Playerunknown's Battlegrounds adding Sanhok in June

The tropical new island of Sanhok will properly arrive as the third Playerunknown's Battlegrounds map "near the end of June", developers PUBG Corp have said ahead of the final public beta test's launch tonight. If you haven't dropped on Sanhok yet, you might want to get the download started early today, as it uses a whole separate client.

Stag & hen parties who'd rather not dabble with unknowns get something new this week too, as an update for the main game has arrived with changes including making molotovs and grenades less rubbo. Heck, it's not a real hen party until you've flashbanged the bride.

Sanhok is the 4x4km Southeast Asian island formerly known as Codename: Savage. Its (probably) final beta test launches tonight at 7pm Pacific (which is actually 3am on Friday for us here in the UK) then will run until 4am Pacific (noon our time) on Monday the 4th of June.

PUBG Corp have kept working on it since the test, of course, adding art assets and dressing locations to look fancier, increasing the spawn rate of items and weapon attachments, and making the blue zone circle move a little slower towards the end. And, most importantly, players in the loading lobby will have 20 apples to lob rather than only 10. I certainly have enjoyed throwing apples.

See the Sanhok testing patch notes #4 for more details on the test and the changes. If you want to visit Sanhok, you'll need to download the separate client - all players should see the 'PUBG: Experimental Server' in their Steam libraries.

As for the main game, update #14 is now go. It's a good update for lobbed weapons. Frag grenades have a wider blast radius, stun grenades can flash people from further away, and molotovs deal more damage - and their fires can now creep across wooden surfaces. Keen-eyed players can also now shoot molotovs in mid-air.

The update has also turned the once-crate-exclusive M24 sniper rifle into a regular loot item. It's powered-down a little, going from 88 damage to 79, but on the bright side you'll now see them more often - and they do still deal more damage than the K98.

A few optimisations are in too, hopefully improving performance. One of these aims to stop vehicle physics freakouts but ha ha I'll believe that when I see it; those bugs will outlive us all. Sadly, a planned change that was supposed to fix the problem of loot spawning in after some players have already landed has been removed as it was causing problems.

PUBG Corp are currently going after Fortnite Battle Royale developers Epic Games in court, claiming that Epic's Plunkbut violates their copyright. Epic, meanwhile, have kept updates flowing, this week adding rideable shopping trolleys to their game.