Cleared Hot — patch notes and updates
Stored observation / content update:
Dated developer announcements recorded from Steam. Open the source for the complete update.
| Update | Date | Excerpt / source |
|---|---|---|
| Flares, Geothermal Craters, and a Helicopter Poll | 2026-07-24 | Dearest pilots, join me again for a fireside chat about attack helicopters. Things at Cleared Hot HQ are going quite well. The jungle campaign is reaching a crescendo as we race through the final few missions of Chapter 2. Then begins the gauntlet of balancing, building a boss fight, QA testing, playtesting, and preparing to ship a major update. More on this later.Introducing Flares!Travis has been hard at work in his hangar, crafting some new counter-measures. These will distract any heat based missiles that are flying at you.Sticking with our physics-pillar, the flares are actual objects that shoot out of the helicopter and are detected by |
| The Red Butt | 2026-06-09 | Welcome loyal players and wishlisters, the ones who make it all possible! Cmon in and let's talk Jungle. BTR-80Soviet Era Armored Personnel CarrierIn our initial jungle devlog, some of you suggested this behemoth! Here it is in it's retro Soviet glory. We also made a slight modification to add some anti-aircraft missiles to the rear, to make it's attack a bit more spicy. It also carries 10 NPCs that can disembark when it reaches a destination or when its health drops below 25%. Weak Point SystemAka The Red ButtWe have added a weak point to the back of the BTR unit, that rewards you for landing direct or near-direct hits. This adds more depth |
| Into the Jungle | 2026-04-17 | Pilots! Oh do I have an update for you. Let's get right into it. First, feast your eyes on this lush jungle scene. We've picked up production on chapter 2 and it is feeling great. Is that a rock or are you happy to see me We are working on a jungle mission that will involve destroying some key enemy locations along the coast, and liberating some weapons caches. The mission has a mix of bases with helipads that allow you to repair your helicopter once you capture the base. This creates a nice hub and spoke gameplay where you capture a base and then can return to it for support. The mission also features a new enemy type to contend with...Kamik |
| Chapter 1B Update Is Live ! | 2026-03-17 | Pilots! Our Chapter 1B update is live on Steam. It was a major performance update to the game, and we had to touch a lot of systems to make it happen. This needed to happen before the game expanded much more, and I'm really glad we can build chapter 2 on this improved foundation.FeaturesPerformance OverhaulThis was our main focus. We greatly improved performance on all platforms, and especially on Steam Deck. Steam Deck FPS increased by 30%, and hits 90 fps in low action areas.Stutters are greatly reduced. The ones that remain are from spawning units and we will improve this over time.More settings. You can set anti-aliasing, ambient occlusio |
| Chapter1B - Release Date Announcement | 2026-02-25 | Hello Fearless Pilots, I have a rare thing to present to you: an update release date: Chapter1B Drops on March 17th! Video DevlogIf you prefer to digest you devlogs in video format, check out the below! Let me know what else you would like to see in these, I'm curious to try this new format. I'm new to YouTube but I want to share our dev progress- leave a comment, a like or subscribe if you want to help out. Chapter1B FeaturesPerformance ImprovementsThis was our main focus of the last few months. Steam Deck fps increased 30%, and hits 90 fps in low action areas. Stuttering is greatly improved. The ones that remain are from spawning units and |
| Jungle Preview | 2026-01-31 | Hello Pilots! Join me on this Saturday morning as I share what we've been up to since the holidays! New Jungle preview, new water, boats, and performance updates. Let's go... Jungle PreviewOur revised jungle theme is coming together.We've been doing a ton of work finding the right style for the jungle that won't melt your GPU. We're not quite done optimizing but we're getting closer. The overall vibe is coming together and I'm pretty excited about it. The jungle will play differently than Texas, and we're exploring how those elements play into mission types. Expect to be ambushed by units hiding in the trees, fend off naval attacks, and escor |
| Chapter1a Update | 2025-12-18 | Pilots! We are happy to announce that Chapter1a has been released. We fit in as much as we could before the holidays, we hope you enjoy it!Comanche The new helicopter, the RAH-66 Comanche is in the game! It is extremely agile but takes damage quickly. Give it a play and let us know what you think.New Test Flight AreaWe took your feedback on wanting some more things to test, and made the test flight area into a sandbox. There are now buttons / switches you can interact with to spawn enemies, How To Access Test FlightTo enter the test flight mode, go into the hangar and then click "TEST FLIGHT" on the right side panel. Survival ModeThis area ha |
| Week 2 Update | 2025-12-06 | Hi Everyone, I just wanted to say thank you again and give a recap of our first 2 weeks since launching Cleared Hot. I mean it when I say: the launch went better than any of us even dreamed of. Thank you all for the reviews.It was really a wild ride after we clicked the big green "RELEASE MY GAME" button. All of our long time fans hit Steam right away on launch, which catapulted is into the good graces of the Steam algorithm. This traffic coincided with the Steam Black Friday sale. To our surprise we ended up in the top 5 of the New and Trending list for the sale. This really amplified the traffic. More StatsSteam Impressions: 18,720,000Steam |
| Hotfix: v0.2.5#17788 | 2025-12-04 | Hotfix: v0.2.5#17788Keep the feedback coming everyone. This is a small update to fix some common issues. Our focus will now move to the Chapter 1a update. Fixed: all helos loadout stats.Fixed: end of mission screen navigation issue when using quit button from pause menu.Balance: hydra and hellfire missiles.Localization: hold ctrl to land is now localized.Fixed: press escape while loading was starting the game with the pause menu open and game running.Fixed: blackhawk cargo stats.Changed: improvements in ui scale supportChanged: increased font sizes in homebase to improve Steam Deck legibility.Fixed: ps4 and ps5 controller icons.Changed: reord |
| Sit back, Relax, and Blow Shit Up Award | 2025-11-26 | Dearest players + wishlisters! THANK YOU. Holy moly what a launch week.First, if you would be so kind, please nominate us for the "Sit Back and Relax Award" category in the Steam Awards. Or whatever other categories you want. If you feel like it. Link Here.Thanks. Okay, on to the launch stuff. Launch RecapThe night before the launch I set 2 alarms to make sure I didn't sleep past our 5am launch. I slept about 2 hours before I started waking up thinking I'd missed it. So I just got up, and we prepared for the release. At about 4:52am we pressed the scary green "Release Now" button.The 3 of us who were awake at the time made peace with our god/ |
| Hotfix: v0.2.4#17671 | 2025-11-22 | Hotfix: v0.2.4#17671Thanks for your feedback. We fixed the most pressing things we could manage to fix in a day. Enjoy!Fix: Improved performance in Mission 10: Data Harvesting.Fix: Improved performance of jet enemy on all missionsFix: When rescuing or delivering people made them invulnerable to prevent accidental deaths when dropping themFix: Tweaked volume and frequency of scientist barksFix: Fixed how instructions were shown for controls that have positive and negative axis (ex: altitude control)Fix: Made chickens a priority target for the ropeFix: Fixed ally npcs entering the van and breaking the objectives (Data Harvesting)Fix: Fixed dial |
| v0.2.3#17592 Hotfix | 2025-11-20 | Hello Players! Thank you for all your feedback! We just pushed a quick fix for the below issues. Fix: Fixed some texts that were using a font without support for localizationFix: Fixed main fonts using fallback for cyrilic charactersFix: Added code to prevent issues when the options or savegame can't be loadedFix: Fixed gas tank from "An Odd Tool for Odd Jobs" that was not blowing up when using the Easy of Custom difficulty options to lower Ally damage.Carry on, pilots. It's great to have you in the game, finally ! - Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot rapid response dev team (Ariel and Ruben :D ) |
| Cleared Hot Early Access Is Live !!! | 2025-11-20 | WE ARE LIVE Brave Wishlisters, our time has come !!! Cleared Hot is available for purchase on Steam. Wow. it is just barely sinking in for me. Go and enjoy this nostalgic experience we have crafted for you !Ways You Can HelpBuy and review the game! Early reviews help us a ton. Share it with your friends Come celebrate on discord with us :) Thanks.Five years ago I was struggling with a career I wasn’t enjoying. I wanted to explore game dev again- a childhood dream I had left behind- but didn’t know if it would work out. I started learning Unity, and ended up spending a lot of time inside during 2020, making games out of cubes and programmer ar |
| Early Access Roadmap + Price | 2025-11-17 | Brave wishlisters, your day of glory is near!The team is busy slaying the dragon of "releasing a game". As a global team we are starting to merge into a single time zone, which is not good. But, we are almost done. And we're in the phase of, everything is f*$(ing awesome and it's actually motivating again. I am typing this devlog with my remaining 3 brain cells, on a Sunday after the team made an intense push to finish chapter 1 of the game. I think you're all going to be pretty excited and I can't wait to see your reactions. Enough beating around the bush, we're here to talk DOLLARS AND CENTS. And roadmaps. Click to full-screen the image. Ro |
| Early Access Release Date Announcement ! | 2025-10-30 | Dearest Wishlisters, the time is finally here for me to share some news!Cleared Hot will be released into Steam Early Access on November 20th, 5am PST ! Release Date TrailerI am equal parts excited and terrified :D But I can't wait to let you guys see what we've been working on, and start the next chapter of the game. Early AccessWe chose to do Early Access for 2 reasons: Letting the community guide the direction of the gameGive us the option to build more content as we goWithout early access, we would be much more limited on the scope of what we can do. You guys have been really great at providing feedback, and I want that to continue as we |
| The Chinook Lives | 2025-10-04 | Dearest wishlisters, join me on this Saturday morning and feast your eyes on this big beautiful helicopter... THE CHINOOK!We had to improve our rotor wash FX just for this occasion.Will the Chinook break the game? Will it fit in the hangar? Shhh... it's all taken care of. (I think). It fits on the helipad at your home base, just barely. You might have to adjust the satellite TV after taking off. It even fits inside the hangar (just barely)Hell, we even got a new game idea out of it. Thank you SeaBiscuit. This thing is fun as hell to fly. I gave it a lot more mass and inertia. So it's slow to accelerate but actually pretty fast at it's top spe |
| Missions, Missiles and Manned Turrets | 2025-08-25 | Hello Faithful Wishlisters, We are heads down on production but I wanted to give you a quick update on some new things! Gather round, it's time for some helicopter gunship gifs. New Mission - Defending Friendly NPCs One of the new missions involves helping your NPCs on the ground defend various targets. It's pretty cool to see the battle raging below you, and to help defend your units as best you can. Yes, that guy did get run over... it just didn't fit in the 5MB gif limitConvoy MissionI'm pretty happy that we found a good spot for this mission. I know escort missions sometimes suck, but do they normally have flying trucks and mid-air missil |
| Demo Launch Recap! | 2025-06-25 | Thanks for playing the demo and giving us feedback! Releasing the demo was quite a milestone for us as a team, and for me personally. I started learning game dev in 2020. I've gone a LONG time without a public demo for anyone to play. Imagine the pressure of having 100,000 wishlists and releasing the first playable build! To my relief, people really really liked it. We have a lot of feedback on what to change, improve, and all that, but I think the core takeaway for me was: We are on the right track. That is SUCH a good feeling. Some Quotes From YouPlanned Features + ChangesThank you for completing the survey as well- this data is super helpf |
| Next Fest Has Started! | 2025-06-09 | Play The Demo!We Are Live On Next Fest! Hello wishlisters and future current pilots! I hope you're enjoying the demo- we've been loving all your feedback in the demo survey and all your comments that you've posted on social media. If you haven't played the demo yet, go give it a try and send us your feedback! Download the demo on our Steam page: Cleared Hot (Steam)Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/XmMTqEjpQgFill out the demo survey after you play: Cleared Hot Demo Survey (Google Forms)Post your favorite clips online :) If you're not aware, Steam Next Fest is a festival where Steam features upcoming games and players get a chance to play a |
| The Demo is Live !!! | 2025-06-06 | It's happening !! Everybody stay f%*#ing calm! The demo is now available to download on our Steam page!How To PlayDownload the demo on our Steam page: Cleared Hot (Steam)Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/XmMTqEjpQgFill out the demo survey after you play: Cleared Hot Demo Survey (Google Forms)Thank You!Thanks for all your support- I know some of you have been here for years- and it means a lot. This has been a long time coming for me too. I'm super excited for you to play and give us feedback! - Colin "cfinger" and the Cleared Hot team |