Windrose players spent weeks sailing the high seas without realizing their SSDs were taking on water the whole time
Early access launched April 14, and Windrose moved 1.5 million copies in under three weeks on the back of strong word-of-mouth and a co-op formula that left players comparing it to Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag.
That goodwill took a hit when players noticed their drives behaving strangely because there was a problem hiding below deck.
Why Windrose was hammering players’ SSDs
YouTuber Pixel Operative clocked Windrose writing 108GB to players’ drives every hour, which adds up to 432GB over a four-hour session. For context, Enshrouded wrote 695MB in the same 60-second window where Windrose wrote 1.3GB, and Valheim wrote just 5MB.
Windrose players are flooding the Steam forum, accusing the game of “frying” their SSDs and wondered how much damage their game time could’ve done.
The culprit was the RocksDB database system developer Kraken Express used for saving player progression. Windrose ran three separate databases with a very small cache budget, which was quickly exhausted and forced constant write operations to disk.
Most modern SSDs can handle that kind of sustained load without taking immediate damage, but older or lower-spec drives were a different story, with some players reporting temperatures spiking to 83°C during play.
Kraken Express deployed a fix on April 30 with patch version 0.10.0.4. Post-patch, average writes during sailing dropped to between 20 and 30 per second, and write speeds fell to between 10MB/s and 16MB/s, dipping below 1MB/s when the player stood still.
Pixel Operative measured the improvement at 60 to 75 percent, so it checks out. The game remains in Early Access, and Kraken Express has not indicated how many drives were affected before the fix shipped.
