Ball x Pit's last free update, The Naturalist, arrives August 6

The final free content update for Ball x Pit arrives on August 6, the game's developers announced in a post on the PlayStation Blog. Titled The Naturalist Update, it will be available to all PS5 players and was accompanied by a new trailer and gameplay clips.

The team said the run of post-launch updates came out of material left over from development: with time in hand before release and a backlog of unused ideas, they kept building and shipped the results as free content.

Two new characters

The update adds two unlockable characters built around opposing trade-offs. The Ballbearer doubles the number of ball slots available but gives up passive items entirely. The Hoary Hoarder inverts that, carrying only two ball slots in exchange for twice as many passive slots, leaning on item Evolutions to carry a run.

Eleven new balls come with the update. The developers detailed five of them:

• Lightning Bug spawns a firefly on every bounce, which seeks out the strongest enemy before zapping nearby targets with lightning.
• Mosquito Kingdom builds a swarm, spawning one or two mosquitoes on each hit; they hunt the weakest target for 100 to 150 damage, and a killing blow returns a small amount of health.
• Drill pierces enemies from behind, dealing extra damage as it passes through.
• Flesh opens at half damage but accelerates with every bounce until it is crossing the screen at speed.
• Armageddon calls a meteor shower on its first impact, marking the target and dealing heavy damage within a three-tile radius.

Five new passive items were also described:

• Platinum Dumbbell grants a damage boost that holds until the ball hits the back wall.
• Inglorious Hammer makes any ball that strikes a wall or the back of the arena immediately hit a random enemy for reduced damage.
• Remote Detonator spawns a level 1 Bomb Ball each time an enemy dies, chaining explosions across the board.

The developers said further additions are in the update that they did not want to detail ahead of release. The Naturalist Update goes live for PS5 players on August 6.