Windrose launched into Steam Early Access on April 14 and quickly attracted attention from survival game fans (and pirate fans alike). Steam reviews are very positive, and everything seems to be smooth sailing for developers Kraken Express, but one problem has garnered some criticism. An unusual issue that could seriously overwork your SSD was spotted in the game.

Shortly after launch, players noticed Windrose was constantly reading and writing data to storage drives. According to reports shared by users, the game was capable of writing as much as 108GB of data per hour to an SSD. Disk activity would spike heavily while exploring bases or piloting ships, with write speeds reportedly reaching between 15 MB/s and 30 MB/s almost nonstop.

Windrose devs released a patch to address the issue

To put everything into perspective, a long gaming session could easily result in hundreds of gigabytes written to storage in a single day. While modern TLC SSDs are built to handle a lot of writes, older drives and QLC SSDs could wear out much faster under workloads like this. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it’s certainly an anomaly that had to be addressed.

The developers at Kraken Express reacted quickly after the issue started spreading online. They released patch 0.10.0.4 to reduce disk usage, and according to early testing, the update improved things quite a bit. Write activity reportedly dropped by around 60% to 75%, with the game now writing between 10 MB/s and 16 MB/s during active gameplay. When standing still, writes could even fall below 1 MB/s.

Unfortunately, it seems the problem has not actually been fully solved. A Reddit user recently shared detailed testing results from a dedicated Windrose server running the newer 0.10.0.5 build. According to their findings, the server still wrote around 69.6GB of data over a two-hour idle period with absolutely no players connected. That comes out to roughly 35GB per hour, even while sitting idle. It’s an improvement, but there’s certainly room for improvement, especially when compared to other modern titles.

The user monitored the system using Docker statistics and NVMe SMART logs on a setup using two Samsung NVMe SSDs in RAID 1. The main concern here is not just the amount of data being written, but the fact that the writes continue even when nobody is actively playing. The Reddit post also pointed out that most games normally write only a few hundred megabytes to maybe 1GB per hour during gameplay, while Windrose remains far above that despite the fix.

At the moment, the developers have not announced another fix specifically targeting the remaining SSD workload issue. While the patch clearly reduced the problem compared to launch day, many players may still be concerned that the game continues to place unusually heavy stress on storage drives.

About the Author

Abdul Haddi

Abdul is a tech writer and Editor for PC Guide, specializing in all things tech, gaming, and hardware.