Squad Hotfix 10.6.3 Pulls the HAB Ammo Crate. Here's What Changed

The free ammo crate is gone. Squad Hotfix 10.6.3 landed on October 22, and the headline change is a reversal: HABs are back to how they worked before Update 10.6, which means building one no longer drops a crate of ammo on the wall next to it.

If you started playing Squad in the last month, that might sound like a downgrade. If you've been placing HABs for years, there's a decent chance you're relieved. Either way, it's worth understanding what happened, because it says a lot about how Offworld is handling feedback right now.

What the crate was supposed to fix

A HAB is your team's forward spawn. A squad leader drops a radio, builds the HAB near it, and the rest of the team can spawn there instead of walking from main. The catch has always been ammo. A HAB without a crate next to it turns into a respawn point for people who show up with half a mag and no grenades, and new squad leaders forget the crate constantly.

Update 10.6 tried to solve that by attaching an ammo crate directly to every HAB. Players spotted it on the public test build back in September, and the early reaction on r/joinsquad was mostly warm. One of the top comments in the playtest thread called it "an excellent quality-of-life addition," and another player said they'd lost count of the times they waited ten minutes for supplies after another SL burned the build points on something else.

The same thread also called out the problem that ended up sinking it. The crate was part of the HAB itself, so it shared the HAB's health and couldn't be knocked out on its own, and it could clip into walls and rocks depending on where you placed it. As one player put it, "I dont hate it but id rather just have the first ammo crate of a radio free. This will mess up some more precise indoor HAB placements."

Three hotfixes in, Offworld backed out

Once 10.6 went live, those placement issues showed up in real matches. Hotfix 10.6.1 moved the crate inside the HAB and fixed a bug where the crate survived after the HAB was destroyed, which let people rearm forever from what was basically a ghost box. Hotfix 10.6.2 on October 15 added stakes to HAB blueprints so you could see where the crate would spawn and avoid getting trapped inside the finished structure.

That same 10.6.2 post is where the team admitted the idea wasn't working. In a dev note, Offworld wrote that "the implementation didn't land in a way that achieved those goals while accommodating the long-term players of the game," and said it would "BACK OUT the changes to the system in our next hotfix." That's what Hotfix 10.6.3 did a week later.

The 10.6.3 notes say the team still wants to make life easier for squad leaders and newer players, but needs to find a way that "doesn't disrupt the current gameplay or navigation around the HAB." Any redesign will go back through playtesting first, and there's no timeline yet.

The rest of the patch

It's a small hotfix, but there are a couple of other things in it worth knowing about:

• Vehicle laser rangefinders show distance numbers properly again in Jensen's Range, so you can practice ranging without guessing.
• A client crash that happened when a dead player respawned while still being dragged is fixed.
• Server admins can now change the map on an empty, freshly booted server through RCON, which should make life easier for anyone running event or training servers.

What it means if you're new

If you picked up the habit of trusting the HAB to carry its own ammo, drop it. You're back to the old rule: when your SL builds a HAB, someone needs to put an ammo crate down near it, and it's worth pointing out on comms if nobody has. Logi drivers and squad leaders will be grateful.

It's also a good moment to appreciate that the community actually moved the needle here. Plenty of players liked the crate, plenty didn't, and Offworld chose to pull it and try again rather than leave a half-working system in the game. The 10.6.3 post also says the team has started talking internally about the "projects, plans, and promises" it has in the works and expects to share more in the coming weeks, so keep an eye on the Squad news page and the Steam announcements.

If you're looking for a unit that'll teach you HAB and logi habits the right way, you can browse Squad units on Milsim Units.