Shroom and Gloom languages

Steam lists 2 languages for the game: English and Simplified Chinese. Everything else is a request or a promise, and this page keeps the two apart.

The first two rows read the store’s own language list, so they change if Steam’s list does. Of 1,549 Steam reviews, 1,106 are in English; the rest are in other languages. The reviews page has how they rate.

What the developers announced

Simplified Chinese came first by design. In the Next Fest post the team wrote “For our first reveal we’re so stoked to announce our first supported language, Simplified Chinese!” and asked for input on the rest: “Hearing back from the community and reviewing wishlists from different regions will really help us know which regions to localise for!” (in Steam announcement: Next Fest Demo! 200K Wishlists! Localization announcement!) The launch FAQ then set the order: “We’re launching into Early Access with English and Simplified Chinese first, then we’ll roll out other languages.” (pinned in Steam discussion: FAQs here!!) None of these has a date, and the wider roadmap is on the Early Access page.

Why it takes so long

A thread asking for Brazilian Portuguese got the longest answer. The developers said they are already on it, and added “We’re probably still a ways off from being able to roll this out, but we’re working on it.” Then they explained the delay: “the text on cards is dynamically generate, allowing it to change as you modify the rules of the cards. Because the sentence construction of each language is unique, it means that every translation calls for reworking the code that we use to generate these descriptions.” (Team Lazerbeam, in Steam discussion: Brazilian Portuguese translation!) The same is why a card’s wording changes as you upgrade it, which the cards page covers.

French players got a warmer but vaguer reply back in the demo days: “Thanks for adding an extra vote for a French translation of the final game. We really hope we’ll be able to make it happen!” (Team Lazerbeam, in Steam discussion: french translation) After launch, new one-line requests keep arriving for French and for Italian, which have no answer yet.

If you play in Chinese

Chinese is the one language the 0.6.39 notes spend real time on, and the developers apologise to those players. The patch says it gave “a lot of focus to improving on issues when playing the game in Simplified Chinese, especially the bug where some players had the game freeze on start up”, and lists three fixes (in Steam announcement: Shroom Patch Notes: 0.6.39):

• Long loads and crashes while loading: “Hopefully fixed”, on the developers’ own wording.
• Blank text: “resolved issue with some instances of text appearing blank”, which they trace to large text atlases loading more slowly than expected.
• System language: if it is Chinese, Simplified Chinese or Traditional Chinese, the game now falls back to the Chinese text it has, so a Traditional Chinese system gets the Simplified locale.

Earlier, the first patch had already replaced the Chinese loading screen with an image as a step against the same load problem (in Steam announcement: Shroom Patch Notes: 0.6.24). The Chinese-language bug report thread on Steam, which links a form for reporting Chinese bugs, has a reply saying the game already has an official Chinese version, “虽然还有一些显示问题，我们会紧急调整”, roughly that some display problems remain and will be fixed urgently (in Steam discussion: 中文玩家Bug反馈说明). Where the developers answer in general is on the community page.