Class Overhaul — five roles reworked, lobby flow rebalanced
Updated:
A mid-June 2026 update rebalanced five playable classes — Doctor, Surgeon, Head Nurse, Secretary, and Secret Agent — and reworked how the lobby hands out roles at the start of a shift.
Date note: the studio did not publish an exact day for this update. Multiple community trackers place it in the second week of June 2026; we use 2026-06-10 as the approximate anchor.
Why this update happened
By the start of June 2026, four of the original launch classes were doing most of the work in every shift, and a handful of newer classes were sitting basically unused. Roleplay servers in particular had drifted into a pattern where the front desk and the surgical theatre had no incentive to coordinate with the rest of the staff, because the class designs didn't reward it. The class overhaul was the studio's response — a single update that touched five roles together rather than adjusting them one at a time.
Classes that changed
Doctor
The Doctor's diagnosis ability had been the single most powerful tool in the lobby — it gave near-perfect anomaly identification on a short cooldown, which compressed entire shifts into "wait for the Doctor to call it." The overhaul kept the diagnosis frame but tightened the activation window and added a confidence gradient, so a Doctor still confirms suspicious patients faster than anyone else but no longer turns the rest of the staff into spectators.
Surgeon
The Surgeon was reworked to feel like a downstream role rather than a parallel one. The class lost some of its standalone item access and gained interactions that key off patients already routed through the treatment rooms. Net effect: a Surgeon now needs the front of the hospital functioning to be useful, which gives the front desk a reason to talk to the back.
Head Nurse
The Head Nurse picked up a coordination ability that briefly surfaces nearby patient conditions to everyone on shift. This is the closest the patch came to adding a new mechanic — it's a soft "everyone look at this" broadcast that solves the old problem of one player spotting a tricky condition and having no way to share it across the room.
Secretary
The Secretary's role had been the most ornamental of the bunch, and the overhaul gave it actual queue control over the check-in window. A Secretary can now stagger the patient flow rather than passively logging it, which directly affects how often a shift devolves into multiple anomalies being open at once.
Secret Agent
The Secret Agent class was the most controversial change. Its detection toolkit was widened, but the class lost the ability to act on its findings alone — it now flags rather than resolves. This pushes Secret Agent into a support slot, which is what the studio had been pointing at since the role launched.
Lobby flow rebalance
Beyond the per-class changes, the update altered how roles get assigned in the lobby. Earlier versions had used a simple first-come-first-served claim system that let the same player pick the same dominant class every shift. The new flow nudges variety: classes recently played by a given session start lower in the selection list, and there's a soft cap on how many copies of the same class can be on a single shift roster.
The patch did not remove a class. It also did not change the class unlock costs — see /wiki/classes/ for the current cost table.
What changed for the player
The practical impact, week-over-week, was visible in two places:
- Shift composition — the average shift now has more class diversity, which means the typical event plays out differently depending on the lineup. Strategies tuned around a "guaranteed Doctor + Surgeon" composition no longer hold.
- Tier list churn — the class tier list we publish was rewritten after this patch landed; rankings from before mid-June are obsolete.
Quiet fixes that shipped alongside
The patch post also rolled in a set of smaller adjustments without dedicated callouts: improved hit detection on the fire extinguisher, a fix for the supply-room shelf clipping at certain camera angles, and audio rebalancing in the surgical theatre so the surgical minigame doesn't drown out hallway cues.
Related coverage
- Launch retrospective — what the class system shipped with originally
- Skin system launch — the cosmetic layer that landed shortly after
- Console support — input rebalancing tied to the same window