Keep track of Arma 3 development progress, straight from the team, and let us know what you think!
Since its first public release, we have published the very latest development build to a special development Steam branch. During prime time development, this happened every single working day, a feat that makes us proud till this day. In its current small-scale Live Ops development phase, we still do publish builds, but on average once per week (typically on Wednesday afternoons). Its goals are as follows:
- To test our team's work publicly, immediately and always.
- To validate ideas, try out concepts, experiment with technologies and gather player feedback on it all.
- To be as transparent as possible about our progress.
- To discover potential issues in the broad and varied player base. This is complementary to our in-house testing by the various QA teams.
- To allow mod teams and other custom content creators to prepare for changes and adapt their works if necessary, and to give them a chance to help iterate on upcoming development.
We believe this approach lets us create a better game that is influenced by player feedback throughout development. Your help is very much appreciated!
Caution
- Do not use this branch unless you would like to participate testing or are otherwise interested in it. For regular players, we recommend staying on the default main branch.
- This daily experimental build undergoes little in-house testing before it is published. It is possible for serious issues to be present, or even for major components to be temporarily broken entirely.
- Multiplayer is not compatible with main branch. You will not be able to play on main branch servers, thus restricting you to a smaller range of testing servers. For testing of selected engine improvements, please see the Profiling Branch instead.
- No Linux Dedicated Server package is available for this build.
- Mods or other custom content may not yet be compatible with this build.
- Steam client is limited to one branch being installed at a time, so switching branches involves re-downloading data (see a potential work-around below).
- Consider your bandwidth, because updates can range from several megabytes to hundreds of megabytes.
- This build is not 100% representative of a main branch build. It may contain special diagnostics that can affect performance for example.
- While main branch updates are the culmination of the collected Dev-Branch changes since the last update, not all changes on Dev-Branch necessarily appear in the next update.
Usage
Opt into the Dev-Branch in your Steam client:
- Right-click on Arma 3.
- Select Properties.
- Access the Betas tab.
- Select development - Development Build from the drop-down list.
- Let the game update itself to the development build.
- To ensure a valid build, consider verifying the integrity of the local game cache using Steam client.
You can use our Game Updater tool to install multiple branches on your PC, including Dev-Branch. It can be found in the free Arma 3 Tools suite on Steam.
Reports
- Change logs are published in this forums thread.
- The best place to report issues is and to learn about known issues is the ARMA Discord (#dev_rc_branch channel).
- Alternatively, report issues to our Feedback Tracker (how to guide).
- Please mark your exact version number and usage of Dev-Branch clearly.
- Please also try to replicate the issue in the actual main branch build.
- Please prioritize reports on issues new to the Dev-Branch build (not present in the actual main branch).
- The Dev-Branch build can also be discussed in this forums discussion thread.
Thank you kindly for your help with making Arma 3 a better game!