Phasmophobia Patch Notes (August 2023): Latest News and Changes

Phasmophobia's major progression update is just around the corner, and developers have recently released a series of development previews, offering a look at the game's new UV light, new equipment changes, and more.

FIXES

• You can now complete the Easter event, if you do not have any other badges. If you had this bug, you will receive the badge and trophy by completing the Easter event on one map again
• This weeks weekly challenge will now give the reward and have the correct loadout. This challenge will reset at the correct time and will not be extended

EASTER EVENT

This year's event will run for 1 week, until 00:00 on April 12th (BST)!

• Enter any location featuring an Easter sticker on any difficulty in single or multi-player.
• Find and collect all of the hidden Easter eggs.
• Retreat to the truck and leave! No need to find the ghost type!
• Repeat this until all stickers on the contract board are ticked off!

Enjoy the Easter '23 ID Badge and Trophy in your collection!

CHANGES

• Randomizing a custom difficulty will now always give a random cursed possession

FIXES

• Arabic player names are now displayed right to left
• Fixed a memory leak caused by having unicode characters with a broken sanity monitor
• Tripods no longer speed up Raiju after you detach a video camera
• The speed running difficulty challenge will now give all 7 cursed possessions instead of 6
• Improved statistics page text sizing on languages with long text
• Fixed a crash after leaving a game when using Vosk voice recognition
• The weekly challenges will now reset on Sunday instead of Saturday

CHANGES

• Several doors in all maps are now linked to multiple rooms for ghost events and monkey paw wishes
• The Sanity Survival weekly difficulty challenge now has the Nightmare hunt duration and no candles

FIXES

• If you didn’t play for a long time your level and progress will no longer be wiped
• The ghost can no longer walk through the Maple campsite large tents
• Fixed a bug that was causing players to not be able to select a difficulty
• Ghosts will now open and close the doors in the correct direction
• You can now click the left shop buttons on 4:3 aspect resolutions
• Yurei will no longer lower your sanity if they used their ability without closing a door
• Yurei will now only count the ability used when it successfully uses its ability
• Potential fix for hunts starting when all players are outside
• Lowered the volume of the guitar sound
• Sunny meadows TV sound can no longer be heard across the map
• The Sunny Meadows male day room TV will now turn on

NEW

• Added unique descriptions for crucifix interaction photos

CHANGES

• The ghost will now always fully show when it starts moving during the start of a hunt
• Monkey paw tags now update live in the journal when grabbed

FIXES

• The Monkey Paw tags can now be grabbed by multiple players in the same game
• The ghost in the dead room will now match the ghost model if it was male
• The host can now be revived with the monkey paw revive wish
• The see ghost negative effect will now end after the ghost event if you have a friendly ghost
• Improved main menu performance
• The revive stat will now only count when you are revived, instead of when anyone is revived
• Voice recognition will now work correctly for non-hosts
• Improved accuracy of the ghost crucifix hunt detection
• The loading screen tips are now translated correctly, if the language was changed in the same instance of the menu
• Removed black objects and weird lighting from the truck in High School
• Improved some translations in the shop
• Potential fix for “Loadout can't be added until flipping back and forth between loadout 1 and 2
• No more null references for “UpdateAddButtons” in all logs
• Fixed a rare bug where you couldn’t change difficulty
• Potential fix for keyboard EMF photo not working in Ridgeview
• The next time you open the game, your last difficulty will reset once, in order to fix many issues some users were having if they continued to play with the settings they had pre-0.8.1.0.
• Willow windows now have the new UV shader
• Sound sensors, motion sensors and DOTS will no longer be detectable by the ghost when held after being placed

PROGRESSION

The next major update will be Progression Part 1 (v0.9.0), and will make way for the new leveling system; player levels, money, and equipment will be wiped and set to 0, however, to allow users to continue playing as they have been, everyone who has played the game pre-wipe will be fast-tracked to Prestige 1, level 0.

This will reset your progress but keep all difficulties and locations available for play when the reset hits. A future development preview will reveal what your pre-wipes level badge will look like, keep your eyes peeled for that soon!

CUSTOM DIFFICULTY

Custom difficulty’s reward values have been overhauled. This should help balance the game closer to the default difficulties and make progression fairer for those who don’t want to min-max their custom games.

• The maximum reward value possible is now 15x

• Several options have had their rewards reduced

• The Apocalypse Challenges’ requirements have been adjusted:

  • Bronze: 6x+

  • Silver: 10x+

  • Gold: 15x

• Rules have been added to reduce rewards when two options are set to specific values, thus canceling each other out but still giving you a reward. Here are some examples:

  • 0 starting sanity with sanity pills 25% or higher

  • Faster ghosts but player unlimited sprint

  • Broken Fuse Box but Flashlights: On

Triggering one of these combinations will change the custom difficulties option panel to a yellow warning icon. You can hover your cursor over this icon to find out more information on how it is affecting or being affected by other settings.

Several custom options have been adjusted:

• “Evidence Given” will now soft cap the reward multiplier. Rewards added above these multipliers will only add 50% of their values to the total reward;

  • 3 Evidence: 4x

  • 2 Evidence: 5x

• “Grace Period” 6s has been removed

• “Sprint Duration” and “Sprint Recharge” have been removed and will default to:

  • Duration: 3s

  • Recharge: 5s

• “Sprint” options have been changed to:

  • Off

  • On

  • Infinite

NEW DIFFICULTIES

INSANITY

For the best investigators, a new default difficulty has been added: Insanity.

More information can be found in-game on the difficulty selection screen.

CHALLENGE MODE

A new weekly rotational difficulty has been added. Each week a different challenge will be available offering unique modes ranging from Intermediate to Insanity and beyond.

• 26 challenges have been added

• A challenge-specific loadout will be provided automatically, for free

• Completing the challenge 3 times on the specified map will grant a large money and XP bonus

• Each challenge will be available twice a year

• You will lose nothing if you fail or die

CURSED POSSESSIONS 

Sunny Meadows’ staff weren’t just experimenting on people, they were seriously trying to unearth something unnatural:

MONKEY PAW

A severed paw that grants a wish for those who ask it. Be warned, the wish may not be worth the consequences:

• Wishes can be found scattered inside Sunny Meadows Mental Institution and will be added to your Journal when found. These are not required to use the paw and are just a permanent note to help you remember.

The number of wishes you have will correspond to the difficulty or reward multiplier for that contract:

• 0x – 1.9x Rewards: 5 wishes

• 2x – 2.9x Rewards: 4 wishes

• 3x Rewards or higher: 3 wishes

Note: After 2 weeks, these patch notes will be updated with the details of every wish

Shop Updates

The shop computer has had some UI improvements

• Shop and Storage has been recreated, acting like an online shopping basket

• Added an “all equipment” loadout

• You can now tick “auto-add” to your loadout, to add it as soon as you join a lobby

NEW

• Strange symbols have been spotted in the warehouse, what could they mean? Get searching for an answer!

• Crucifix uses will now have new textures, effects and sounds when used

• Updated all UV shaders! UV effects will now be much more accurate and work when shining another light over the UV light. Additionally, UV effects will now fade out over time, instead of disappearing instantly

• “The Tower” Tarot Card will now additionally double all ghost activity for 20s

• Weather particles lighting have been improved and now work with the sky light, helping them look more realistic (no more ashy black snow!)

• All windows will now have new raindrop effects on them if it's raining, and additional sounds in all maps similar to Tanglewood’s

• Several foliage objects will now be affected by windy weather outside

• You will now receive an in-game message when a new game update is available to download

• A Broken Fuse Box’s sparks now bounce on nearby objects instead of clipping through them

CHANGES

• Reduced the range and resolution of several environmental lights slightly. This should decrease the chance of your shadows becoming overly pixelated when having lots of lights turned on in a location, and decreasing the chance of an object hitting the “maximum lights” limit (e.g. resulting in black floors or DOTS casting no light)

• The time between hunts will now be the same if the ghost uses a crucifix or if it hunts (20s for Demon, 25s for other ghost types)

• The ghost's room will no longer be visible on the Haunted Mirror when you use it at 0% sanity

• Ghost orbs can no longer go through walls into a different room

• Fog quality settings have been changed for better visual clarity across all settings
  
  

  • Low – Downsampling at 2, no shadows

  • Medium – No downsampling, no shadows

  • High – No downsampling, receive shadows

  • Blur has been removed

• Renamed Daily and Weekly Challenges to Daily and Weekly Tasks, to avoid confusion with the new Challenge Mode difficulty

• Several icons have been improved

• Improved and fixed the visuals of light sources on the PC monitors in Prison

• Improved the visuals of the collectible cabinets in the warehouse lobby

• Lighting a Summoning Circle candle with no sanity will now extinguish it instantly.
  Note: Lighting the 5th candle with no sanity will cause an instant hunt
  
  

• Saying "goodbye" on the Ouija Board no longer counts toward challenges

• Renamed the High School bathrooms to make it clearer where they are

• Failing to join a room with a password now gives a more descriptive error

• The night vision camera effect will now adjust brightness when entering and exiting foggy areas

FIXES

• Ghosts can no longer interact with windows on the floor below them, in both Farmhouse locations

• Voice recognition will now work for all players if other players loaded in slowly

• Removed several safe spots in Prison, Maple Lodge Campsite, and School

• Several shaders and materials will now render correctly

• The Voodoo Doll can no longer stop hunts

• Using the Voodoo Doll, Tarot Cards, Music Box and the Summoning Circle will now count towards the “use Cursed Possessions” task

• Items will no longer teleport in the SM Courtyard when thrown in specific spots

• Patched up some holes in the Sunny Meadows Courtyard floor

• Removed an invisible wall upstairs in Edgefield

• Improved Anisotropic textures for radiators, rugs, outside ground, SM flooring

• Ghosts can now kill you on the blue beds in house maps

• Ghosts can now detect active electronic equipment if they were grabbed when active

• Voice recognition will no longer work if you have the ‘text’ voice recognition option enabled

• The Apocalypse stickers will now show in Singleplayer instead of Multiplayer

• A book in the Sunny Meadows Courtyard is no longer only a shadow

• Removed several shadow rendering issues in Sunny Meadows and Tanglewood

• Thaye will now have the correct interaction rate before aging

• Window knocks now count as an interaction for stats

• Tasks featuring “Asylum” will now display “Sunny Meadows”

• You can no longer sprint or move while in the death room

• Setting a preset for a custom difficulty and changing a cursed possession, will no longer apply that change to the actual preset difficulty, instead of just the Custom game you are editing

• Standing in DOTS light will no longer stop sanity drain

• You can now see your hands on your monitor when in VR and smooth camera is enabled

• Ghost orbs can no longer be seen with a photo camera

• The ball in the upstairs Ridgeview closet will no longer glitch when the hiding spot is blocked

• Ghost orbs in the outside "rooms" in Camp Woodwind will no longer be very high above the ground

• Video cameras will now receive the ghost glitch effects

• The “Sky Light” will now turn on and off accurately with your settings

• Lighter flame is now being considered for the Onryo hunt ability when blown out

• An Onryo will now have a higher chance to blow out a flame, the more players that are dead, instead of a lower chance

• Hunts will now end if all players are outside

• The haunted mirror will now drain a minimum of 20 sanity per use instead of 27