Toby Fox had a simple announcement for fans on Bluesky this week: "Deltarune Chapter 5 came out IDK if you saw." Understated as ever. The numbers, though, tell a very different story.
DELTARUNE Chapter 5 dropped on June 25, 2026, and Steam's concurrent player chart immediately went vertical. The game peaked at nearly 300,000 simultaneous players, more than double its previous all-time high, and landed in Steam's top 10 best-selling games within hours of release. For a series built by one person over the better part of a decade, that is a remarkable number.
How a free RPG keeps pulling these numbers
Here's the thing about Deltarune's release history: it has been anything but conventional. Chapter 1 dropped for free in 2018 with almost no warning. Chapter 2 followed in 2021, also free. Then Fox announced that future chapters would be paid, with the plan being to bundle chapters 3 through 5 into a single commercial release.
That plan changed. In 2025, chapters 3 and 4 launched as the game's "official" paid release. Chapters 1 and 2 remain free to this day, and anyone who purchased chapters 3 and 4 gets every subsequent chapter at no additional cost. Chapter 5 arrived as part of that same deal.
The key here is that Fox built a release model that rewards early buyers while keeping the entry point free. New players can try two full chapters before spending anything. That structure clearly works: the player numbers keep climbing with each new release.
What the Steam FAQ says about what comes next
"The story is still continuing, and more chapters will be added for free over time," reads the official Deltarune Steam page. "We are aiming for a 2027 release! Meanwhile, we will be periodically releasing information on the development progress of the game."
That 2027 target is for Chapter 6, but Fox has already signaled the pipeline extends well beyond that. In a recent newsletter, he noted that development on Chapter 6 is going well enough that some team members may begin work on Chapter 7 before the end of 2026. For a project that once felt like it might never get past chapter 2, the pace has picked up considerably.
Getting through Chapter 5 if you just started
With nearly 300,000 players jumping in at once, a lot of people are going to hit walls. Chapter 5 introduces new puzzles, new boss encounters, and some mechanics that are easy to miss on a first run. The Deltarune Chapter 5 complete walkthrough covers the full chapter from the honey toast opening through the castle puzzles, festival sections, and the Dark World flower shop.
Two of the trickier encounters involve the prosecutor duo Yellow and Blue, whose trial cases require specific evidence and correct culprit selections. You'll want to check the guide to beating Yellow and Blue before going in blind, since getting those cases wrong has consequences. The Mysterious Structure sequence is another point where players tend to get stuck, requiring you to locate Aqua and obtain the Petal Feather before the activation triggers correctly.
Chapter 6 is targeting 2027, and Fox's team is already moving fast enough that Chapter 7 work could begin this year. For everything you need to clear Chapter 5 in the meantime, the full DELTARUNE guide collection has you covered.
