Barotrauma’s Home and Harbor expansion releases on December 2, 2026, and a free “Companion Update” for every player arrives a week earlier, on November 26, developers FakeFish and Undertow Games announced on Steam. It is a paid expansion for the co-op submarine horror game, and the team says it has been working on it for about two years.
The Details
Barotrauma sends crews of up to 16 players through the alien ocean under Jupiter’s moon Europa. Home and Harbor adds two big pieces, per the developer blog and the store page:
- Player-owned outposts. You can take an outpost by conquest or through missions, then expand it with new modules, manage its NPC inhabitants, build workshops and defend it from attackers. A dedicated research and unlock tree opens new technology, and you can run more than one outpost.
- The Descendants. A new high-tech, body-modified faction that traces its lineage to Europa’s original settlers. They bring powerful new equipment, a new story arc and a Descendant transport submarine the blog calls a “behemoth with a laser gun.”
- A livelier world. Roaming submarines feed the economy of NPC outposts, and factions trade, gain and lose ground with each other even without the players.
The free Companion Update sets up the systems the expansion needs, and the developers say the DLC itself runs as a code mod. The update adds a new plugin system that “makes code modding much more accessible,” plus content for everyone: parts of the DLC’s dismemberment and prosthetics, advanced gardening and decoration, and livelier world are partly available in the base game. It also brings a new transport submarine, new farming and shipyard modules, and fixes for long-standing networking issues, including the “missing entity” error.
What This Means for Players
Everyone gets something on November 26. You do not need the DLC to get the networking fixes, the new submarine or the modding plugin system, so even crews with no plans to buy it should expect their game to change in a month.
Buy the base game now if you were waiting. Barotrauma is 50% off until the end of October, and the developers have called it the final discount before regional prices change in several countries. If you want more games for a full crew, see our picks for the best co-op horror games, the best PC co-op games of 2026 and the best horror games on Steam.
When and Where
- Companion Update (free): November 26, 2026.
- Home and Harbor: December 2, 2026, on PC via Steam. The developers have not announced a price yet.
Source: FakeFish and Undertow Games on Steam, October 26, 2026.