PUBG Mobile Season 31 — what to finish before it closes on 11 September (GameLoop PC)
Season 31 closes on 11 September 2026 and update 4.6 is scheduled for 9 September — two days earlier. Here is what a GameLoop PC player should finish first, and in what order.
PUBG Mobile Season 31 runs from 16 July 2026 to 11 September 2026, and the Ultimate Royale window inside it closes earlier, on 7 September 2026. Both dates are official: PUBG MOBILE's own channels published the season calendar on 16 July 2026 — "Season 31 Promotion Match/Casual Season: July 16 – Sep 11 (UTC0)" and "Ultimate Royale Period: July 20 – Sep 7 (UTC0)". The client underneath is update 4.5, released globally on 9 July 2026.
There is one wrinkle that makes the last stretch of this season different from a normal one: update 4.6 is scheduled for 9 September 2026, two days before Season 31 ends. The build changes under you while the season is still running. That single detail reorders everything below, so it gets its own section.
1. Royale Pass A20: opened with the season, closes on a date nobody has published
A20 went live on 16 July 2026, the same day Season 31 began — that much is official. Its end date is not.
This is worth being blunt about, because the number is everywhere. Neither pubgmobile.com nor any official PUBG MOBILE channel has stated when A20 closes. The widely repeated "11 September" appears only on top-up shops and aggregators, and it is the same figure as the officially announced ranked season end — which is very likely where it came from. Recent passes have expired alongside the ranked season, so 11 September is the reasonable expectation, and we would plan around it. It is not a confirmed date, and we are not going to print it as one. We will update this section when KRAFTON publishes one.
Reported rewards on the track include the Wavesong Sprite Set at level 100, an upgradable Kar98K at level 50, and 720 UC spread across the track.
Two of those are worth separating, because they behave differently for a PC player.
The upgradable Kar98K at level 50 is the item to prioritise if you are behind. An upgradable weapon is not a skin that sits in your inventory — it is a weapon you keep feeding materials to across future seasons, so unlocking it late in A20 is worth more than unlocking a level 100 cosmetic you will never see in first person. It is also a bolt-action, which is the single weapon class where a mouse gives you the largest advantage over a touchscreen player: the flick-and-fire that costs a phone player a swipe costs you a wrist movement.
The 720 UC across the track is the reason the pass tends to pay for itself for regular players, and it is also the number that decides whether you buy into A21 later. Track it before the season closes, because unclaimed pass rewards do not follow you into the next pass.
If your keymap is still the default, fix that before you grind tiers rather than after. The GameLoop keymapping guide covers the layout work, and the Season 31 settings guide covers the graphics and control side specific to this season.
2. Ranked: promotion matches on keyboard and mouse
Season 31 shipped with an improved Promotion Match system. That matters more on PC than it sounds, because a promotion match is the one moment in the ranked ladder where a single game decides a tier, and emulator players are matched into their own lobbies — you are pushing against other keyboard-and-mouse players, not against phones.
Two practical consequences before 11 September 2026:
Do not save your promotion attempts for the final days. Ranked lobbies at the end of a season fill with everyone else who left their push late, which raises the average opponent quality in exactly the window where you have the least room to recover from a bad match.
Do not change your control setup mid-promotion. A promotion match is the worst possible time to be re-learning where your prone key moved to. If you want to experiment with sensitivity or bindings, do it in normal matches and lock the layout before you queue for a tier.
The best settings guide for GameLoop PC is the baseline to start from if you have never deliberately tuned anything.
3. The 4.5 collaborations: three clocks, not one
Update 4.5 carries the NARUTO SHIPPUDEN collaboration, headlined by the Naruto: Ninjas Assemble themed mode on Erangel with chakra and ninjutsu abilities and a Kurama boss fight, plus a Ferrari collaboration and a Spider-Man: Brand New Day collaboration whose themed mode was announced on 29 July 2026.
Themed modes are the part of a live-service season that disappears most cleanly, and they are also the part that punishes a bad keymap hardest. A standard PUBG match needs movement, fire, aim, crouch, prone, lean, heal and vehicle keys. A themed mode adds abilities on top of that set — chakra and ninjutsu actions in the Naruto mode, traversal actions in the Spider-Man one — and the emulator does not invent room for them. If you map an ability onto a key your hand has to leave WASD to reach, you will not use it under pressure, which is the same as not having unlocked it.
The fix takes two minutes: open the keymap editor, put ability actions on keys your resting hand already covers (the number row, Q, E, F, C, V, side mouse buttons), and confirm nothing else is sitting on them. Our 4.5 and NARUTO SHIPPUDEN write-up covers what the mode contains; the keymapping guide covers the layout mechanics.
4. The 4.5 gameplay changes, and why the moving-spread one is a PC change
Beyond the collaborations, 4.5 shipped a set of gameplay items that are still the ones you are playing on until 4.6: the Karambit melee weapon, upgrade effects for the QBZ, M762 and Kar98K, fast-swim, co-op climbing, an SMG buff, and a 75% reduction to moving bullet spread.
That last one is the important line on this site. A 75% cut to spread while moving means strafe-firing is much closer to standing-still accuracy than it used to be, and strafe-firing is precisely the thing a keyboard does better than a thumbstick or a touchscreen: A and D produce instant, repeatable, full-speed direction changes while the mouse keeps the crosshair on target. On a phone, moving and aiming compete for the same thumbs. On GameLoop they do not compete at all.
So if you have been playing Season 31 with a standing-still, hold-the-angle habit carried over from earlier updates, the remaining weeks are the time to unlearn it. Practically, that means lower your first instinct to stop moving when you take a fight, and spend a few matches deliberately keeping strafe input alive through the burst.
The SMG buff points the same way, since SMG range fights are almost always mobile fights, and the upgrade effects on the QBZ, M762 and Kar98K are the weapons worth investing materials into before the season closes.
5. Frame rate: 120 FPS is a preset trade, and your emulator caps it too
For the 4.5 client it has been reported that 120 FPS ("Ultra Extreme") is available only on the Smooth graphics preset, with HD and HDR capping at 90 and Ultra HDR capping at 60.
For a PC player this is a two-layer ceiling, and both layers have to agree. The in-game preset sets one bound; GameLoop's own frame-rate setting sets the other, and the effective ceiling is the lower of the two. Setting the game to Ultra Extreme while the emulator is still limited to a lower frame rate gets you the emulator's number, not the game's — and choosing a heavier preset in the game to chase visual quality quietly moves the cap down without any warning in the interface.
For competitive play on an emulator, the Smooth-plus-high-frame-rate combination is the one that matches what a mouse actually needs: more frames means less latency between a wrist movement and the crosshair reacting to it. Visual fidelity is what you trade for it.
If your frame rate fell after a client update rather than after a settings change, that is a different problem with a different fix — the FPS drop after an update guide covers it.
6. Update 4.6 arrives before the season does: what that ordering means
Update 4.6 is scheduled for 9 September 2026. Season 31 ends on 11 September 2026. The gap is two days, and the implication is easy to miss: the client will change while the season is still running, so anything you leave for the last days gets finished on a build that is not the build you learned the season on.
Three things follow from that.
Finish anything ability-dependent before 9 September 2026. Themed-mode content, collaboration challenges and anything that depends on a specific mode being in rotation is safest done on the client it shipped on.
Do your sensitivity and keymap work before the update, not after. This is counter-intuitive, so it is worth being precise: tune now so that you spend the final two days of the season playing on a layout you already trust, and then treat the post-4.6 period as a fresh tuning window that belongs to the next season rather than to this one. Re-tuning inside a two-day window is how a promotion attempt gets lost.
Expect a performance re-check after the update. A new client build resets the assumptions behind your graphics preset and your emulator frame-rate cap, and a re-check is a five-minute job. Plan it for after 9 September 2026, not for the last night of the season.
7. If you play BGMI, your calendar is a different one
BGMI runs its own offset schedule and it does not line up with the global client. BGMI 4.5 arrived on 16 July 2026, a week after the global 4.5 release, Royale Pass A20 opened there on 23 July 2026 — another week behind global — and the BGMI Naruto collaboration runs to 14 September 2026, three days past the global Season 31 end date. Every pass-related deadline on this page is therefore shifted for an Indian account.
If you play both, treat them as two calendars rather than one, and check dates against the version you actually launch. Our BGMI on GameLoop PC guide covers the setup differences between the two clients.
What carries over past 11 September 2026
To avoid grinding the wrong things in the final weeks: your account level, your UC balance, your unlocked cosmetics, and any weapon you have unlocked and upgraded all stay with you. The upgradable Kar98K from A20 is yours permanently once claimed, and the materials you invest in it keep their value across seasons. Royale Pass progress does not carry — unclaimed tiers close with the pass, on whatever date A20 actually ends. Since that date has not been published, finish the track by 7 September when Ultimate Royale closes rather than betting on the expected 11th.
Your GameLoop setup carries over too, and it is the only preparation on this list that pays into the next season instead of out of this one. A keymap tuned around the 4.5 movement changes, a frame-rate ceiling you have actually verified rather than assumed, and ability keys within reach of a resting hand are all still true after the rollover.
If you are setting the emulator up from scratch, start with the PUBG Mobile on GameLoop PC guide and the PC requirements guide.