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Crimson Desert's Charting the Unknown is out now, and patch 2.04.00 adds ships, diving, marriage, castles and the Garden of Trials

By PPRGaming · October 29, 2026

Official Crimson Desert: Charting the Unknown key art showing three adventurers in front of a tall sailing ship, with a diver swimming over sunken ruins below
Image: Pearl Abyss

It’s live. Crimson Desert Enhanced: Charting the Unknown “has officially launched,” Pearl Abyss posted on Steam this evening, a few minutes after its 6 p.m. ET release time. It’s out on Steam, PlayStation Store, Xbox Store and Epic Games Store, according to the studio’s release times post, and it arrives with a base-game update, patch 2.04.00, that Pearl Abyss says you should install before you play.

One heads-up from the patch notes: on Steam (Mac) and the Mac App Store, this patch needs a one-time download of the full game package because of technical changes to the Mac build. And saves made with the DLC installed can’t be loaded or used for cross-save in a version of the game without it.

The ocean. You can now dive, with a breath gauge that you stretch by refining your diving suit or by eating certain foods. Ships are a new mount: you build one through a dispatch mission or buy one from fleetmasters around Pywel, then customize it with parts sold in Demeniss and Delesyia and use it for maritime trading with new trade goods. There are new underwater mounts you can subdue or feed until they trust you, uncharted islands to settle through missions, and treasure maps.

New stories. Each of the three playable characters, Kliff, Oongka and Damiane, gets their own new quest from the Journal once you’ve finished the main story, plus a new ocean-focused quest that opens earlier.

Life in Pywel. The patch adds:

  • Free-construction housing, where you lay out your home and place walls and windows yourself
  • Two castles you can decorate
  • Businesses in liberated strongholds: a restaurant, sawmill, smithy or tailor’s shop that keeps running while you’re away
  • Camp festivals, where NPCs you trust come to visit, and some can be hired as “Honorary Greymanes” for dispatch missions
  • Romance and marriage: a new trust level through Flirt, with a proposal at 100. Your spouse can travel with you, shows up on the map and sometimes brings gifts. You can also break up with your spouse, “but doing so comes at a cost”
  • 17 residences built through dispatch missions, barber shops in major cities, and a new dice minigame, Banker’s Dice

Combat. The Garden of Trials is a boss-rush mode with 10 groups to beat, unlocked after the main story. You can take in up to three characters in an order you pick, food can’t be used for healing, and if one character goes down the next one steps in. Clearing each group upgrades one of your existing skills. There’s also new gear and several new bosses, some of which you can rematch with Memory Fragments. And yes, frying pans, ladles and kitchen knives are now usable in combat.

PC settings. Upscaling and frame generation can now be picked separately, so you can mix, for example, DLSS upscaling with FSR frame generation.

The rest of the notes cover a long list of fixes, a reduced spawn rate for Golden Apple Hedgehogs, map improvements like always-visible trade routes and a bigger zoom-out, and faster startup on Oongka’s Scatter Shot and Damiane’s Shield Toss.

The Twitch Drops event Pearl Abyss announced last week was set to start with the launch, with week one running through November 4 at 11:59 p.m. UTC.

PPR take: Being able to mix DLSS upscaling with FSR frame generation is a nice touch for PC players, and a boss rush that upgrades your skills gives finished save files a real reason to come back.

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