Windrose devs respond to bug silently “frying” players’ PCs

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Players of Windrose unknowingly sailed the virtual seas for weeks while their computer’s storage drives were failing due to water damage.

Windrose became a hit quickly after its early access launch on April 14th, selling 1.5 million copies in less than three weeks. Positive player feedback and its cooperative gameplay, which reminded many of Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag, fueled its success.

The company’s good reputation suffered when players realized something was wrong with their game drives due to an underlying technical issue.

Why Windrose was hammering players’ SSDs

The YouTuber Pixel Operative discovered that the game Windrose writes a massive 108GB of data to players’ computers every hour – totaling 432GB during a four-hour play session. To put that in perspective, in the same minute, Windrose wrote 1.3GB of data, while the games Enshrouded wrote only 695MB and Valheim wrote a mere 5MB.

Players of the game Windrose are reporting on the Steam forums that the game seems to be causing excessive wear and tear on their solid-state drives (SSDs), and they’re concerned about how much playtime might contribute to the problem.

The problem stemmed from the RocksDB database system that Kraken Express used to track player progress. Windrose was running three separate databases with limited memory for quick access, which quickly filled up. This meant the system constantly had to save data directly to the hard drive, causing performance issues.

While most newer solid-state drives can withstand heavy, continuous use without failing right away, older or cheaper models sometimes struggled. Some gamers reported their drives getting very hot – up to 83°C – while playing games.

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 found that performance improved by 60 to 75 percent, confirming the fix worked. The game is still in Early Access, and Kraken Express hasn’t shared how many players were experiencing issues before the update.

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2026-05-05 18:50