PUBG Update 43.1 Adds Kicking, Water Combat, and a Jujutsu Kaisen Crossover

Krafton pushed Update 43.1 to PUBG: Battlegrounds this week, and the studio is calling it an Action Update for a reason. Kicks are in. You can finally fight back while bobbing around on the water. And a full Jujutsu Kaisen crossover has dropped onto Erangel. The patch went live on PC on September 10, with consoles following on September 17.

This is one of the more mechanically interesting updates the free-to-play battle royale has seen in a while. It’s less about a shiny new gun and more about widening what you can actually do in a firefight, which is the kind of change that tends to stick. It sits comfortably alongside the other best free battle royale games we keep tabs on. Here’s what changed, and why it matters.

Update 43.1 at a glance

• A new kick action for unarmed combat, with Standing and Jump variants
• Sidearms and throwables now usable on the water’s surface
• Swimming and diving speed up 25%, plus sturdier boats
• Carry and throw ground items without opening your inventory
• LMG balance pass, plus a Jujutsu Kaisen collaboration on Erangel
• New Leaderboard menu, Season 43, DLSS 4.5 and FSR 4.1 on PC

Kicking is now a real close-range option

The headline addition is the kick, and it slots straight into unarmed combat. Right-click while empty-handed for a Standing Kick, or right-click mid-jump for a Jump Kick. Console players use LT, and you can rebind the whole thing in Key Bindings. Kicks hit harder than punches and shove opponents backward, so they’re built for those messy point-blank moments when someone rushes you before you can swap to a weapon. Interrupt a heal. Break a push. Buy yourself half a second.

The kick isn’t just for people, either. You can boot through windows, wooden doors, wooden fences, jars, and tires, which opens up fresh ways into a building without announcing yourself with gunfire. Doors that you couldn’t destroy before can be kicked open fast. You can even kick a vending machine to grab an item quicker than the usual interaction, though you’ll bang up the machine and it’ll be out of service for a bit afterward.

Water finally stops being a death sentence

Diving into a lake used to mean you were either desperate or already dead. Update 43.1 changes that math. You can now pull a sidearm or a throwable while floating on the surface, including whatever sits in your third weapon slot. There are limits, of course. You have to be stationary to fire, moving or diving auto-stows the weapon, shoulder firing is off the table, and your bullet spread is worse than it is on land. Throwables only work with an overhand toss. Even so, having any way to shoot back from the water is a genuine shift in how you can move around the map.

Movement got a real boost too. Swimming and diving are 25% faster than before, with a new surface-swimming animation and a tidy water-droplet effect on your screen when you come up for air. Boats came along for the ride. They’re sturdier overall, every boat now takes a flat 50% damage from firearms rather than varying by type, and you can patch one up on the surface with an All-in-One Repair Kit. No underwater repairs, though.

Grabbing and tossing gear without touching your inventory

Two related quality-of-life features cut down on the inventory fumbling that eats up precious seconds. Carrying and Throwing lets you pick up certain ground items and hold them (H on PC, LB + X on console) without eating an inventory slot, then lob them with a click. It’s perfect for sliding a helmet or a stack of ammo to a teammate mid-fight. You can only carry one type at a time, and it covers attachments, healing and boost items, helmets, vests, backpacks, throwables, and ammo.

Instant Item Use is the companion trick. Hold that same key over a ground item and you’ll use or deploy it right where it lies, no pickup required. Think healing when your bag is already full, or dropping a Mortar, some C4, or a Folded Shield straight off the floor. Krafton also cleaned up the item UI, shifted the on-screen key guides over to the right, and made more deployed gear retrievable. Small stuff on paper. It adds up fast across a full match.

LMGs get reined in

After a month of data on the light machine gun meta, Krafton decided LMGs were pulling too much weight, so a few things have been dialed back. ADS transition time is slower across the class, moving from 0.30 to 0.37 seconds. The RPD and M249 lost their bonus damage against vehicles, and the MG3’s multiplier got trimmed. Recoil control while crouched or prone is noticeably weaker now, since that stance was letting LMGs sit far too steady. World spawn rates for the RPD and M249 also dropped by 30%, so actually finding one should feel more like a score than a given.

Jujutsu Kaisen lands on Erangel

The anime crossover of the moment is here. Update 43.1 weaves Jujutsu Kaisen into PUBG’s most iconic map, dressing up parts of Erangel with themed spaces and visual touches that turn up in normal matches. It’s a limited-time affair, running until the next update rolls around, so grab your screenshots while the sorcerers are still hanging about.

Everything else worth knowing

There’s plenty packed into the rest of the notes. A new Leaderboard menu now lives under Career, tracking wins, weapon kills, and clan XP alongside the usual Ranked board, each one showing the top 500 players (and where you stand if you’re not on it). Ranked Season 43 kicked off with an Mk14 skin as a permanent tier reward. On PC, Duo Rumble returned as a two-player competitive event with G-Coin payouts, and the fan-favorite Solo Deathmatch is back in Arcade for a limited run.

PC players get modern upscaling at last, with NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 and AMD FSR 4.1 support tucked into the advanced graphics settings. Console players got enlarged hitboxes for more forgiving hit detection, with weapon balance left untouched. Everyone gets double the customization preset slots, up from five to ten. Parachutes got a rebalance too, standardizing the auto-deploy heights and adding fall damage if you clip the ground before your chute fully opens.

Should you jump back in?

PUBG: Battlegrounds is free-to-play, so if you’ve been meaning to drop back in, a patch that rewrites this much of the moment-to-moment is about as good an excuse as you’ll get. Read our full PUBG: Battlegrounds profile for the basics, or see how the genre’s other heavyweights are holding up over on Call of Duty: Warzone and Apex Legends. If you want the granular detail, the complete official patch notes cover every bug fix and tweak we didn’t get to here.