Hi everyone! Dive into our 9th Community Update article, in which we reveal some of the upcoming changes and additions coming to War Thunder in the near future. Buckle up and read along!

Returning decal codes!

We’re temporarily returning last year’s free decal codes! If you just joined the game this year and missed them, now you’ll have the chance to pick them up.

Simply enter NOSEKRITSINSIDE here!

Get yourself a new free decal!

Nigel is always among us, but he’s hiding. Enter code NIGELWASHERE here to redeem this special decal.

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

• “No Sekrit Dokuments, Please” decal: Decals > Special > Snails

• “Sekrit Dokuments” & “Nigel Was Here” decal: Decals > Special > Other

The decal codes will remain active from the publish date of this news until December 11th (10:00 GMT).

Testing new Matchmaking to avoid repeat maps

For most players, it can be a bit tedious to get the same map twice in a row, especially if it’s a map that doesn’t align with your playstyle or one that you don’t have the most suitable lineup for. Due to this, over the last few weeks we’ve been testing a new matchmaking system that will drastically reduce the likelihood of getting the same map twice in a row. When selecting a map for battle, the matchmaker now takes into account the map history of all players in the queue — it sees the map that each player previously played on, and will reduce the chance of selecting that map again for the upcoming battle.

We’ve been testing this for around three weeks on the live servers, and have been gathering data in the meantime. Based on the matchmaking results and the data we’ve collected, the number of players experiencing a repeat map has dropped by orders of magnitude across the board (by more than ten times).

While the system is working effectively, it’s not perfect. Please be aware that depending on active map bans, dislikes, (just as a reminder, the top 2 most disliked maps from players in the queue will be excluded) and the overall map pool available in any particular queue, there will be instances where some players will get the same map twice. However, the chance of this happening should be significantly reduced compared to how it was previously, so let us know how your battles have gone and if you’ve noticed a difference!

The December Major Update

It’s time to take a look at what’s coming in the final major update of 2025.

Changes to Ground Arcade and Realistic Battle Lineups

In Ground Arcade and Realistic battles, lineups are a vital contributor to the outcome of any given battle. However, not every player will have a full lineup available to them. Someone may only have a single premium tank, or may have rushed down the tree to unlock a certain vehicle while neglecting other branches, resulting in a fairly unbalanced lineup that lacks versatility.

With this in mind, we’ve decided to implement a new feature to help. We’ll be adding a random ground vehicle spawn option in Ground Arcade and Ground Realistic Battles in lineups of 9.3 and above. This will work similarly to the aircraft spawns for Naval Battles, where you have the option to spawn a random fighter or bomber. For Ground Realistic Battles, there will be two options: a random spawn for tanks and another for SPAAs, while Ground Arcade Battles will just have a tank option.

The available vehicle selection depends on the nation and Battle Rating of the battle, but the options won’t be top BR in any given scenario. As an example, in a 9.7 to 10.7 match, if you have a battle rating of 10.7, the random vehicle options will be between 9.7 and 10.3 — while if you have a Battle Rating of 9.7, the options will be between 9.3 and 10.0. This logic will apply universally across the board where possible, in cases where there is a limited number of vehicles available, the roster will include vehicles of lower BRs just to make sure there are enough options.

In addition to this, we’ve also applied the same logic above to the random aircraft spawns in Naval Battles, the list of available aircraft has been drastically expanded, for both bombers and fighters.

We hope that this new feature combined with the free daily backups will give everyone more ability to stay in each match for longer and keep fighting until the very end!

Naval Improvements

We also have a couple of nice additions for naval that we’d like to tell you about as well. We have some more naval features planned for this update but they’re not quite finalized yet, so we’ll tell you about two that we already have locked in!

Refining Rewards, and how Damage is Calculated

Vessels in War Thunder have effectively two types of damage mechanics: the durability of each section of the ship, and the percentage of crew. Previously, damage — and therefore rewards — was calculated based on how much damage was caused to sections of the ship that contained crew, and not explicitly tied to crew itself.

This could lead to situations where a player has depleted 80% of a ship’s crew but has only caused 15% of the damage, which would lead to only 15% of the reward (SL, RP, mission score, award damage). This is why you may have noticed that destroying coastal vessels provided much more damage points on the scoreboard, because of the difference in their damage model.

In the next update, damage and all of the associated rewards will be tied completely to crew, and not to the sections of the damage model that contain crew. This should make the process of damage and getting rewards much clearer, as crew is a more tangible and convenient source of survivability. This change will mean that you’ll regularly get a much higher damage score when fighting large ships, and higher rewards too!

Severe Damage System

Exactly as the title says, we’ll be adding a severe damage mechanic to naval! It will be similar in function to the mechanic for aircraft that we have in the game already. For naval specifically, you’ll be granted a severe damage credit by causing 50% crew depletion to a ship. This will give you 50% of the kill reward the moment you receive the credit for severe damage. If you don’t land the finishing blow, you’ll still get the kill credit, which will be shared with the player who landed the final hit.

Another difference from the mechanic for aircraft is that a ship won’t be “written off” like a severely damaged aircraft at the end of the mission. If you’ve been severely damaged but keep your vessel afloat until the end of the battle, a kill credit won’t be given to the player that caused the damage. This mechanic will be present for all vessels, from boats to battleships.

“Heavy Damage” Battle Award

When engaging large vessels like cruisers and battleships, they can sometimes take quite a long time to take down. This is fair enough of course, they’re tough nuts to crack after all, but it does mean that it’ll often be quite a while before you get that satisfying Target Destroyed message.

Because of this, we’ll be adding a new battle award, it’ll be named something like “Heavy Damage” and will be awarded for causing 30% crew depletion on large vessels (cruisers and battleships). The aim of this new medal is to give you an extra reward while you steadily bring down enemy ships, and ideally give you a motivation boost to keep those shells raining down!

Vehicles!

Moving on from the naval improvements now to the vehicles coming. The December update will feature a heap of interesting vehicles for all nations, we’ll save the real headliners for the trailer and the upcoming dev server, but we might as well drop a few hints while we’re here...

We’re planning a handful of advanced SAM systems for several nations in the next update. We'll be adding a few, but we think you’ll especially like the two we have planned for Japan and Sweden. We also have some very interesting light vehicles in the works...

We’ll have a nice mix of famous and obscure naval additions well, with each nation with naval getting something. There’s a lot of big names you’ll recognise, regal and states, and a few rarer vessels too!

Also on the cards is a highly unusual experimental bomber, it’ll have a rather special playstyle, but we won’t say much more! There’s a lot to expect on aviation front in general for the next update, you won’t have to wait too long to see what we’ve got in store!

New detailed cockpits

Alright, alright we have to show something, we’d love to share some progress on some bomber cockpits we’ve been working on — next update the B-25 series will all receive detailed cockpits! This addition will be the first of many detailed cockpits that we’ll be adding for older aircraft that are missing them. It may be a small thing in the wider scope of the game, but it’s often the detail that makes War Thunder special, so expect more bombers to receive detailed cockpits in the future. In the meantime, check out the work in progress on the B-25! The textures are still being worked on, but from these screenshots you can see the amount of detail this cockpit will have.

The end of year winter event

We’re coming up to the end of the year now, which means it’ll soon be time for our big winter event, featuring four vehicles instead of one. Keep an eye out for what’s coming for this event!

Before that though, we’ll have a dedicated naval event for a Soviet boat!

Bullet Hell reflections

We’re very happy to see how everyone enjoyed the Bullet Hell event! A lot of us took part too, it was an interesting change of pace for sure. There are a few tweaks we’d like to make to the mode in general but overall we’re very happy to see how well it was received, so expect to see it again in some form in the future. In the meantime we’ll keep working on developing similar experimental modes too.

Video Q&A with WT Game Director, Viacheslav Bulannikov

Check out this Q&A with War Thunder Game Director Viacheslav Bulannikov who answers some of your hottest questions!

Thank you!

Well, that’s the last Community Update post from us this year, it goes fast doesn’t it? From the entire War Thunder team, thank you for a great 2025. Thank you for reading these posts and leaving your thoughts throughout the year, we always appreciate it. All of us here are hard at work on the final major update, and next year after a little bit of R&R we’ll see you again for more updates on what we’re working on! We hope you all have a fantastic holiday season, wrap up warm (apart from those of you in Australia, get the brolly up and the tinnie out!), and we’ll see you in 2026!

War Thunder - Community Update Pack

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The War Thunder Team