The Empires of the Undergrowth March 2026 Newsletter goes into detail about what you can expect from the RTS’ Beach Brawl Update.
Developer Slug Disco had recently released a beta version of the update to its insect colony RTS game, and in its newsletter, it notes it has had plenty of feedback from players for the full release.
But we’re getting closer to a full release, and it’s just the tip of the iceberg for Empires of the Undergrowth in 2026. While there’s lots of information on the Beach Brawl Update, Slug Disco also details its other plans for the year.
Let’s take a look at what’s new in the Beach Brawl Update.
Empires of the Undergrowth Beach Brawl Update Details
Sand Lizard
The sand lizard (Lacerta agilis) lives in several different biomes in much of mainland Europe. The bright, lime green patterning of the males is unmistakable. It feeds on a wide variety of invertebrates - mainly beetles, spiders and flies - but as an opportunistic predator it will take what it can find. In the case of Empires of the Undergrowth, that means ants and termites are on the menu!
Shore Crab
The shore crab (Carcinus maenas), also known as the green crab, is a common species of true crab that is found around much of the coastal areas of northern Europe, and is invasive to several other parts of the world. It feeds on worms, molluscs and carrion - and likes to bury itself in the sand at low tide, which is when they are most often encountered out in the wild.
The shore crab also has a juvenile variant, which is still a relatively large creature but a much softer target than the big one. These can be selected as regular spawns in custom games.
Custom Map: Causeway
A causeway stretches between two areas of higher land, inaccessible to the creatures of this shallow area that is heavily flooded by the tide. Lizards, crabs and other denizens of the beach reside here, representing a roadblock to the dominance of your colony. They must be subdued.
Causeway is the first custom game map that can support up to six colonies - that’s five computer-controlled colonies and the player’s one. It’s designed for a 3v3 battle, although, like all custom game maps, it can be played in any configuration you prefer.
Extra Level: Causeway - Chowder
Based on Causeway, Chowder is a uniquely goopy-looking level: I hope you like your seafood stew! In this variant of Causeway, the northern part of the map is occupied by a huge shore crab, nestled between the remains of a sardine that dominates the decoration there.
The objective of the level is to take out the shore crab, but things aren’t quite so straightforward here - waves of smaller crabs will attack you at regular intervals, and sand lizards guard important resources to the east and west. Careful planning and considered growth will be needed to take on the challenges and reach the final goal of killing the overlord in one final attack.
UI Update & Controller Support
Outside of the new content, by far the largest and most obvious change in this update will be to the user interface. Almost every element of the UI has been entirely redesigned or reworked in some way - from the menus, to the level selection and the in-game panels.
Alongside the new UI is a complete rework of how the game interacts with controllers/gamepads - every menu and game system now takes these into account and works with them natively, rather than relying on a thumb-controlled cursor as with the previous setup on Steam.
The newsletter also tells us that the Beach Brawl Update will be available to everyone instead of being paid DLC. Changes in what DLC entails have given the developer reason to show a new Empires of the Undergrowth Roadmap.
Empires of the Undergrowth 2026 Roadmap
Here’s what the developer has written about the 2026 roadmap.
The Beach Brawl Update
This one is self-explanatory, but it’s first on the roadmap because we expect it to graduate from the beta test in very short order. Once again, thank you so much to everyone who is helping with the test, and also to everyone who is waiting patiently for it!
Fixes & Balances
We go through 3 distinct phases with testing - internal alpha, our closed focus group, then an optional beta. Although each of these tests gets significantly bigger than the previous one, it is inevitable that there will still be things that we didn’t catch throughout the testing period once we get things out to everyone, and so there is some time set aside for fixes and changes after the fact.
I’d hazard a guess at these coming a few weeks to a month or two post-release of the Beach Brawl update, depending on how much stuff we find ourselves having to fix.
Soundtrack on Streaming
We’ve been working with our publishers Hooded Horse to get Empires of the Undergrowth’s soundtrack up on all the major music streaming services for some time now, and we’re just about ready to go. As long as everything goes smoothly you’ll soon be about to stream 4.1’s action music while on your fourth set at the gym, or listen to 1.2’s plucked strings as you spring clean cobwebs from your living room.
Extra Levels
This stop on the roadmap has become a wildcard, and that means that although we don’t have any more specific extra levels scheduled for release right at this moment, that could well change for a variety of reasons.
Perhaps a dev sits upright in the middle of the night, struck by a sudden bolt of inspiration and spends the small hours crafting it, or perhaps some extended period of time between updates warrants a little extra something to chew on in the meantime. In either case, if extra levels happen they are likely to arrive with little or no prior notice.
Custom Game Changes
There are several things on the list for custom games that we’re slowly getting round to - several tweaks to the AI, balances to food amounts, and a couple of quality of life changes in the menus. As the game’s content grows this also adds extra things to consider in custom games, and so later in the year (before stage 6, or concurrent with it) we will be reviewing feedback for custom games in general.
Major DLC
This is the “combined” DLC mentioned earlier in the newsletter - as it became clear to us that the one tentatively planned to be released in the first half of this year would work better when combined with work for what was a later DLC. We’ve been generous to ourselves with the estimated timing in the new newsletter - from Q3 this year to Q1 of next, but as mentioned above we do hope to not have to use the extreme far end of that window. Sooner or later, time will tell.
Related Empires of the Undergrowth Content
- Empires of the Undergrowth 1.0 Release Details
- Crimson Freedom Demo Update
- Total War: Star Wars - What We Know
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