How to Beat PEAK's Reworked Caldera and Kiln After Patch 2.5.a

PEAK, Aggro Crab and Landfall's co-op climbing game about scaling a cursed mountain, wrapped up its content roadmap in August with GLOOM and THE CITADEL, a pair of new variant biomes that shuffle into the daily rotation alongside the original CALDERA and THE KILN. Those two founding biomes spent a few weeks out of rotation while the team ironed out bugs, and Patch 2.04.a brought them back with new hazards, new loot rules and a feature aimed at PEAK's upcoming console ports. A string of follow-up patches, including one that landed on Steam just yesterday, has kept tuning both biomes. Here's what changed and how to climb through it without losing a run.

Why the Caldera and the Kiln Keep Disappearing

PEAK doesn't run one fixed map. Every expedition draws from a pool of biomes, and since the Gloom and Citadel maps arrived, the Caldera's ash fields and the Kiln's lava caves have been rotating out in favor of the newer content rather than running alongside it. Aggro Crab pulled both older biomes for a short stretch to patch bugs specific to them before folding them back into the pool, so scouts who only saw Gloom's fog or the Citadel's spike floors for a while are now just as likely to draw the volcano again. Check the full PEAK store page for the current build number before you climb, since the rotation and its hazards have shifted with nearly every patch since.

The Caldera's Condors Will Steal Your Run

The headline addition to the Caldera in Patch 2.04.a is a flock of condors that now circle the biome's large cliffside nests. Those nests were purely decorative before; now they explain themselves. Wander too close and a condor can grab a scout, carry them off, and drop them back at the wall once it lets go, undoing whatever progress that climber had made on the current pitch. The practical fix is simple: treat any nest silhouette on the Caldera's ridgelines as a no-fly zone and route your climb around it rather than under it, especially when you're carrying luggage that would scatter if you're snatched mid-carry.

Loot has also shifted around the birds. The developers removed one guaranteed luggage spawn from the statue area at the end of the Caldera, but made the remaining piece there guaranteed to be higher quality, so a single careful detour to the statue is now worth more than it used to be.

Crossing the Kiln's Petrifying Rocks and Hot Rock Bridges

The Kiln got the bigger overhaul. Patch 2.04.a added petrifying rocks scattered through the cave system and new hot rock bridges spanning its lava channels, on top of the luggage spawner gaining two extra bags to compensate for the one pulled from the Caldera. The hot rock bridges look like solid stone but radiate heat the same way the Kiln's lava streams do, so treat them as a timed hazard rather than a safe path: cross with momentum rather than stopping to rest partway across, and keep an eye on teammates carrying flammable items like Amulets, which a recent patch made uncookable specifically because players kept losing them to environmental fire.

The petrifying rocks are best spotted before you commit to a route. They sit among the Kiln's ordinary stone, so scouts who rope up together and call out hazards as they climb will lose far less time here than solo climbers picking a path on the fly.

Bouncy Mushrooms, the Rescue Claw and the Mycoacrobatics Badge

Several traversal tools changed in the same patch. Bouncy mushrooms now send you higher when you bounce off them from a greater height, which makes the Mycoacrobatics Badge noticeably easier to chase, but the added height comes with a catch: your jump strength decays faster across consecutive bounces, so a long mushroom chain won't keep gaining altitude the way it might have before. The awkward off-angle bounces that used to send climbers into fall damage after a high drop have also been toned down, making high mushroom bounces more predictable than they were at launch.

The Rescue Claw, used to yank a fallen teammate back toward solid ground, now ragdolls the rescued player for less time, so they can grab on and recover faster once the claw connects. It's a small change, but on a hot rock bridge or near a condor nest, the extra second of control is often the difference between a clean save and losing two scouts instead of one.

Room Codes and What Patch 2.5.a Actually Fixed

Buried in the Caldera and Kiln patch was groundwork for PEAK's console ports: a new room code system. Open the pause menu in any lobby and you'll see a code you can hand to friends, who enter it through "Join Game" on the main menu; there's also a setting to hide the code if you're streaming. It works alongside the game's existing invite methods rather than replacing them, and it's the system that will let players on different platforms climb together once the ports arrive.

That porting work introduced its own share of bugs, which is what yesterday's Patch 2.5.a was largely about. Reconnecting scouts were sometimes dropped back into a run dead when they should have still been alive, joining a room code that didn't exist could freeze your menu buttons entirely, and loading into a different part of the world could strand you on the loading screen. All three are fixed as of this patch, along with a reduction in the fall damage you take leaving an anti-sphere and a fix for cloned items with fuel spontaneously recharging. If you hit any of those bugs on a run this week, updating to the current build should clear them.

Aggro Crab has said PEAK was designed to ship finished rather than run as a live-service game, so don't expect another biome on the scale of Gloom and the Citadel. What's coming instead, by the studio's own account, is continued maintenance until the Caldera and the Kiln's newest additions are as stable as the rest of the mountain.