Enshrouded’s Wake of the Water Makes Voxel Fluids Real—and That Changes Everything

Why Wake of the Water Actually Caught My Eye

Water in survival sandboxes is usually smoke and mirrors-pretty shaders, blocky flow, or static lakes that might as well be painted on. Enshrouded’s Wake of the Water update, shown at Gamescom 2025 and landing in October, looks like the rare exception: a full-on dynamic voxel fluid you can shape, weaponize, farm with, and break with bombs. That’s not just a new biome; that’s new verbs for how you play.

• Dynamic voxel water you can redirect, drain, and build with-not just swim through.
• New tropical aquatic biome, reptilian enemy faction, and underwater ruins with traps.
• Greatsword arrives after a community running gag snowballed into an actual weapon.
• Fishing (including legendaries), new building blocks, and +10 to the level cap.

Breaking Down the Announcement

Keen Games-yes, the Portal Knights studio—has been steadily leveling up Enshrouded since Early Access launched in January 2024. The team says the full 1.0 will hit PC and consoles in 2026, but Wake of the Water is the seventh big step on that road. Community requests put water at the top of their Feature Upvote board, and instead of bolting on a shader pond, they went for a fluid simulation that reads the voxel terrain in real time.

The new tropical zone pulls from Caribbean jungle vibes: bright shallows, river carve-outs perfect for coastal terraforming, and ruins hiding below the surface. Keen’s demo showed a room that slowly floods during an encounter—more “Zelda-style pressure puzzle” than simple swim check. There’s also a new reptilian faction lurking in the mangroves, which should give melee builds a different kind of dance partner compared to the current Shroud horrors.

And then there’s the greatsword. According to the team, it started as a community running gag that turned into a full-blown feature. It’s a two-handed slab that should open up new stamina-risk play, likely with longer windups, wider arcs, and chunkier stagger potential. Enshrouded’s combat benefits from clear archetypes (bows, spears, staves), so adding a committed heavy option is the kind of spice a survival-RPG needs late in Early Access.

Voxel Water Done Right? The Technical Bit That Matters

Here’s where the pitch gets interesting. In the live demo, a dev tossed bombs near a lake, blew craters in the shoreline, and the water actually poured into the new holes and dropped the lake level. That’s the magic trick. If terrain destruction changes fluid behavior, players can truly sculpt their world: dig drainage channels around bases, carve moats that actually fill, or build aqueducts to power water wheels.

The potential systems here go beyond “now we can swim.” Think large-scale irrigation for farms, floodgates you raise and lower with contraptions, or emergency drainage for dungeons. This isn’t unprecedented—Minecraft and some modded sandboxes flirt with fluid logic—but it’s rare to see it look this organic in a fully 3D voxel world with action-RPG combat layered on top. If Keen can keep it performant on mid-range rigs, this becomes Enshrouded’s identity, not just another biome.

Of course, fluid simulation is a CPU hog, and we’ve all been in survival servers where one clever gremlin turns water into grief material. Can you flood other players’ builds? Will there be protections, region claims, or toggles? Keen didn’t go deep on those details in the presentation. I’d love to see server settings to cap flow updates, anti-griefing rules for water placement, and smart pathfinding so enemies don’t short-circuit in a kiddie pool.

The Gamer’s Perspective: New Toys, New Threats

Fishing is finally in—complete with legendary catches and the ability to haul fish back alive to your base. If those tie into cooking buffs or alchemy, that’s a win for the “cozy survivalist” crowd who want more than boss rushes between resource runs. Underwater ruins suggest oxygen or pressure puzzles and give exploration builds a reason to craft water-ready kits. Pair that with the +10 level cap and new building blocks, and Wake of the Water feels like both breadth (a new way to exist in the world) and depth (progression that respects high-hour saves).

Combat-wise, I’m curious where the greatsword lands in the meta. If it cleaves through reptilian shields but punishes whiffs with heavy stamina costs, that’s a meaningful trade-off. If it simply out-DPS’s one-handers, it risks flattening the sandbox into “big sword good, everything else optional.” Keen’s been pretty responsive through Early Access, so I’m cautiously optimistic they’ll tune it fast if it breaks boss balance.

One open question: how water interacts with the Shroud itself. Does corrupted mist displace fluid? Can you use flowing water to manipulate Shroud-based hazards, or will it evaporate in certain zones? The best updates create new problem spaces; Wake of the Water certainly looks poised to do that, but the devil’s in the edge cases.

Looking Ahead

Enshrouded was already one of the more confident survival-RPGs to hit Early Access in years—think Valheim’s sense of place with more deliberate combat and proper building tools. Wake of the Water aims to give players a literal new layer to master. If the performance holds and the griefing vectors are addressed, this October update could be the moment Enshrouded stops being “a great early access game” and becomes the survival title I recommend without caveats. Full release in 2026 can’t come soon enough, but this tide is worth watching right now.

TL;DR

Wake of the Water isn’t just a splashy biome drop—it’s dynamic voxel water that changes how you build, fight, and explore. Tropical zone, reptilian foes, greatsword, fishing, building blocks, and a higher level cap land in October. If Keen nails performance and anti-griefing, Enshrouded just leveled up in a way most survival games never do.