SCP: Secret Laboratory Megapatch III Private Beta: November 13, the Free Trial and the Server Question

What Northwood announced

The November 6 post on Steam, titled "MEGAPATCH III // Private Beta & Free Trial // Launch Date Reveal", answers the question the community has asked since the October status report put the beta "around early November". The private beta of Megapatch III goes live on Friday, 13 November 2026, at 20:00 GMT. Northwood says the update has reached a state where it is stable and functional enough to host a private beta, while the team keeps modifying, programming and modelling parts of it and responds to supporter feedback during the beta.

Access comes two ways. Tier-4 Patreon supporters get in as before. New this time, anyone can buy beta access on Steam for $20, either from the free trial's main menu or from Northwood's portal, where it can also be bought as a gift or as a bundle for friends. As with earlier betas, the price steps down: to $10 after two weeks and to $5 one week after that.

What did not get a date is the full 15.0 release. The October 25 status report placed it later in 2026, and the November post does not move or confirm that. Treat "later in 2026" as the last word until Northwood says otherwise.

The free trial is a different kind of beta

This is the genuinely new part. Northwood is putting out an open, freely accessible Steam build of the beta. It carries the same features as the Patreon beta, with one big exception: no multiplayer, and no servers are accessible. You can walk the new Surface Zone, meet SCP-953 and judge the art direction on your own. To play a round with other people, you need the paid access or Patreon.

For a round-based multiplayer game, a trial without multiplayer is an odd but clever fit. It lets curious players see the content before they pay, and it keeps the actual playtest, the part that stresses spawn waves, Surface Zone sightlines and SCP-953's chase loop, inside a smaller group that has paid for the privilege of finding bugs. For server owners it also means the trial population will not show up on anyone's server, so do not expect a wave of new faces on 14.2 servers to come from it.

What is unfinished at launch

Northwood lists what will still be in development when the beta opens, which is unusually candid and useful for anyone planning events around it:

• the Gate A and Gate B entrance rooms are playable but in greybox, with the art pass coming during the beta;
• MTF and Chaos Insurgency spawn animations are still in progress, so expect no spawn wave animations at launch, even though the MTF helicopter is already remodelled;
• SCP-953's containment chamber is unfinished (its unique spawning conditions do not need it), and its own chase theme is held back, so the generic chase music plays for now;
• SCP-953 and SCP-106 still need new icons for the ability icon system;
• Surface Zone doors and gates are only partly placed;
• mini waves and civilians may spawn at the default spawn location if the new Surface Zone mini-wave elevators are not ready;
• the Gate B blast door will likely arrive later, and the main menu launches without credits and OPG.

None of that is a server setting, but every item is something players will report as a bug on day one. If you run a community that is going to buy in together, share that list before Friday.

The server question

Here is what the post does not say. It describes how players get access and that the free trial has no servers. It says nothing about whether community servers can run the beta, how a server would get the beta build, or whether beta play is limited to Northwood's own servers. Anything you read with a confident answer to that is a guess.

What we can check is the Steam side. On November 7 the SCP: Secret Laboratory Dedicated Server app (Steam app 996560) listed four branches:

Two things stand out. The earlyaccess branch exists for exactly the people who would need 15.0 first, plugin developers and server maintainers, and on November 7 it carried the same build as public. And none of the branches has moved to anything that looks like a 15.0 build yet. If Northwood lets community servers into the beta, a new build on one of these branches, or a new branch, is where it would show up first. That is speculation about the mechanism, not a promise of access, and it is worth watching from Friday evening.

What 15.0 means for plugin servers

Megapatch III is the kind of update that rewrites assumptions. The October status report described the reworked Surface Zone with a light snowstorm and a new night sky, Gate A as a run-down office building and Gate B as an abandoned warehouse behind a blast door, with a vehicle garage between them, plus SCP-953 with its own containment area in Heavy Containment. The same report listed gameplay changes: humans carrying two SCP items instead of three, slow walking rising from 1.6 to 2.3 m/s, Scientists spawning only in checkpoints and one Facility Guard spawn becoming a Scientist.

For a community server that lives on a plugin framework, each of those is a potential break: spawn logic, item limits, room names, door and gate handling, anything that hooks the Surface Zone. The 14.2 line has been patch-and-maintain for months (14.2.7 on 30 May, the Halloween update on 17 October), which is the calm before the rebuild. Expect your framework and every plugin to need updates against 15.0, and expect that to happen in stages: framework first, then the plugins that depend on it, then your own configuration.

The practical upshot: even if beta servers open up, a heavily modded community server is unlikely to be the first place 15.0 runs well. A vanilla test instance is the sensible first step.

What to do before Friday

• Back up the 14.2 server, configuration and plugin folders included, before anything changes on any branch.
• Write down what your plugins touch. Spawn waves, item limits, Surface Zone and Gate logic are the obvious risk areas given the announced changes.
• Do not switch your live server's branch on Friday. If a 15.0 server build appears, test it on a separate instance first.
• Tell your players what the free trial is. Trial players cannot join any server, so "why can't I join you" questions on Friday are expected, not a server fault.
• Follow Northwood's Steam announcements, which is where the November 6 post landed and where server-side details would most likely follow.

Northwood's full post is on the SCP: Secret Laboratory Steam news page.