objectives, and breakables no longer despawn at the end of the map. Instead, when the portal spawns, a circle of corruption will also spawn that starts closing in on the portal as enemies will continue to spawn. You will have a bit of extra time to grab things and get more gold but don't get too greedy or you will be overwhelmed as you try to portal out!

• Charms are now part of the progression system, they are unlocked in Hero Trees and are equipped in Hero Select. Now when you select your class you can equip some charms with item synergies and different builds in mind! (As it doesn't make sense for the Tailor to sell Charms anymore, they have been removed from her shop)

Looking forward to hearing your feedback on the new changes once they are implemented!

If you have not done so yet, you can join our Discord server Here, hope to see you there! ~ Aureliq

A small hotfix to address the following:

• Fixed a bug where creatures spawned from Summon items would spawn as invisible and unresponsive.

• Language dropdown in Game settings now also displays language names in the current language.

Today we have another update. This update includes a new main menu upgrade, a new map objective, some other UI visual improvements, and some fixes for reported issues.

Main Menu

• New and improved 2.5D main menu that showcases your party around the campfire, prepared and ready to go

• Added the ability to show / hide Lobby IDs (Mainly for streamers who do not want their Lobby IDs out in the wild)

Barrier Pylon Map Objective

• Starting From Act 2 there is the possibility of a Barrier Pylon spawning as a map objective.

• Spawning enemies will gain half of their health as extra Barrier for each Barrier Pylon on the map.

• Once a Barrier Pylon is destroyed all enemies that were granted a barrier by it will lose that barrier.

• Barrier Pylons drop 40 gold when destroyed

Item Changes

• The Hand Mirror item now grants +100% Quantity instead of +1 Quantity and damage reduction has been increased to 20% to compensate

• The Reflect attribute has been replaced with Thorns; Thorns deals magic damage as a percentage of total defense instead of being a flat amount which allows it to scale better later on.

Other Changes

• Added the ability to see Hero Health, Health Regen, and Defenses when holding the bound key (Tab by default)

• Added Hero Health and Barrier values to the Health Bar

• Random Map Objectives have had their markers and colors changed so they match the Map Progress bar

• Updated Coin sprite

• Updated Reroll sprite (Changed to dice rather than cards)

• Improved the appearance of the status effect gained and lost messages

Fixes

• Fixed a bug that could cause lobby invites to no longer work after clicking the Join lobby button

• Fixed an invisible hole that players were able to fall into on Cavern map in Act 2

There are more fixes and improvements based on feedback currently being worked on that will be coming soon! A huge thanks to those of you who have reported issues in the Steam Discussions forum and the Discord, your feedback is super valuable!

~ Aureliq

The Packmates Demo is now available to play, and will be part of the upcoming Steam Next Fest! Recruit your friends to join your pack and and see how you fare as a team with the online co-op mode included in the demo.

If you want to chat with us, other players, or provide any feedback, please join us on the Steam Forums or chat in our Discord server! We hope you enjoy the demo, and best of luck protecting the forest!

~ Aureliq

Packmates Playtest has been updated to include Act 2! After beating the boss in Act 1, you can keep playing longer and push your build deeper in Act 2 which features 2 more maps followed by the Act 2 boss.

This update also adds three new items to shake up your runs:

• Barbed Wire (trinket) - Adds Bleed to adjacent Weapon items

• Oak Quarterstaff (weapon) - Blunt twin headed weapon with knockback ... Bonk!

• Frozen Twinblade (weapon) - Sharp twin headed weapon that chills on hit

Steam Playtest: How To Join

New or wishlisted only? Go to the Packmates store page and click Request Access in the 'Join the Packmates Playtest' (below the Trailer/Screenshots). Playtest access is currently being sent out daily in waves. Once accepted look for and install “Packmates Playtest” in your Steam Library to play!

Have Any Feedback?

Feel free to drop all feedback and bug reports in the Steam Community Discussions for Packmates, or join us in the Packmates Discord!

Thank you all so much for helping us test and improve Packmates, and we hope you enjoy playing Act 2!

Changelog:

• Hero Unlocks: all unlocks in hero trees have reduced gem costs, this change should make it more likely that you will have enough gems to unlock something after your first adventure

  • This is a retroactive change, so expect to have some of your hard earned gems back; ready to spend on unlocking new things to try!

• Artifact Merchant (Item Shop): improved item offer algorithm so items which align with your chosen class will appear more often

• Artifact Merchant: now starts with 4 items in the shop, which can be expanded to 6 items by the unlock tree

  • These extra items are not as likely to be based on your chosen class, opening up options for build diversity for experienced players

• Item Collection - Can now preview stats for items which have not been unlocked

• Item Tooltips: Tidied up how details are presented to make better use of space

• Portals that lead to a map with a boss are now red and appear larger

• Zweihander (weapon) - Increased physical damage

• Wooden Ruler (trinket) - Increased range and area scaling

• Added a glow to the event marker to improve visibility

Fixes:

• Fixed Throwing Knives not having their bleed attribute

• Fixed Gotato missing an unlock sprite

• Fixed Rogue's Companion weapon missing the Bleed tag

• Potential fix for item tooltips going off the screen on some setups

• Fixed input issues on Steam Deck

• Fixed the "Not available in the Demo version" message not being localized

The first wave of Packmates Playtest invites has been sent out! If you requested access on the store page make sure to check your Steam library for 'Packmates Playtest'. More invites will be sent out in waves over the next few days.

Since we're looking for co-op feedback as well, we've made it even easier to squad up with every invited player receiving an additional two invites to share with friends. You can invite friends to join the test from the invite widget shown after selecting 'Packmates Playtest' in your Steam Library.

After playtesting the game, we'd love if you could share any of your feedback and bug reports in the Steam Community Discussions for Packmates. Your playtesting and feedback will help us make Packmates the best it can be, so thank you for being part of the journey!