Kerbal Space Program 2 is getting a performance patch this week, plus a fix for the "Kraken drive" bug

You don't need a degree in rocket science to know that Kerbal Space Program 2 didn't exactly launch in the best of states last month. From its astronomically high PC requirements to the numerous bugs identified in our early access review, it's been a rough ride for developers Intercept Games, but hope is on the horizon. In a new development update, creative director Nate Simpson has announced the first major patch will be arriving on Thursday March 16th, primarily focusing on "performance improvements and bug squashing".

They also fixed the ominously titled "Kraken drive" bug, which "created insane reverse thrust when an engine's nozzle was obstructed" when using the Kraken ship type, the devs say. "We may not in fact have killed the Kraken yet, but we have definitely stubbed its tentacle."

Needless to say, if you have any Kraken ship builds in progress right now that actually rely on that "insane" reverse thrust, beware: "the 'unique' physics on which it depends are about to go away forever," Simpson says in the update, so you better start thinking of other solutions to get your ships off the ground.

Graphics programme Mortoc also released a new dev diary about KSP2's performance challenges last week, which goes into more detail about why the frame rate can suffer in-game. They acknowledge that KSP2's performance "isn't amazing" right now, and that most of KSP2's current bottlenecking is GPU rather than CPU-related. "Other engineers are working hard on CPU-facing improvements that you'll see reflected in upcoming updates," Mortoc says, but right now they're focused on optimising performance improvements to do with the GPU and the algorithms used to generate terrain.

There is a chance the date of Patch One's release could slip, Simpson adds, but provided their QA team doesn't discover any more "show-stopping bugs over the next few days", he says their March 16th date should stick.

"We have done a fair amount of hand-wringing around whether we should announce the target date for this patch when there is a non-zero chance of a delay, but we know this topic is very important to you all, so we're doing our best to keep you all in the loop. We’ve also already completed a nice queue of fixes to go into the second patch, but we’ll talk more about that after we’ve got the first one out the door."