Patch coverage, in plain language

If you stepped away from Phasmophobia after the big content pushes of the last couple of years, the current roadmap might look quiet at first glance. It is not. Kinetic Games has spent 2026 deliberately slowing the milestone treadmill in favor of quality-of-life improvements, fixes, and reworks, and for returning players that is arguably better news than another headline feature.

The nearest visible milestone is the 13 Willow Street rework, scheduled for July 21, 2026. Reworked maps matter more than they sound: hiding spots move, sight lines change, and looping routes you memorized a year ago may simply stop working. Treat any reworked map as a new map on your first few contracts back.

The bigger-picture change is the 1.0 launch itself, which has been pushed to the second half of 2027. That is a long runway, but it signals that the studio would rather ship reworks and stability now than rush a version number. For players, it means the mechanics you relearn this summer should stay reasonably stable through the rest of the year.

Our advice for anyone coming back: run a few low-stakes contracts on small maps before trusting old habits, skim this patch log for handling changes, and lean on behavior reads rather than memorized layouts until the reworks settle. Our hunt survival guide covers relearning hiding and looping on changed geometry.

⚙ Site impact: map notes for 13 Willow Street will be re-verified after July 21, 2026. Until then, treat its hiding and looping notes as pre-rework.

No-evidence contracts are where most misidentifications happen, and the pattern is almost always the same: a player sees one suggestive behavior, anchors on a single ghost, and stops testing. The fix is not more knowledge. It is discipline about how much weight each tell actually deserves.

Strong tells are behaviors only one ghost can produce: a six-fingered print, a hunt that ends the instant you enter an official hiding spot, a ghost that walks straight past you while you stand still and silent. When you see one of these, you can commit. Weak tells are things like speed impressions, activity levels, or a single odd interaction. Those should narrow your list, never close it.

A practical rule: one weak tell moves a ghost up your list, two independent weak tells make it your working theory, and only a strong tell or a deliberate, repeated test should make it your answer. If you cannot name the test you ran, you guessed.

The scanner on this site is built around that idea. Behavior observations filter the candidate list, and the reasoning notes tell you why each ghost was kept or cut, so you can see when you are leaning on one shaky observation instead of converging evidence. This piece has since grown into a full method article: Zero-evidence identification: a field method.

⚙ Scanner impact: none to logic. This piece explains how the Field Observations panel is intended to be used.

Every rework cycle quietly breaks a little bit of community knowledge. A hiding spot gets removed, a speed value gets tuned, a threshold shifts by a few percent. Guides and muscle memory lag behind the patch, and that gap is exactly where wrong IDs come from.

Evidence-based identification survives reworks fairly well, because the seven evidences are stable pillars of the design. What breaks is the soft knowledge around them: which corner is safe, how fast a chase feels, when a hunt should start. That is why behavioral confirmation, actually watching how the ghost moves and reacts rather than reciting what it should do, becomes more valuable right after a patch, not less.

With 2026 dedicated to reworks and quality-of-life passes, and the 13 Willow Street rework arriving July 21, this is a season for re-testing assumptions. Confirm speeds by observation, re-check hiding spots on reworked maps before a hunt forces the issue, and treat any figure in any guide, including this one, as a community estimate until you have seen it hold in-game.

Our commitment on this site is to date everything, log corrections openly, and label estimates as estimates. That is what a fan reference should do in a year defined by change.

⚙ Site impact: figures across the Codex remain community estimates. Anything affected by upcoming reworks will be re-verified and logged in Corrections.

Two new entities arrived with the Alan Wake collaboration, bringing Phasmophobia to 29 ghosts.

Aswang already jogs at about 1.53 m/s with no target and reaches top speed in roughly 17 seconds, so straight-line running gets you caught. Its weakness is unique: if it sees you step into an official hiding spot, the hunt ends on the spot.

Kormos is the first fully blind ghost. It hears instead of seeing (sprinting alerts it from roughly 30m, walking around 15m, crouch-walking about 10m) and can strike through walls at 1.5m. Standing perfectly still and silent is the only defence. It shares its three evidences with the Mimic, so test for Freezing Temperatures to separate them.

⚙ Scanner impact: the Aswang hiding-spot tell and the Kormos walk-past tell are both in the Field Observations, and the Kormos/Mimic split is flagged automatically.

Twelve new high-quality character models arrived with character bios, adjustable hair, and a free cosmetics shop, with no microtransactions.

The separate death room was removed; players now transition straight to a Dead state. Equipment switching animations are gone for instant swaps, salt places instantly, and flashlights are now held in the left hand.

A new wearable Player Watch shows your sanity and contract time without opening the journal, and it does not count as electronic equipment, so it will not trigger ghost abilities.

⚙ Scanner impact: faster equipment handling changes timing slightly, but evidence logic is unchanged.

A five-second delay was added before you can lock in a ghost in the journal, character visuals were improved, and equipment handling was sped up further.

VR interactions were refined and several ghost and environment bugs were fixed. The time-limited Alan Wake event ran through early June 2026.

Known issues at launch included footstep audio not matching movement speed and minor lighting glitches from the visual overhaul.

⚙ Scanner impact: none to evidence logic; the journal lock-in delay is a UI change only.