Survival action RPG Enshrouded released in Early Access last year and became an instant hit, reaching more than a million players in four days and currently sitting at “Very Positive” on Steam with nearly 75,000 reviews. Developer Keen Games has consistently updated the game in the months since, and its newly released Update 7, titled Wake of the Water, is its biggest to date.
If you’re not familiar with Enshrouded, it’s a mix of lite survival, exploration, action RPG combat, and base building in a world you can completely terraform. An all-consuming fog known as The Shroud corrupts everything it touches, and you must scavenge for materials you can use to craft gear to survive the unforgiving environment and the mutated monsters it creates.
You can play solo or with up to 16 players in co-op, and voxel-based building allows you to create a home that’s only limited by your imagination and willingness to put in the work. Construction can be shared across servers from around the world, so you can visit them yourself, and there are some truly staggering player builds to see.
Take German YouTuber Kontreck and his community’s build, which you can see here. They fully re-created Isengard from Lord of the Rings, a feat that required more than 22 million voxels and 54,000 decoration items with nearly 4,400 hours of work and 61 days of building time across 15 players. And all the materials were farmed by hand, with no mods or cheats used.
The Wake of the Water’s biggest splash (that’s the only water pun, we promise) is the introduction of swimming and new water-based gameplay. Most of what you can do on land you can do underwater, with new animations. That includes opening treasure chests, collecting plants and other loot, pushing buttons to solve puzzles, and using an underwater mining tool to gather ore. There are also floodgates and new water-based puzzles where you can fill rooms to reach previously inaccessible levels, as well as traps that will try to drown you.
The main thing you can’t do underwater is fight, which is why the new enemy faction of lizard people presents a problem. Called the Drak, they can pursue you underwater with spears drawn, so you always need to be aware of your surroundings and how to get back to the surface quickly. The Drak can fight on land too, but at least then it’s a fair fight.
The other headlining addition in the update is Veilwater Basin, Enshrouded’s first water biome. This being a new type of environment, it brings a lot of other new things with it. That includes quests and lore journals, as well as points of interest ranging from settlements to temples to Shroud Roots and Elixir Wells. There’s also a bunch of new materials and resources for crafting and base building, so many that we couldn’t possibly list them all here. Trust us, there are a lot.
As we all know, you can’t have a water biome without fishing, so that’s been added too. You can now automatically collect worms when terraforming dirt, which can be used as bait. Other types of bait include moths, fireflies, and frogs. There are five fishing rods of varying quality, and casting your line in a body of water will begin a minigame. Fish will bite at a random time, then try to flee to either the right or left. You need to pull your rod in the opposite direction, then reel it in when the fish is tired. Do this repeatedly until it’s caught, and the difficulty of the minigame will depend on what fish is on your line and the quality of the rod you’re using.
If you’re more focused on building up your base, then good news: Water can move dynamically and be used as a source of plant irrigation or to power new parts of your base. You can dig irrigation channels to run water to your plants, which will grow faster in watered soil. And some new plants (like rice and algae) will only grow if submerged.
There’s a new buildable water wheel, which will rotate when in contact with flowing water. And you can connect it to an advanced grinding wheel if the flow of the water is strong enough to power it. There’s also a new watering can, which you can fill up manually at lakes or water barrels, and you can use it to fill pools or water plants at your base. What wild and creative ways to use moving water will the community figure out? Only time will tell, or maybe you can become the trendsetter.
On top of all the water-focused additions, there are also refinements to gameplay and quality-of-life improvements. New spells and skills have been added, stats have been rebalanced on several pieces of gear, wands have more inherent mana regeneration, customizable UI labels for chests and signs have been added, and lots more.
Like we said, there’s a ton here to keep players busy for a long time. For more info on Enshrouded or the Wake of the Water update, you can check out the official website or follow the game or developer Keen Games on Twitter or Discord.
