This Early Access pirate game was quietly killing your SSD without you knowing

[Alfonso Maruccia]

Oops: When a game is released through Steam's Early Access channel, players can expect to encounter some rough patches while the developers continue working on their code. However, a newly released piracy-themed RPG drew attention this week for doing some very wicked (and potentially damaging) things to players' storage hardware – thankfully, the developer has already shipped a fix.

Developer Kraken Express introduced Windrose as a survival adventure set in the age of piracy, featuring a procedurally generated world where players can gather, build, and craft alongside the usual piracy activities such as fighting and looting. Released in Early Access in April, the game has since made headlines for the wrong reason: its dangerous behavior toward users' storage hardware.

According to reports, Windrose players were experiencing unusually high I/O workloads in specific in-game situations. The game was reading and writing large amounts of data to disk, with spikes of up to 30MB/s when the player's character was roaming around a base. I/O operations would slow down when the character was standing still, but could worsen when the player was steering a corsair ship.

During normal game sessions, Windrose was writing around 108GB of data per hour. Traditional HDDs likely had no trouble handling that throughput, but SSDs are a different story. NAND Flash chips can only be written a limited number of times, and modern QLC drives are even more vulnerable to sustained I/O workloads in typical consumer setups.

Some users investigated Windrose's abnormal storage behavior further. The issue apparently stemmed from the RocksDB database system Kraken Express chose for saving player progression. Windrose was running three separate RocksDB databases with a very small cache budget, which was quickly exhausted, forcing frequent write operations to disk.

As highlighted by Pixel Operative, the YouTuber who provided video evidence of Windrose's SSD-punishing behavior, no other modern open-world games are known to stress storage drives this heavily. A deeper technical analysis by storage expert NewMaxx/BoreCraft traced the problem to the Worlds database operating with an extremely small WAL budget, which forced constant memtable flushes and compactions that turned modest in-game state changes into far larger physical write traffic.

Kraken Express responded quickly. Days later, on April 30, the studio pushed out a "housekeeping" update addressing SSD and CPU usage, connectivity issues, missing building blocks, and various bugs.

The results were dramatic: pre-patch, RocksDB was generating roughly 90,000 - 130,000 writes per second, while post-patch testing during sailing (one of the heavier write scenarios) showed an average of just 20 – 30 writes per second, with peaks never exceeding 60 writes/sec. Players with the game installed are advised to update as soon as possible.

Considering the sad state of things the hardware industry is currently going through (for consumers anyway), the developers' swift response is welcome news for anyone mindful of their hardware's longevity.

Permalink to story:

This Early Access pirate game was quietly killing your SSD without you knowing

 

[havok585]

What a an "alarming" sad news of an article.

IT was not killing any SSD even if you player years ! which is not possible, because any game IN EARLY ACCESS gets updates frequently.

but again, "ALARMING" news is just as bad as fake news.

 

[NumberNine]

Jeopardy question headline.
"This Early Access pirate game was quietly killing your SSD without you knowing."

BEEP BEEP
"What is Windrose?"
"That is... correct! $200 on the board."

 

[Benses]

What a an "alarming" sad news of an article.

IT was not killing any SSD even if you player years ! which is not possible, because any game IN EARLY ACCESS gets updates frequently.

but again, "ALARMING" news is just as bad as fake news.

What are you talking about? The article just stated facts of a bug that would put wear on a SSD much quicker then normal.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

What a an "alarming" sad news of an article.

IT was not killing any SSD even if you player years ! which is not possible, because any game IN EARLY ACCESS gets updates frequently.

but again, "ALARMING" news is just as bad as fake news.

108GB an hour of writes is in no way normal. Play it for 10 hours over a weekend and that is 1TB of unnecessary writes.


Especially if you have a QLC or older TLC drive, that is not good at all.

 

[The Talking Tech]

Hope you think twice before you keep testing Early Access which is code for potentially damaging games just because you couldn't wait for the real deal.

 

[GABulldog]

Why post this article if the patch is already out? This sounds like a "Lets Trash Windrose" article rather than an article with meaningful information. You could of just said that the dev's issued a patch to fix the ssd issue, rather than write 9 paragraphs about a problem that was already fixed.

 

[GABulldog]

Hope you think twice before you keep testing Early Access which is code for potentially damaging games just because you couldn't wait for the real deal.

That is most ignorant statement I've heard. Just like a early access game, a finished game can still have bugs, even triple A games. The over 1.5 million people who purchased the game will think differently.

 

[noel24]

With games now hitting $80, all of Them are in the territory of "piracy games". I've cut off Netflix, as It seemed useless at this economy. If They come with anything special, will consider "piracy game". Sorry corpos, owned by private equity, You're pricing Yourself out of middle income countries. ;-)

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Why post this article if the patch is already out? This sounds like a "Lets Trash Windrose" article rather than an article with meaningful information. You could of just said that the dev's issued a patch to fix the ssd issue, rather than write 9 paragraphs about a problem that was already fixed.

Why should windrose be free of criticism for such an obvious screw up? What places them above reproach?

 

[bviktor]

That's vibe coding for ya <3

 

[amghwk]

There's no one to blame other than *****s who buy "early access" games, which are basically work-in-progress games, which, some of them may never be completed.

Would you buy an unfinished, work-in-progress house and move in?

 

[abactuon]

I always wait for the big DLC ​​before I start playing. At the same time, bugs are being fixed and the game is being optimized a bit.

 

[Burty117]

There's no one to blame other than *****s who buy "early access" games, which are basically work-in-progress games, which, some of them may never be completed.

Would you buy an unfinished, work-in-progress house and move in?

First of all, crazy analogy, a house is something you live in, it’s a requirement to live, a game is luxury to pass time.

But I had a similar opinion to your probably 7-8 years ago now, but today, a lot of my most played games are Early Access games.

And I’ve had more issues with games that have “launched” than most Early Access games, Windrose from this article is an example of, a bug has existed for a week or two and is now fixed. Oblivion remake is in a terrible technical state, Bethesda appears to just have abandoned it.

At least these games are being honest calling themselves Early Access.

 

[BbN48]

Never mind the fanboy apologists here. This is important to know about.

 

[poohbear]

Never mind the fanboy apologists here. This is important to know about.

I dont think it's Fanboys, who would be this worked up over an article criticizing a hardware damaging bug and the state of some early access games? I'd guess it's one of the developers from the game, as this article could be perceived as a hatchet job against them.

 

[yRaz]

First of all, crazy analogy, a house is something you live in, it’s a requirement to live, a game is luxury to pass time.

But I had a similar opinion to your probably 7-8 years ago now, but today, a lot of my most played games are Early Access games.

And I’ve had more issues with games that have “launched” than most Early Access games, Windrose from this article is an example of, a bug has existed for a week or two and is now fixed. Oblivion remake is in a terrible technical state, Bethesda appears to just have abandoned it.

At least these games are being honest calling themselves Early Access.

Bethesda didn't do the oblivion remake, and the old game code is still running under the UE5 "coat of paint" it got. What exactly are your problems with the remake? It provides a near identical experience I had 20 years ago and I'm loving it.

 

[Burty117]

Bethesda didn't do the oblivion remake, and the old game code is still running under the UE5 "coat of paint" it got. What exactly are your problems with the remake? It provides a near identical experience I had 20 years ago and I'm loving it.

Traversal stutter annoys the hell out of me, why is the framerate just never that great out in the open world, just stuff that makes no sense still being rubbish, the last patch was July 2025, they literally just gave up ever making it run properly, I swear I saw more articles on it recently... Yeah I did:

I gave it a spin when it launched, then put it down waiting for some patches to actually make it run nicely, I guess I'll either be forever waiting, or modders will do it one day.

And this is a fully released game here, not an early access game, I get better performance from Enshrouded, which is an Early Access game with a custom made engine just for it.

 

[ZedRM]

So the lesson to learn from this? Don't use beta software and games.

 

[yRaz]

Traversal stutter annoys the hell out of me, why is the framerate just never that great out in the open world, just stuff that makes no sense still being rubbish, the last patch was July 2025, they literally just gave up ever making it run properly, I swear I saw more articles on it recently... Yeah I did:

I gave it a spin when it launched, then put it down waiting for some patches to actually make it run nicely, I guess I'll either be forever waiting, or modders will do it one day.

And this is a fully released game here, not an early access game, I get better performance from Enshrouded, which is an Early Access game with a custom made engine just for it.

So the problem comes from the old engine bugs working against all the problems UE5 has. It's not getting fixed. Most of these problems were in the original oblivion release and we just brute forced our way through them over the years

 

[Burty117]

So the problem comes from the old engine bugs working against all the problems UE5 has. It's not getting fixed. Most of these problems were in the original oblivion release and we just brute forced our way through them over the years

Which would be fine if this was, I dunno, a DLC, you know, £15-£20 at most addon for some better graphics.

It's not, it's a fully paid £60+ game, which you can find for £40 on sales, it's expensive, therefore, the issues are a problem for me.

I understand inflation etc... I get it, back when the game released 2006, £40, in today's money is £65, which is what brand new games are coming out at.

You're charging me full price for a graphics uplift, but no bugs have been fixed, the game runs worse, you haven't had to invent a game engine or assets, you haven't had to create a story, you haven't had to get voice actors or orchestra's in, no writers, no quest designers, you get the idea, they haven't actually had to do a huge amount of work here, they got a UE5 technical team together and a team of digital artists to re-create the assets.

Charge me the correct price for the product, those 20 year old bugs and poor performance is more forgivable, charge me 3x more than it should be, I'd expect an actually polished product.

 

[daffy duck]

What a an "alarming" sad news of an article.

IT was not killing any SSD even if you player years ! which is not possible, because any game IN EARLY ACCESS gets updates frequently.

but again, "ALARMING" news is just as bad as fake news.

The only thing I'm alarmed about is your ignorance and inability to even read the article.