Frostburn is the biggest content drop Far Far West has had since it went into Early Access in April, and it changes how a run actually plays. Evil Raptor shipped it as v0.2.0.0 on August 27th, adding the game’s first melee weapons, a Frost spell school built around a new shield bar, a volcanic map, and a full rework of how you unlock gear. Two follow-up patches have since cleaned up bugs and moved a few numbers around.
Quick answer: Update Far Far West on Steam and check the lobby. If you see a single Blueprints currency instead of per-weapon fragments, a Frost tab in the spell menu, and Knuckles, Lasso and Banjo in the weapon list, Frostburn is installed. The promo code THESADLYLOSTBLUEPRINTS grants 15 free blueprints.
Frost spells and the Shield Points system
Frost is the fifth spell school, and it leans defensive rather than damage-focused. Every Frost effect can hand out Shield Points, a blue bar that sits above your health and soaks damage before your HP does. Shields cap at 100 and start decaying a few seconds after you stop gaining them or stop taking hits, so they reward staying in the fight instead of hoarding.
You don’t need a Frost spell equipped to build shields, either. Elemental slots on weapons accept Frost the same way they accept the other elements, and several of the new Jokers generate shield points on melee kills or when a shield absorbs a hit.
| Spell | Unlock level | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Breeze | 1 | Wide frontal cone that freezes groups of regular enemies |
| Bridge | 4 | Ice path in midair that shields allies crossing it and applies Frost |
| Cube | 12 | Encases you or an ally in ice for invulnerability, then breaks out with bonus shields |
| Glaze | 20 | Burst that damages nearby enemies and shields nearby allies |
| Blizzard | 35 | Storm that follows you, damaging enemies and shielding allies |
Note that the unlock order above reflects the September 7th patch, which swapped the first and third slots. Breeze is now the level 1 spell and Cube arrives at level 12. Cube’s cast animation can also be cancelled by holding the attack button while casting, which spawns the ice faster when you’re trying to save yourself mid-fight.
Melee weapons: Knuckles, Lasso and Banjo
Melee weapons don’t get their own slot. They replace either your primary or your secondary, so you have to make sure the rest of your loadout can still handle every enemy type before you drop into a mission. None of them use ammo. Instead, each hit fills a circular charge meter, and spending that charge triggers the weapon’s right-click ability.
| Weapon | Slot | Right-click | Unique Jokers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Knuckles | Primary | Damaging burst in a wide cone | Fist Ro Dah, Fist Rage |
| Lasso | Primary | Damages all enemies in front of you for a few seconds | Sky Lash, Spell Lash |
| Banjo | Secondary | Heals you and allies in a zone around you | Lullabard, Bardbarian |
The Uniques change how each weapon plays rather than just padding stats. Fist Ro Dah pushes you backwards on a charged attack and has a 20 percent chance to apply Frost. Sky Lash grants 50 percent move speed and lets you fly. Spell Lash refills the whole charge bar every time you cast a spell. Lullabard widens Banjo’s healing zone and adds an extra chord per hit but removes the slam, while Bardbarian lets you hold the slam longer for a heavier blow.
Three upgrade lines came along with them. Range extends melee reach, Charging Speed fills the meter faster, and Chord Capacity raises the number of chords you can bank, which only applies to Banjo. Evil Raptor has said this is the first batch and more melee weapons are planned.
Blueprints and Uranium replace the old unlock loop
Item fragments are gone. They’re now called Blueprints, and they work as a single universal currency you pick up during missions like anything else. You no longer pick one weapon to track at a time, and you no longer pay gold on top of the unlock. Spending Blueprints unlocks and buys the weapon in one step. Everything you had banked on individual weapons was pooled and converted when the update landed.
Uranium handles the other half of the split. It only exists inside a mission, and anything that used to cost gold mid-run, including buying, copying and refining Jokers, now costs Uranium instead. Gold is reserved for long-term lobby purchases. Leftover Uranium at extraction converts into XP for your hero and your weapons, so there’s no reason to sit on it.
| How you get Uranium | Detail |
|---|---|
| Breaking a Joker | Punch a Joker to break it; the amount scales with rarity. Dropped Jokers give nothing |
| Killing an Elite | Any Elite enemy |
| Secondary objectives | Standard mission side goals |
| Quests and secrets | Pays out even on repeat completions |
| Lighthouses | Completing the minigame at the top |
| Balloons and unique objectives | Flying balloons plus dedicated Uranium objectives |
Hellfire map, Jungle quests and Lighthouses
Hellfire is the one genuinely new region. It’s a volcanic map with lava fields and meteor hazards, gated behind a three-quest chain from an NPC named Ronsau, and it hides a secret tied to its central volcano. The Jungle map wasn’t left alone either. It picked up ancient pyramids with a coloured brazier puzzle, three new quests from Arizona Jones, and a secret of its own.
Lighthouses now spawn in every mission and show on your minimap. Climb one, finish the light alignment minigame at the top, and the map reveals its unique locations, including the Copy Press and the Refiner. That solves a long-running problem where those stations spawned but almost nobody found them without memorising minimap silhouettes.
Two things previewed in the July devlog did not ship here. The Redwood Forest map and the Zurkers enemy faction were both flagged as unfinished work at the time, and neither made it into Frostburn.
53 new Jokers and the Unique slot cost change
Frostburn added 53 Jokers, bringing the total roster to 147. The split is 25 weapon-slot cards, 22 character-slot cards, and 6 Uniques attached to the new melee weapons. A large share of them exist to make melee and shield builds viable, since none of the older cards were written with punching in mind.
The structural change matters more than any single card. Unique (red) Jokers used to cost a flat five slots regardless of what they did. They now cost a variable number of slots based on how strong they are, which makes weaker Uniques worth running instead of automatically skipping them.
Some of the standouts on the shield side include All Mighty (+1 percent damage per shield point, up to 80 percent), Riposte (+100 percent damage on your next attack after a shield absorbs a hit), Last Bastion (+50 shield at 25 percent HP on a 60 second cooldown), and Tin Man, which turns overheal into up to 15 shield points. Cold Blooded makes your melee attacks freeze enemies at the cost of three shield points each.
Balance changes that affect existing builds
Two long-standing favourites took hits. Battlemage’s cooldown reduction dropped from 1 percent to 0.5 percent per kill, and Speedster’s damage scaling moved from 1 percent per 2 percent move speed to 1 percent per 3 percent, with a 40 percent cap. Cheapskate now caps at +15 HP. Lifesteal was reworked so it scales from all outgoing damage modifiers, and Jokers that modify HP were moved onto one standardised formula.
Spell-side, Acid Rain, the Pyro abilities and Cactus Mino were all adjusted, and the update shipped with a batch of engine and enemy AI performance fixes. Six new skins arrived too, covering Bullet Bob, Arizona Jones, Ronsau, Nemo, Amnesia Headheart and Nuker, plus a Juggling emote unlocked through the Jungle brazier puzzle and a Plane emote sold in the shop.
Post-launch patches: hotfix 0.2.0.4 and patch 0.2.0.20
Frostburn pulled in more than 60,000 new players and peaked above 11,000 concurrents, and it also generated over 500 bug reports. Two patches have landed since, with the studio saying it is prioritising stability on low-end hardware and Linux.
| Version | Date | What changed |
|---|---|---|
| v0.2.0.0 | Aug 27, 2026 | Frostburn launch: melee, Frost, Shield Points, Hellfire, Uranium, Blueprints, 53 Jokers |
| 0.2.0.4 | Aug 28, 2026 | Fixed broken promo code redemption, added THESADLYLOSTBLUEPRINTS, made Marauders freeze correctly |
| 0.2.0.20 | Sep 7, 2026 | Frost tree reorder, Banjo and melee XP buffs, cheaper Blueprints and Wandering Trader prices, 100+ bug fixes |
The September patch is the one worth knowing if you’re grinding. Primary and secondary Blueprint costs fell from 12 to 8 and utility costs from 6 to 4. Wandering Trader prices dropped to 10, 20, 30, 45 and 55. Banjo got a broad pass, with base damage up from 8 to 9, slam damage from 20 to 25, healing radius from 650 to 1024, and an XP multiplier raised from 0.6 to 1.0 that now counts healing done to yourself and teammates. Knuckles and Lasso XP went from 0.5 to 0.7. Cryptic Horseman also stopped dropping Normal-rarity Jokers entirely, and its Legendary odds doubled to 10 percent.
Note: If you’re on an AMD GPU and hitting crashes or frame stutter after updating, toggle AMD FSR on or off in the graphics settings. The issue sits with AMD Frame Generation rather than the game, and a driver-side fix is expected.
Evil Raptor has published a public roadmap on Notion covering what comes after Frostburn, though it doesn’t attach hard dates to anything, and the team has said plans can shift. For now the practical takeaway is that shields and close-range fighting are a real build path in Far Far West for the first time, and the old habit of tracking one weapon’s fragments at a time is finished.
