Sailing

[BlueBaby701]

What do you like about sailing, and what DON'T you like

[Dr. Safety]

My big issue with sailing is the actual sailing itself. Lunar island, Pearl’s quest line, salt, fishing etc. are all useful and worth getting eventually, but the actual sailing to those destinations is slow paced and boring, making me put it off until I absolutely have nothing better in mind to do. 

[Scrimbles]

2 minutes ago, Dr. Safety said:

My big issue with sailing is the actual sailing itself. Lunar island, Pearl’s quest line, salt, fishing etc. are all useful and worth getting eventually, but the actual sailing to those destinations is slow paced and boring, making me put it off until I absolutely have nothing better in mind to do. 

Funny how my problem is the exact opposite, I like the act of sailing and the multitasking piloting aspect of it, but I don't like the content in the ocean, as most of it is optional trophy tasks that dont really do much.

I feel like theres hardly anything of note in the ocean.

[Terra B Welch]

As much as I like some of the ocean content, I persoanlly can't stand how boats control like a catatonic whale.

They're fine enough for travel, but god trying to kite at all with one is atrocious alone, which is also a big reason why I can't stand Crab King.

Crab King was a mistake, it's hardly a boss, just an ice staff cheesefest.

 

[Harrowick]

Lack of locations to travel to kinda kills it for me. It's a very cozy feeling to have a big ol' crew, but I wish we had more incentive to be on the boat more often, a portable home to travel between lands with. 

[Primalflower]

y'all need to put more sails on your dang boats

the only big issue i have with boats/ocean is crab king. Crab king is borderline impossible without 2-3 godgangs and a myriad of boat patches or just skipping the entire fight with the bee strat or flingo + dwarf star. And theres not even  anything worthwhile at the end of it like (kind of...) toadstool, it's just a funny guitar and something you basically get for visiting lunar island ever anyway.

[Pine G]

I just enjoy the feeling of it, as a variation of the typical slightly repetitive DST gameplay. Provided you know how to survive and sustain yourself out in the open sea, it's very relaxing and fun. Sailing is rather an optional task, but I don't understand why people dislike it - the boats are clumsy, but you learn how to control them well after trial and error. 

[Charlie Dark]

I think it's great but... I don't like it...

[Maxposting]

I enjoy it.

I just want the crab king to drop more shell bells or something else unique.

[viberr]

i picked other in what do like because i like all the stuff on that section (except crab king and i only dislike him i dont hate him because i think klei can make him better if they tried)

[ArubaroBeefalo]

I love the boat mechanics and the resources and new mobs 

I kinda hate malbatross for how messy is the fight (why he has to go far away and spam waves all the time #$@%$!)

 

The problem with CK is that his desing is for +2 players but is a cool desing and the music is so epic

For solo is a spam fest

[ShadowDuelist]

I like sailing, and the concept of making mobile mini bases. I just don't see a point into it yet.

Currently the only rewarding things I think there are about the ocean are mining salt, and harvesting everything from the moon island. Both things can be done just once, and then never again, so it's still more profittable to make a normal land base.

I think we need more islands with interesting resources, sort of how biomes on the mainland work: when you decide where to make a base, you are usually deciding on which of the biomes you feel you'd have more advantages to start at. Eg: do I want all year round food? Do I want natural protection? Do i want protection from forest fires? Do I want a wormhole nearby? Etc. I think each new island added from now on, should basically be new biomes that offer a new advantage to stay at.

Also I love the concept of highly interactive NPCs like pearl. Except that pearl's rewards are all ocean related.

If pearl sold useful stuff for the land life as well I think people would rush visiting her more.

Spoiler

EG: she could also sell non ocean related resources at varying costs and types of fish (this would have to be balanced so its not OP but it is rewarding enough, and worth doing) specially to purchase some resources that are hard to get in some worldgens or situations, such as:

• Reeds and papyrus (can be either scarce, or burn)
• Gold (as an alternative for Wurt)
• Living birds of different colors and types of your choice (lights out, or mass collecting fish to trade for blue birds outside of winter)
•  Living normal bees (can go extinct on the mainland)
• Living butterflies and living moonmoths (No butterflies in lights out, moonmoths can go extinct)
• Pig skins: in long lived pub servers pigs often go extinct. You can bring them back by doing the moonstone event, but this would be an alternative. It could also be a reliable alternative for characters excluded by pigs.
• Thulecite pieces, purple gems, moon glass, etc.

New types of factions you can interact and trade with, or battle with, found on the islands would be the way to go as well, IMHO

Like giving players a choice, to either conquest new islands by force and rule them with violence (the locals should probably respawn) or make a new peaceful commerce route between islands, and become a sea trader of goods.

And of course new ongoing threats, weather related, more ocean mobs, waves, pirates, etc. Its strange that we are the only sentient being to start sailing the constant, specially considering some species like the merms have a high water affinity, and are smart enough to build stuff like boats.

Also I think that if time passes by and you ignore the ocean entirely, it should pose a threat somehow. For example if you didn't kill crab king at least once in 500 days you may start getting strong monsoons during spring. Or if you didn't trade (or killed) the islands viking pigs, after 300 days or so, they may start invading the mainland in waves and be hostile.

Speaking of crab king, I think his unique weapon drop should also have land related perks, and a decently good land damage (but have more damage at the sea). Like an alternative thul club damage in land and dark sword damage in the water. It could also let you to push enemies away with soundwaves or something. Even if the special attck deals no damage on land, pushing enemies away and stunlocking them for a second could be a good crowd control during messy fights.

[Scrimbles]

24 minutes ago, ShadowDuelist said:

-snip-

Sadly Klei's goal wasn't to add content to the core game, if you've not noticed by now nearly every single update outside of the QoL ones are made up of completely optional tasks that don't really add anything to the base survival game.

Not to say any of it is bad, or not fun at the very least, but just not... important?

I don't want to misquote JoeW, and please take this with a grain of salt because I simply cannot find the quote and am going off of memory, but he said something along the lines of "We realize players want content that changes the core game, and while that isn't our goal right now, we will look into that in the future" in response to people asking for more challenge for the main game. It just sounded like that wasn't even on their radar.

 

I hope at the very least that once RoT is done, their focus switches to the core game. The QoL updates have been great, more of that would be excellent.

[thegreatJash]

Portable base and I'm sold.

[PasssionFish]

I don't understand some people's complaints about crab king drops, the tribute will be updated to do something at a later date.

Regarding boats: I haven't played long enough to fight crab king or malbatross but the other aspects are nice, slow sailing but once getting more sails its a lot better.

 

[sinisterrkid]

About the new content being optional:

I don't think optionality is the problem, and in general one big criticism to survival games is needing to do chores and babysit the character or the environment. I'd say it's more a problem in progression. I love going down to the ruins and eventually fighting Fuel Weaver, not because I have to, or because I would lose the world if I didn't, but because if feels so much like I am progressing in the game and dominating the world I'm surviving in. Personally, having different islands with unique challenges would give me this sense of progression and fulfilment.

In the Hamlet DLC there is this a non-optional quest of the kind that I see a lot of people here ask for: Every 70 days, if you don't reset the ancient calendar, Aporkalypse happens, and the world becomes waaay more hostile, to the point that unless you're hundreds of days worth well prepared, you will end up dying and losing that world. So usually you gotta reset the calendar every cycle. It's fun, but it comes with these complications:

• Since it's hard to get to the calendar, you can either:
  • Brave the entire journey to it every cycle, which is exciting at first, but gets repetitive with every iteration. Often you just want to get back to whatever other project you were working on; or
  • Base near the calendar, which is limiting upon your base location choices, reduces the challenge, and make different play-throughs feel too similar; or
  • Build a telelocator focus next to the calendar. Closest thing to "cheesing" it, at which point it's not challenging at all.

I love Hamlet and I love the Aporkalypse, but all I'm saying is that it hasn't convinced me of some need to have obligatory quests in survival games. What truly motivates me to perform a challenge is the feeling that something I've worked on a long time ago ties to what I'm working on now, a.k.a, progression.

It always feels natural to me that fighting Fuel Weaver is something I must do, even without the threat of losing my world if I don't. It feels that way because it feels like that fight is a center-piece of the world, and I'm aware of the super fleshed-out lead up to it: I often go through the caves and ruins, which is where FW hides, I pass those giant tentacles, which I know might lead to the atrium. Even on the surface, I see marble chess pieces and chess thematics, which are part of the previous boss battle required for the Ancient Fuel Weaver fight. I just find that way more powerful.

[kiwikenobi]

I like building boats and sailing around. I think both the Lunar Island and Pearl's island are pretty cool. My only problem with sailing is how hard it is to find anything at sea. The ocean is huge, you move slowly compared to how big it is, and you can only see in a small radius around yourself, there's no telescope or anything like in Shipwrecked. If you're looking for anything small and specific, like salt, or sea weeds, or Crab King, it seems like you just have to get lucky and blunder into the right place. You could be sailing right past what you're looking for without ever knowing it. I think either a telescope-like item or more clues to hint at where certain ocean-based objects are would make it much better.

[gaymime]

i do so miss telescopes

 

[Yuuko]

I voted Other for what I don't like about sailing:

I don't like how much investment it takes to get a boat going, and how much it is constantly at risk of becoming totally wrecked.  I think they gotta pick to either make a boat cheaper or more durable, because right now I feel its too risky to dump that much into a boat.

The flingo sucks at putting fires out during summer without stopping the boat too, and wildfires can happen almost every minute :\ such a chore.

I really liked boating when the first released it, its just been a kinda steady downhill as more content comes out :\ 

I feel like we really need spy glasses, pirate and captain hats, and a net we can toss to gather things in the water.

15 hours ago, Ogrecakes said:

I don't want to misquote JoeW, and please take this with a grain of salt because I simply cannot find the quote and am going off of memory, but he said something along the lines of "We realize players want content that changes the core game, and while that isn't our goal right now, we will look into that in the future" in response to people asking for more challenge for the main game. It just sounded like that wasn't even on their radar.

I'm sad to hear this.  For DLC I get it - you don't want players to feel forced to buy into the new content to enjoy the base game - but for base game updates that are free, and pushed across all platforms, they should feel more free to change the core gameplay to include these new features as part of the original game.  Leaving them all in this tacked on state is gonna be stale.

[GenomeSquirrel]

I mostly hate sailing. Boats are very expensive, and too much of ocean life is booby trapped from fishing which spawns a bird that breaks your boat, to salt which has a specialized mob to break your boat, plants that spawn fishes to extinguish fires, that random piece of wood that blocked me from touching the steering wheel.

I'm very annoyed at all content that involves the sea fishing rod from lures, to thermal stone substitutes that appear in the wrong season, to that boat sinking bird, needing that squirt fish as part of boat equipment, and not being able to place tin bins on land.

There are two times I engage in sailing, first if I want the moon moth pet, and second if I want a merm king as Wurt.

 

[gaymime]

1 hour ago, Shosuko said:

The flingo sucks at putting fires out during summer without stopping the boat too, and wildfires can happen almost every minute :\ such a chore.

water balloons and lux fans put out fires

[Yuuko]

1 hour ago, gaymime said:

water balloons and lux fans put out fires

I wouldn't use either of those as a primary fire deterant.  You'll be using them about every 1-2 minutes on a boat during the long summer days which will quickly burn through your supplies.  Those are better secondary fire deterants like if you base in oasis, or are in an autumn base and a fire hound accidentally sets flame to an area without flingo protection.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

Ice staffs. Cheap and a way to waste the big amounts of blue gems also works to fight sea mobs

[Squirrel12]

An option that I think is missing here is Combat.

Because boat combat is the most disappointing element regarding sailing. They really needed canons. 

[BlueBaby701]

19 minutes ago, Squirrel12 said:

They really needed canons. 

OH WOOODLEGS!