I still remember the night I read those patch notes and thought, wait, they're giving us a mortar? It was the November 2021 update, and I was sitting in a voice call with three friends who had all sworn off swimming across rivers because a single bullet in the water used to mean instant death. We laughed about the chicken. We argued about the mortar. And then we queued up, died three times in a row to something we didn't understand, and spent the next few weeks learning a game that felt slightly different from the one we'd mastered. Years later, in 2026, I look back at that patch as the moment PUBG stopped being just a shooter for me and became a sandbox of terrible, wonderful ideas.

Let's start with the loudest addition. The M79 arrived as a smoke grenade launcher, and the pitch was simple: cover at range. Not a killing tool, a decision tool.

I remember the first time I used it to save a teammate. He was down behind a rock with no cover between us, and I lobbed a 40mm smoke round at the ground near him. The projectile cracked open and two separate smoke blooms rolled out, one on impact and a second a few seconds later. It bought us exactly the eight seconds we needed.

M79 detail	Value
Weapon slot	Pistol slot
Ammo	40mm Smoke Grenade (max stack 5)
Damage to enemies	0
Max firing range	400m
Reload time	3.5 – 4 seconds
Weight	14
Available in	Normal, Custom, Sandbox — not Training Mode

The trick most people never learned: if the round lands within 10 meters of what it hits and doesn't detonate properly, you only get the second smoke effect after a three-second delay. I found that out the hard way, staring at an empty field where my beautiful cover was supposed to be.

Then there was the Mortar, which was a different animal entirely. It ate a primary slot, demanded flat ground — no cement, no iron, no water, no wooden floors, no interiors — and locked you in place while you crouched and fired. Three seconds to deploy, one second between shots, and a range band between 121 and 700 meters. It never made it into Ranked Season 14, which tells you exactly how the developers felt about it. But in Normal matches, a well-placed mortar was pure psychological warfare. Nobody wants to push a compound when the sky is falling.

And then, quietly, the best change of the whole patch: DBNO swimming. Previously, going down in deep water skipped the downed state entirely and killed you on the spot. Now you entered a slow, half-speed swimming crawl with a real chance of reaching shore.

• 🏊 Downed players swim at half normal speed

• 🫁 Lung air is not reset when you enter DBNO — if you were drowning, you keep drowning

• ⏳ Constant HP drain plus drowning damage means roughly 10 seconds underwater, maximum

• 🚫 Reviving underwater is impossible, and any revive cancels if either player submerges or moves too much

• ✅ Reviving a swimming player while floating on the surface works fine

I won a game because of that. Not a fight — a river crossing. My squad had been wiped down to me and one downed friend, and instead of dying in the water he made it to a muddy bank and I got him up behind a tree. It felt like the map had forgiven us for something.

Oh, and Taego got chickens. Actual chickens. They had emotional states, which is the funniest sentence I have ever written about a battle royale game.

State	What happens
Calm	Default. Zen. Nothing to see here.
Fear	They bolt when they hear punching, footsteps (not prone), gunshots, engines, or another creature dying
Death	Guns and grenades kill them. They go where we all go.

For a while my squad treated chickens as an early-warning system. A chicken sprinting across a field meant someone was nearby, and honestly it was more reliable than half the audio cues at the time. The patch also added five Taego areas to the Team Deathmatch preset — Palace, Field, Market, Mountain and Shipyard — and tuned spawn points in Market and Mountain so the fights stopped turning into roof-camping stalemates.

Ranked players got a different kind of patch. Taego's blue zone was reworked for the 8km map and a pile of toys were stripped out: Emergency Landing, Emergency Pickup, Comeback BR, Secret Rooms, Error Space, Self-AED, the M79, the Mortar, C4, Blue Zone Grenades and Spike Traps. Paramo was compressed too — smaller, faster phases, total playtime down from 21 minutes to 18, with more loot on the ground but no Secret Room Keys, no Panzerfausts and no 8x scopes. It was the developers admitting that some fun is not competitive, and competitive is not always fun.

Elsewhere the game got a PGC 2021 coat of paint — a new esports menu with an overview tab for streams and schedules and a standings tab for match rankings, plus PGC branding across the lobby, the plane banner, live-stream billboards on Erangel and Miramar, and building graffiti on three maps. The Halloween theme packed up and left. Krafton ID linking arrived in the lobby, and the Profile Overview replaced the old Career page so you could finally see someone's season stats, survival level, last mastery kill and medals at a glance instead of squinting at a spreadsheet.

Sanhok and Karakin also picked up the Dynamic Blue Zone, which sped things up based on how many people were still breathing:

Phase	Triggers when survivors drop below
2nd	30
3rd	18
4th	10
5th	3
6th	3

A little message on screen told you the delay had been shortened because the lobby was thinning out. Small thing. Massive quality-of-life improvement.

The bug fixes were their own comedy reel. A cancel error during matchmaking. Weapons getting holstered after you healed in the driver's seat and stepped out of a vehicle. An observer hearing gunshots from a player who wasn't shooting. Night Hunter Mask colours that didn't match the store banner — the eternal struggle. A crash when you hit Alt+Tab in fullscreen with DX12 enabled, which I personally triggered roughly forty times. And a long, deeply relatable list of clothing clipping issues: transparent ankles with the Dinoland Mascot Suit, gloves tearing through the Midnight Equalizer Jacket, waistlines vanishing on specific top-and-bottom combos. Fashion is the true endgame, and it is held together with tape.

Looking back from 2026, the dates on those shop rotations — Singles' Day, PGC 2021 bundles, Black Friday windows that closed in December 2021 — are pure archaeology. The Survivor Pass: CRAZY NIGHT ended with that update, and we were told the next pass wouldn't land until March 2022. At the time it felt like a drought. In hindsight it was the calm before a very long, very strange era for the game.

But the patch itself? I still think about it. It's the update that made water survivable, made smoke a skill, made a chicken a tactical asset, and made me crouch on a hillside with a mortar I could never quite aim properly. If you'd told me then that I'd still be talking about it years later, I'd have laughed. Then a chicken would have run past me, and I'd have known someone was coming.