Community Update No.12: Keeping You Updated On What We’re Working on!

Hi everyone! Today we’re back with another Community Update post. Read on to see what we’re working on, what we’ve got planned, and what’s coming in the next major update.

Disclaimer: While we’re excited to be able to share work-in-progress information before dev blogs, the dev server and the full release, please bear in mind that new features, vehicles and maps mentioned in this news are subject to change, be delayed or even cancelled. War Thunder is constantly being developed, and as with all game development, unexpected delays or other unforeseen circumstances may occur. Thank you for your interest!

You can get yourself this free decal by activating the code SPEEDLIMIT here.

Once you’ve logged in, the decal can be found under:

• Decals > Special > Other

The decal code will remain active from the publish date of this news until September 1st (09:00 GMT).

The next Silver Lion chest is planned for the last full week of August, which will contain all of the usual things you can expect. As for vehicle events, the next event will be for an aircraft and the one after for a tank. No hints yet, we want to keep it a surprise!

We recently started a brand-new news article series called Work-In-Progress, where we show new content that we’re working on in its very early stages. We’re happy to see the reaction has been very positive to this new series. We’ll continue to do them over time where possible and if we have something to show early. If a vehicle is mostly ready (in terms of textures, model, characteristics) we will do a regular dev blog instead. WIP blogs won’t replace regular dev blogs, and we’ll still do full dev blogs even for vehicles that had WIP blogs. In case you missed them, you can see the first four WIP blogs here: AW159 Wildcat, PLZ45,  CA-27 and M7.

We’re working on the first steps of implementing a better damage model for bomber aircraft. Our ultimate goal here is to make bombers more survivable and therefore more active and enjoyable to play. This will be a lengthy process as we are doing it in several steps. We’re currently working through a vast collection of documents from actual attacks on various aircraft parts. Bomber survivability will be improved based on this data, we expect that bombers will not lose control surfaces and wings during brief passes with 12.7 mm or lower caliber rounds. This work is being conducted comprehensively, with an in-depth review of the documentation. Expect to hear more from us on this over time.

We’re continuing to work hard on the Nuclear Escalation mode. In the near future we plan to run a new event test featuring a different environment setup. We’ve seen that you’ve frequently requested escalation variants at lower Battle Ratings in your feedback, and so we’ve made a new variant for you to try out. The ground vehicles, air defense systems, and naval vehicles reflect the Vietnam era (or the 70’s), and are designed for aircraft in the 8.7-11.0 Battle Rating range. Guided weaponry will be minimal here. Air defense will rely on S-75 and Hawk SAM systems, while battlefield air defense will be gun-based only. For this run, we’re also adding several early anti-radiation missiles (ARMs) such as the AGM-45, AS-37 and Kh-27 for aircraft within the specified Battle Rating range. 

Since we want to gather more feedback and focus on this specific era, only this variant will be featured in the test. However, each test and new era brings us closer to launching Nuclear Escalation as a permanent game mode. It’s quite possible this could happen as early as the next major update.

In addition to the above, the team is working on other aspects of Nuclear Escalation, specifically we would like to share our plans for refining ground vehicle models in the mode.

Nuclear Escalation has a lot of assets on the ground, with many of them having a simpler 3D model than researchable vehicles. We’ve taken the time to refine these models to make them far more detailed and as authentic as possible! The quality of the model and textures of these vehicles will almost be at the level of researchable vehicles, meaning they’re going to be very detailed.

Almost all of the assets in this mode (vehicles, air defense systems, etc) are being updated with better models. Take a look at some WIP pictures below!

The next major update is around the corner and today we’d like to show you a small portion of what’s coming!

Air Battles has had a leave-destruction mechanic for a long time, where leaving your aircraft would grant the destruction credit to the nearest enemy. We’re now adding this mechanic to Ground and Naval battles! For example, leaving a ground vehicle or a ship (“J’ing” out) now credits the destruction to the nearest enemy (3 km for a ground vehicle, 20 km for a ship). It’ll work the same as it does in Air Battles, also with a reduced reward. If there is no enemy within these radiuses, then the destruction will be given to the enemy player who’s ammunition is closest in the radius. If there is no enemy or ammunition, then no one will get the destruction credit.

Currently, War Thunder has many modes and options for modes to pick from. For example, night battles is an optional setting that is slightly hidden behind menus. We want to improve on this and make sure mode options are easier to access and see in general, especially for newer players who might not know they even exist. We’ve been working on an updated menu from the hangar that makes seeing mode options easier.

We’ve overhauled the preset UI in the hangar to improve the user experience and add better functionality. The current preset UX is decent but not as good as we want it to be. One fundamental issue with it is that many presets don’t fit in the line, and the line doesn’t scroll horizontally, making it difficult to see how many presets there are at a quick glance. We also found that most players name their presets by gamemode and/or Battle Rating, and when Battle Ratings change, they have to manually change the preset name.

We took the time to look at these pain points and make improvements to the preset UX:

• There is now a dropdown menu on the left side (replacing the presets window) with the same functionality as before: adding, rearranging, naming and deleting presets.
  

• We’ve added horizontal scrolling to the presets list, great if you have loads of presets or play on a smaller resolution.

• We’ve added automatic display of the gamemode and Battle Rating of each preset, which is customizable: you can have a short or long version or turn it off if you want! This will automatically update when the current mode, vehicles or Battle Rating changes, requiring no more tedious editing. Below example: game modes and Battle Ratings enabled.
  

You can turn off the Game Mode and Battle Ratings if you don’t want them displayed, giving you the old layout displayed as normal.

You can also see the lineup in your preset when you hover over it without needing to click on the preset and wait for it to load.

Let us know what you think about these improvements! Overall we believe this design is much better than before, adding more functionality and layout of presets. We know it may take some time to get used to the new design as always, as the preset menu has been the same for years. But we’re sure once you get used to the improved view the functionality will be much user friendly.

Back in March 2024, we added a new feature called Sensor View, which added a rendered view, allowing you to view the battle in an entire new way while in battle replays. We’ve gone ahead and added an option for top-down view while in sensor view, allowing you to analyse the battle and understand the situation better. It’s not just a static view either, as it can be fully controlled like the map: move it around, change the zoom level, select vehicles and ammo and see their parameters. This top-down view can be enabled by pressing the M button (Map) in while in Sensor View.

In Air, Ground and Naval battles, a lot of things are going on in the map screen. In regular modes, one thing that was missing though was tooltips, which meant you couldn’t see the exact vehicle that was driving on the map, for example. This is something that was already in Nuclear Escalation. We’ve now added a tooltip button to regular modes that allows you to hover over things when enabled, such as respawn bases and allied vehicles to see exactly what they are.

As with new major updates, a plethora of new vehicles will be waiting for you. We don’t want to spoil everything here, so we’ll remind you of some of the Work-In-Progress blogs that we’ve published over the last two weeks, which showcased the development of the CA-27, M7 light tank, AW159 Wildcat and PLZ45.

The Israeli aviation tree will receive a much needed boost to its ranks and lineups in this major update. While it’s a little too early to go into the specifics, you can look forward to the first rank IX jet aircraft to be featured in the tree, as well as some other surprises!

During the last major update we received a lot of feedback from the community regarding the F-14D. As a result of your feedback, we’ll add a researchable variant of the F-14D to the US aviation tree. It’ll be a direct analogue in terms of load outs and performance to the premium variant. This new version will feature some alternative skins compared to the existing F-14D, but will place a researchable version of this iconic American carrier fighter in the US research tree too.

For ground battles, some exciting new vehicles await, which we intend to show off a little later on. But we couldn’t leave you without any details today! The M103 series will be receiving a detailed model update to correct some of its inaccuracies and generally improve its overall quality. This will also include some updates to the T58 hull model too, since they share many similarities. We will also welcome a new Indonesian ground vehicle and the first Greek ground vehicle to the game.

By no means are these even close to the full roster you can expect, just a taster of some of the many interesting things to come!

We’re continuing to work on new MFDs, this time for the MiG-21, F-104, Mirage F1, and T-2/F-1 which have been created authentically from official documents. The Ka-52 has got a new one as well, which we were able to create from photos and videos. Check them out!

Back in May 2025, we released a Falklands map for Air Battles. Well today, we’re pleased to say that we’ve been working on a Falklands map for Ground Battles, named Darwin Hill. To create this map, we looked at all of the visual details of the island, from the houses and vehicles to the hilly and green landscape. You’ll find yourself fighting on the open terrain, but don’t worry as it still has a lot of cover to help you traverse around. 

We’ve worked on creating new assets for this location, from houses to vehicles, and we hope you like it. Have a look!

Thanks for giving this Community Update a read, we hope it gives you some things to look forward to in the next update, see you soon!