War Thunder 2.57.1.52 Patch Notes (29th July 2026)

Update 2.57.1.52 is a housekeeping patch, the kind that arrives when the development team has accumulated enough confirmed bugs to warrant a maintenance cycle rather than a feature push. None of the changes here are headline additions, but several address problems that will have frustrated specific pilot and tanker builds for weeks or months. The real value lies in understanding which play styles actually benefit and which remain untouched.

The most immediately consequential fix concerns SAM vehicles and their missile loading logic. A bug that loaded the wrong missile type onto multi-vehicle SAM launchers when the player switched missile types on one launcher and then moved to the radar vehicle before the reload finished has been corrected. This is not abstract: it means SAM crews who were finding themselves armed with the wrong ordnance at critical moments. Perhaps anti-air rounds when they needed anti-ship, or vice versa. Will now have their loadouts behave as intended. In Nuclear Escalation specifically, corvette anti-air has been adjusted to make them easier to hit with anti-ship missiles, which rebalances the air-to-sea dynamic in that mode without touching the broader naval meta.

Aircraft players see relief from two specific pain points. The fuel dumping bug that prevented jettisoning fuel after using rocket boosters has been eliminated, restoring a tactical option that was completely unavailable in certain loadout combinations. The J-22M1A's drop tank fuel display issue. Where external fuel showed in the main tank counter without a separate timer. Corrects a readability problem that could have led to misjudgements about fuel state during combat. Less critical but still welcome, the Ju 388 J's disappearing crosshair in third-person view is fixed, restoring visual feedback that should have been there all along.

Ground vehicle crews benefit from a turret rotation fix that eliminates jerky horizontal movement when the gun is fully lowered, and from improved hit analysis highlighting that now properly shows which armour elements a shell contacted. The commander camera jitter on SAMs like the HQ11 when toggling radar controls is gone. These are friction points in the user experience rather than balance changes, but they compound across dozens of engagements.

Nuclear Escalation receives the patch's only mode-specific adjustment: the vegetation-free zone around airfields has been expanded. The patch does not explain the reasoning, but larger clear zones typically reduce surprise attacks from ground cover and give spawning aircraft more reaction time. Whether this addresses a specific balance complaint or simply improves clarity is left unsaid.

What is absent matters as much as what arrived. The patch notes explicitly state they reflect only key changes and do not represent a complete list of improvements, which is standard disclaimer language. However, no balance adjustments to vehicles, weapons, or repair costs appear here. This is purely bug correction and minor mode tuning. Players waiting for changes to underperforming aircraft or overcosted tanks will find nothing.