Keen Games have finally put a day on it. Enshrouded leaves Early Access on 15 October 2026, and if you're keeping a world alive for a group of friends right now, the question you're actually asking isn't "what's in the update". It's "does my world survive it". That one has been landing in our tickets since June, so here's what's genuinely confirmed, what absolutely isn't, and what I'd be doing with your server between now and launch day.
The short version, if you don't want to scroll:
- Release date: 15 October 2026, out of Early Access on Steam. Keen confirmed it themselves on 25 June.
- Platforms: PC and PlayStation 5 on the day. Xbox Series X|S slips to spring 2027.
- Current build: still 0.9.1.2, untouched since Hotfix #42 on 29 June.
- Your existing world: Keen haven't said. No wipe has been announced and I'd be surprised by one, but "surprised" isn't the same as "assured".
- Crossplay with PS5 players: unconfirmed. Don't plan a community server around it.
- Your LOW.MS server on the day: it pulls the 1.0 build on its next start, by itself, with nothing from you.
The date, and how much weight it holds
The reveal came straight from Keen on 25 June, in a post refreshingly free of padding: "Enshrouded releases out of Early Access on Steam on October 15th!" A trailer, that one sentence, done. No roadmap attached, no hedging.
How we got there tells you something about how firm it is. Back in January, in the two-year anniversary post, Keen said 1.0 was coming "this Autumn" and flatly refused to name a day: their reasoning was that they'd been forced to postpone before and didn't want to "mark the date and then turn around in a few months and go 'actually...'". A studio that gun-shy naming 15 October is a studio that has sat on the date until it was reasonably sure. I'd treat it as firm.
Consoles, and the bit everyone is getting wrong
PC and PS5 go together on 15 October. Xbox Series X|S doesn't, and has been pushed to spring 2027. Keen CEO Jan Jockel was refreshingly plain about it, saying that hitting the quality and performance they expect on Xbox would need more time and that they never want to rush a platform release.
Now the part that matters if you run a server: nobody has confirmed that PS5 players can join your dedicated server. Crossplay between PC and console isn't announced for launch. Several hosting blogs are already writing as though it's settled, and it isn't. I went looking and couldn't find a single Keen statement committing to it either way. So if half your group is waiting on the PS5 version to pile into the world you've been building since Update 8, don't promise them anything yet. I'll update this post the day there's a real answer.
What Keen have actually confirmed is in 1.0
Less than you'd hope, honestly. June gave us a date and a trailer, and the promised follow-up on "improvements, optimization, QoL changes" hasn't fully arrived on Steam. The most recent community announcement on the game's Steam page is still Hotfix #42 from 29 June, which is a long quiet stretch this close to a launch.
What we do have is a run of feedback-driven changes that Keen's community manager, Andrew 'Toast' Eldred, went through in August:
- The Fell Dragon Youngling fight, comfortably the most complained-about encounter in the game, gets a deeper arena so you stop falling out of it, a longer and more forgiving stun window, a back weak spot that every weapon type can hit, and parryable projectiles.
- Bosses stop snapping back to full health the moment you die. They recover gradually instead, which changes attrition fights entirely.
- The faster glider updraft returns as a toggle in the settings menu, with the current slower version kept as the alternative.
- New "realistic" character proportions arrive as an option, with the existing look staying as "classic". Elio Ricci handles the swap, so long-running characters aren't locked out of it.
- Fishing has been reworked so bait drives what you catch by biome, and location no longer governs whether fish bite at all.
- A pass on NPC and pet pathfinding covering every stuck-location cause Keen currently know about.
That's a polish list rather than a content reveal, and Keen have described 1.0 as content plus improvements, so I'd expect the real breakdown nearer October. Treat anything you read today naming specific new regions for 1.0 with suspicion. A fair bit of it is recycling zones that already shipped during Early Access and betting you won't check.
What happens to your existing world
The honest answer is that Keen have not said, and there's no point dressing that up.
No wipe has been announced. Enshrouded's record across two years of Early Access is that worlds survive major updates, including Update 8, which rebuilt the skill tree and refunded everyone's points without touching terrain at all. Encouraging. And still not a promise. A 1.0 build is precisely the sort of release where a studio finally changes a save format it has been carrying since day one.
So do the boring thing. Take a Cloud Backup from the sidebar before you update, and note down which one it is. It takes about thirty seconds. If you'd rather hold a copy well away from our infrastructure, drag the savegame folder down over SFTP on port 8822: it's small, and having it sat on your desktop on launch day costs you nothing.
One thing I'd genuinely avoid: don't start a fresh world on 14 October to "be ready". If saves do carry over, and they probably will, you've thrown away two years of progress for a rumour.
What actually happens on your server on the day
This is where our setup differs from most, so it's worth being precise about it.
Your server updates itself. Every Enshrouded server we run checks for a pending game update immediately before it starts, and installs it if one is waiting. That's been the default here since July, and it means the usual patch-day mess, where players on the shiny new client bounce off a server still sitting on last week's build, mostly doesn't happen to you. On 15 October your server picks up the 1.0 build on its next start. If it's been up for a fortnight straight, restart it and you're current: that's the whole job.
There's a per-server opt-out, labelled Skip automatic update on startup, for anyone who'd sooner control the timing by hand. If you can't find it on your service, open a ticket and we'll set it for you. Most people should leave it well alone: not having to think about patch day is the entire point.
If you want to force the update yourself anyway, Steam Update in the sidebar at control.low.ms does exactly what it always did, and our getting started guide walks through it.
Most of your config is ours to worry about. The panel builds enshrouded_server.json for you and owns the values that come off your order: server name, password, IP, query port and slot count all flow from the panel rather than from you editing the file by hand. Difficulty, the gameSettings block and user groups are yours to set, and the settings guide covers those properly. If 1.0 adds new config keys, and it may well, that guide gets the update rather than this post.
No new ports that anyone knows about. Nothing announced points at the server's networking changing, and there's no 1.0 branch on the dedicated server tool yet. Steam still lists a single public branch against it. If Keen push a release-candidate branch before October, that's where it'll surface first, and I'll say so.
What I'd do between now and October
- Take a Cloud Backup this week rather than on the 15th. A backup you already have beats one you meant to take.
- Leave auto-update on, then restart on launch day instead of waiting for someone to report they can't connect.
- Tell your group that Xbox is 2027 and PS5 crossplay is unconfirmed, before anyone buys a console on the strength of a hosting blog.
- Moving a local world onto a server? Do it now, while there's no patch-day queue. The walkthrough is here.
- Bookmark the troubleshooting guide. Version-mismatch connection failures are the single most common thing we see on patch day and they look exactly like a broken server when they aren't.
Two years of Early Access is a long time to keep a world breathing, and plenty of you have managed it. If you haven't got a server up yet and you've been waiting for a natural moment to start, 1.0 is about as natural as they come. Our Enshrouded hosting page has the current lineup, and there's no sense waiting until October to start building.
Got something I've missed, or something Keen have confirmed that I haven't caught? Tell us. It shapes what gets written next.