Barotrauma 1.13.4.0 for macOS

Barotrauma is a 2D submarine simulator that drops you and a crew of other players into the dark, high-pressure oceans of Jupiter's moon Europa.

Keep the reactor from melting down

A huge chunk of your time is spent running around the sub, tweaking the nuclear reactor and repairing junction boxes before the whole electrical grid goes dark. Without power, the pumps stop, the oxygen runs thin, and the hull gets very quiet.

Perform emergency surgery on your captain

When a mudraptor gnaws through the hull and mauls a crewmate, you drag them to the medical bay. The game's medical system doesn't just give you a health bar; you diagnose specific injuries and fumble through real procedures with limited supplies while the sub floods around you.

Hunt a shape on the sonar screen

You guide the vessel through pitch-black water using only the sonar display, launching decoys and firing railguns at whatever massive creature is pinging back at you. The captain yells orders, the mechanic patches breaches, and the security officer frantically reloads. This is the minute-to-minute loop — organized panic.

A pre-mission sonar bloom and reactor hum

You start at an outpost. The crew gathers on the sub, someone grabs the captain’s chair, and you watch the sonar bloom to life as the reactor hums up to temperature. First order of business is running through the pre-mission checklist — checking fuel rods, loading coilgun ammo, stocking the medical cabinet with saline and bandages. Nobody talks much yet. Everyone’s still reading their job briefings.

The captain sets a course, the engine kicks in, and for maybe two minutes everything is calm. Then the sonar pings back something large and moving. The security officer scrambles to the periscope. A crawler latches onto the upper airlock. Hull breaches pop open in three compartments at once. Water rushes in. The mechanic sprints with a welding tool while the electrician frantically re-wires a fried junction box. Someone drags a half-drowned assistant to the med bay. The captain is yelling to pump ballast and rise. By the time you limp back to the outpost, half the sub is flooded, one reactor rod is spent, and nobody remembers who left the back hatch open. The game's stories write themselves, and no two runs go the same way.

Steady frames through hull breaches and fire

The game felt steady on the test machine — Mac mini M4 with macOS Tahoe — holding a smooth frame rate even with several hull breaches, fire spreading through the engine room, and a dozen creatures gnawing at the hull. Load times are short. The interface can feel a little dense at first, but it snaps into muscle memory after a few missions.

Memory use sits in a comfortable range for a 2D title with this many overlapping systems. The netcode holds up well with small crews, though a high-ping player occasionally rubberbands through a sealed bulkhead. The built-in editors — Submarine Editor and Character Editor — open without hogging resources, which is nice if you're iterating on a custom sub while a barotrauma download session runs in the background. People grabbing a barotrauma free download off a community hub might worry about stability, but the hotfix patches show the developers are quick to squash crossplay quirks. For a game simulating water pressure, electrical grids, creature AI, and four panicking crewmates all at once, it stays surprisingly collected.

Version 1.13.4.0 is a hotfix that tidied up some crossplay problems from the Summer Update. That larger update itself reworked five of the vanilla submarines and rolled in a bunch of fixes and small quality-of-life improvements.

• macOS details aren't specified by the developer, but the game runs natively on both Apple Silicon (ARM) and 64-bit Intel Macs.