Monkey island and ocean rant

[Draggofroot]

36 minutes ago, Mike23Ua said:

As we have seen with the only trailer and few screenshots we have of Elsewhere, boats in Elsewhere look like actual boats, and I imagine will function more like Shipwrecked Boats and not whatever the holy heck DST boat cookies were intended to be….

Now for the record let me just state that I absolutely loved sailing around in the Shipwrecked DLC, it was fast to get on the water, if your boat broke there was always islands to find different resources to craft different types of boats with so you weren’t just stranded out in the ocean with no way to build a new vessel, the ocean actually felt interesting and full of life and it was fun to just sail the ocean in that DLC.

In DST… Oh boy where do I even start? Boats are a MASSIVE Resource sink seriously just gathering the platform, the anchor, the mast, the steering wheel is a pain & then to top that off… the ocean is a vast void of lifeless nothingness until you reach a small Point of Interest where there’s content to interact with, and then there is the pirate raids which don’t just raid your loot or leave you with cursed trinkets, they also smash your boating structures causing the boat to leak.

It isn’t fun, it’s tedious and I’m hoping DSE reverts to simpler boats, and fast ocean exploration.

So to answer your question: if DSE has better more accessible boats like the SW DLC, I don’t think the behavior of peoples “dislike” for DSTs ocean experience is going to apply to that game.

I GENUINELY do not understand why people love SW boats, they were literally just walking 2.0
DST boats are more engaging and useful on top of having multiplayer support
I want someone to make me see what i cannot

i agree with you on SW having more life tho

[Mysterious box]

2 hours ago, IAmAFurrz said:

theyre either just a massive waste of time that dont even endanger you, or if you have valuables on your boat then its a massive waste of time. you cant prevent it on a first raid so randomly, if you have good **** + dont know MQ youre just ******, like perhaps, someone getting CK before finding that **** island in the void of the ocean

Welcome to don't starve a game of trial and error. If you walk on the mainland you might get robbed marotters and if you retaliate you may wind up dead. You might go to the ruins see monkeys steal loot attack them then go insane from getting crap thrown at you or if you show up at the wrong time get comboed to death potentially ending your world right there before you even knew what was going on. Perhaps you killed too many rabbits and got shown the error of your ways by a benevolent king.

I could go on but really what separates them from the rest of the game besides punishing you for taking the violent option?

[Draggofroot]

18 minutes ago, Mysterious box said:

I could go on but really what separates them from the rest of the game besides punishing you for taking the violent option?

even the trinkets could be avoided by simply sinking their boat with cannons lol

[ShadowDuelist]

45 minutes ago, Draggofroot said:

even the trinkets could be avoided by simply sinking their boat with cannons lol

That’s … not so easy to do? It requires a lot of manouvering and timing with an expensive boat and a clunky aiming system. Scaring them is a bit easier.

I used to get rid of them by putting them to sleep, boarding them and then exploding their boat. Or catapult them (if playing Winona). Most of the times I still got trinkets though.

[Draggofroot]

2 minutes ago, ShadowDuelist said:

That’s … not so easy to do? It requires a lot of manouvering and timing with an expensive boat and a clunky aiming system. Scaring them is a bit easier.

I used to get rid of them by putting them to sleep, boarding them and then exploding their boat. Or catapult them (if playing Winona). Most of the times I still got trinkets though.

have you even tried cannons they work perfectly in my experience

[Mike23Ua]

1 hour ago, Draggofroot said:

I GENUINELY do not understand why people love SW boats, they were literally just walking 2.0
DST boats are more engaging and useful on top of having multiplayer support
I want someone to make me see what i cannot

i agree with you on SW having more life tho

For me it mostly just the cosmetic look that I enjoy, I want a boat to look like a boat and not a flattened out cookie, it can even keep DSTs directional steering BUT it needs to be actually enjoyable and responsive on a Xbox Controller without feeling like it’s “Multiplayer centric” What I mean by that is it is A lot easier to drop anchors, heave masts, and steer out of the way of smashing into stuff when multiple people are operating various aspects of the boat. But when it came to very specifically to Controllers & DS SW boats all of those functions were a D-Pad press away.

I have a love and hate relationship with monkey pirates, on one hand I loved the whole original monkey curse concept that persisted even through death to remain attached to you until you found a way to lift the curse. And on the other hand… I don’t like having expensive parts of my boat that have to be put together part by part smashed away in seconds. I’m hoping DSE boats are easier less resource cost to craft, that like with SW there are multiple types of boats using multiple types of resources to craft, and most importantly… Drop anchor, raise and lower mast returns to being simple Dpad presses away.

[BrixGoBrrr]

What if monkeys respect all royalty?  

• given that Moon Quay has a Queen, perhaps wearing any crown would prevent monkeys from targeting you at first sight,
• a crown is not total protection, it's time-limited, you're increasingly "suspicious" if you linger nearby for too long,
• Bee Queen Crown & Enlightened Crown for sure would count, maybe Thulecite Crown too?

[Draggofroot]

57 minutes ago, BrixGoBrrr said:

What if monkeys respect all royalty?  

• given that Moon Quay has a Queen, perhaps wearing any crown would prevent monkeys from targeting you at first sight,
• a crown is not total protection, it's time-limited, you're increasingly "suspicious" if you linger nearby for too long,
• Bee Queen Crown & Enlightened Crown for sure would count, maybe Thulecite Crown too?

they'd fight for their own queen instead of respecting others, pirates arent exactly known to respect others

[BrixGoBrrr]

59 minutes ago, Draggofroot said:

they'd fight for their own queen instead of respecting others, pirates arent exactly known to respect others

oop i forgot to mention, the notion of a "parley" was on my mind too, 

parleys, parleyed, parleying: 'to hold an informal conference with an enemy under a truce, as between active hostilities.'

so maybe "respect" isn't the best word for this idea, 
but the island monkeys are different than the ruins splumonkeys, like how the island monkeys don't throw poop, there's some decorum among the island monkeys, when compared to the cave/splumonkeys, 

and pirates aren't 100% chaos, there's hierarchy centered on the Captain & in maintaining the ship, there's a code of conduct sometimes including a parley process, 

i headcanon the Queen of Moon Quay as the Captain 

[Draggofroot]

1 minute ago, BrixGoBrrr said:

oop i forgot to mention, the notion of a "parley" was on my mind too, 

parleys, parleyed, parleying: 'to hold an informal conference with an enemy under a truce, as between active hostilities.'

so maybe "respect" isn't the best word for this idea, 
but the island monkeys are different than the ruins splumonkeys, like how the island monkeys don't throw poop, there's some decorum among the island monkeys, when compared to the cave/splumonkeys, 

and pirates aren't 100% chaos, there's hierarchy centered on the Captain & in maintaining the ship, there's a code of conduct sometimes including a parley process, 

i headcanon the Queen of Moon Quay as the Captain 

i'd say the prime apes (amazing name btw) are the captains of each ship, theyre the one with the tricorn
the Queen is just the one running all the operations

[BrixGoBrrr]

tl;dr: pirate monkeys respect their Queen, so they'll respect her wishes, including a parley process, especially where she's not hostile & values trade 

ok, then we fundamentally disagree - i don't see the Prime Ape as the captain, likely bc my usual DST pal plays as Wanda, who says this about the Prime Ape: “He seems to think he's in charge.” 

oh lol, WX's impression of the Prime Apes is great too: “THIS OAF DOES NOT KNOW THE FIRST THING ABOUT LEADERSHIP” 

[Draggofroot]

4 minutes ago, BrixGoBrrr said:

tl;dr: pirate monkeys respect their Queen, so they'll respect her wishes, including a parley process, especially where she's not hostile & values trade 

ok, then we fundamentally disagree - i don't see the Prime Ape as the captain, likely bc my usual DST pal plays as Wanda, who says this about the Prime Ape: “He seems to think he's in charge.” 

oh yeah also maybe make it so that the chance of the pirates attacking you would be reduced if you have their flag on
it would be like how in real life pirates would fool british ships by having a british flag and hiding their cannon holes
cuz right now the banner does nothing (according to the wiki)

[BrixGoBrrr]

21 minutes ago, Draggofroot said:

the chance of the pirates attacking you would be reduced if you have their flag

yesss that would make total sense! 

the Wandering Trader is on my mind too, especially if parleys are a thing, bc something exceptionally silly like having a beefalo on your boat grants safe passage to Moon Quay Island, could make good sense:

If the Queen has a trade deal with the Wandering Trader, the "Odd Beefalo" guy, to always be granted safe passage, but the pirate monkeys aren't around Beefalo much, so they may not know the difference between a regular Beefalo and the Odd Beefalo costume, and so any beefalo-ish thing on a boat would also be safe from pirate raids 

[Mr Giggio]

On 6/8/2026 at 1:03 PM, Captain_Rage said:

Technically they don't even attack you unless you engage them, and giving them a banana is enough to make them go away

I just hope you get a cannon one instead and they send you to talk to fish for this part alone :v 

[Pig and beefalo]

On 6/11/2026 at 2:56 AM, Draggofroot said:

oh yeah also maybe make it so that the chance of the pirates attacking you would be reduced if you have their flag on
it would be like how in real life pirates would fool british ships by having a british flag and hiding their cannon holes
cuz right now the banner does nothing (according to the wiki)

I once made such a suggestion, but it has been drowned out among numerous suggestions

[Hi.]

They are more annoying than anything, it's best to just let them steal your stuff and try to find it on the mainland. You don't even need a map just a decent amount of speed and around a day of searching. It's more of a time waste and can be super annoying if you are trying to have a fast playthrough but for long term worlds its not that bad. I do wish there was a more permanent solution though.

Side note, I'm kinda shocked that some people are defending them all of the sudden? I thought people hated monkey raids? I'm just a little confused for the sudden switch up.

Edited June 12 by Hi.

[AliceShiki]

1 hour ago, Hi. said:

Side note, I'm kinda shocked that some people are defending them all of the sudden? I thought people hated monkey raids? I'm just a little confused for the sudden switch up.

Judging by the like counts of the first post and of any other post in the thread... Seems to be a case where the people who agree with OP just don't have anything meaningful to add to the topic, so they dropped a like and called it a day.

The people who disagreed did have something to say OTOH, so they actually posted, which led to an unbalanced amount of posts being negative towards OP.

It's always hard to judge those things by using a metric as flawed as like count though, so take this with a grain of salt, but... I was also confused like you were, so I figured it might be a case of the people who agree with OP having nothing to say, and then I felt validated by the like count, so... Take it for what it is.

[Lovens]

On 6/8/2026 at 11:50 AM, ShadowDuelist said:

I unironically like the monkeys and think they could have been expanded, as Mike said, with more trade opportunities and even bigger fights.

But perhaps what’s iffy about them, and what most people dislike, is the RNG aspect. With most mobs you face, you generally know where they are. You see or hear them as you approach, and your mind is already prepared for what’s about to happen.

Monkeys, on the other hand, appear randomly within a very large radius while your mind is focused on doing something entirely different. That’s probably what makes them feel especially annoying to so many people.

Perhaps they should exist as already spawned mobs that move around areas near certain ocean biomes, so you always know where they are. If they spot you before you spot them, they raid you. Meanwhile, only the neutral monkeys carrying treasure should randomly spawn near the player from time to time, since those encounters are entirely avoidable.

The monkeys carrying treasure are NOT neutral and I would argue that they are worse for megabasers than the regular monkeys. They don't take a banana bribe like the regular raids do (which would allow them to leave without disturbing you). Even if you don't attack them first they will still attack you on sight by shooting cannons at your parked boats and docks, and docks can be damaged and destroyed by cannons. Any structure destroyed with docks will be also destroyed (truly "amazing" if that happens to be character specific like magician's chest, Winona's spotlight or book case). And if you happened to have a marble statue as a decoration on that one dock tile, it sinks - congratulations, now you an annoying underwater salvageable you have to retrieve by destroying nearby docks so you can fit a boat there. I learned this all the hard way when I discovered monkeys still can raid the harbour dock build I designed (it seemed to be decently far from their island so it must have been at the very edge of their raiding radius). 

Edited June 12 by Lovens

[Baark0]

Just had an amazing experience where the strident trident did absolutely nothing against a monkey boat, and the boat despawned alongside my brightshade sword, umbralla, brightshade smasher, and polar bearger bin because I transferred consciousness as WX. What an amazing mechanic, I'm so glad the boat despawns for literally no reason.

Can't even get the items back without waiting for another raid because the map despawned along with the boat. Why does it even go into the treasure chest if all the monkeys are dead? Genuinely, who is sailing and burying the treasure?

Edited June 23 by Baark0

[Walrusst]

On 6/9/2026 at 11:57 AM, Mike23Ua said:

So to answer your question: if DSE has better more accessible boats like the SW DLC, I don’t think the behavior of peoples “dislike” for DSTs ocean experience is going to apply to that game.

I'd really enjoy a mothership approach where you can give a boat rafts/lifeboats tethered to it or something for repeated small menial tasks at sea or for you to engage in boarder denial style combat, since the key crippling issue of the sea is while the resources are 5x more spread out as on land, your agility in reaching said resources is also 5x less.

The big takeaways are bannanas, rockfruit, seaweed. Maybe if you are lucky someone makes a bigger than average tree or an ocean trawler dam. The bossfights that aren't lunar storyline related are mostly forgotten and their only notable attacks like breaking the sails players never use are sort of an artifact.

If we had these agile lifeboats for coming ashore or working, maybe I'd use the big clumsy sails to go from place to place since when I need to set anchor I can still use my time with my ship anchored to do work instead of well. Just being stuck with no real gameplay.

[BeeClops]

idk if it's purely random, I've had these 3 very often really close together (monkeys, pearl, whirlpool) to the point that I think worldgen tries to do that. 

 

[Jakepeng99]

On 6/7/2026 at 11:59 AM, IAmAFurrz said:

ocean moment. like they couldve done anything but they decided a shitty unpreventable mechanic that is unintuitive that purely is made to randomly punish players for ever trying sailing out heavily is a great idea

The implementation should be made much better.

You are punished even for defeating it with monkey trinkets. The option of giving them a banana to make them run away makes it seem pointless to fight them.

[Baark0]

2 hours ago, Jakepeng99 said:

The implementation should be made much better.

You are punished even for defeating it with monkey trinkets. The option of giving them a banana to make them run away makes it seem pointless to fight them.

The trinkets are the main issue I have with monkeys, especially with raids that don't have treasure and are attacking you. It's a event that happens at complete random regardless of the player's action while in what ends up usually being roughly a quarter of the world. If you try to fight back, you get annoying trinkets that forcibly turn you into a stupid useless monkey character and clog up your inventory, and can only be removed by taking bananas to the monkey island, except all the bananas on the island are gonna be looted by the stupid monkeys before you have a chance to grab them for yourself. If you don't fight back, they steal your items and usually cause a hole to appear in your boat.

Now, if this all happened because you did something, such as attacking a boat that was minding its own business, then I would have less issues with monkey raids, since its an active choice the player is deciding to make. It's actually why I think pirate boats with treasure chests on them are kinda fine and dare I say can even be fun. You can ignore them easily enough (as long as you stay away from the cannon), but if you want a treasure chest you can hunt them down, though you'll have to deal with the trinkets later.

Really, the overall design of monkey island becomes a lot better if you just remove the stupid trinkets, though for the world I mentioned in the original post, it'd still be unusable since I like making boat bridges to pearl, because I hate ocean sailing, and pirate raids would ram my boats at some point.

[Well-met]

11 hours ago, BeeClops said:

idk if it's purely random, I've had these 3 very often really close together (monkeys, pearl, whirlpool) to the point that I think worldgen tries to do that. 

 

agreed and can relate.

[gaymime]

40 minutes ago, Baark0 said:

The trinkets are the main issue I have with monkeys, especially with raids that don't have treasure and are attacking you. It's a event that happens at complete random regardless of the player's action while in what ends up usually being roughly a quarter of the world. If you try to fight back, you get annoying trinkets that forcibly turn you into a stupid useless monkey character and clog up your inventory, and can only be removed by taking bananas to the monkey island, except all the bananas on the island are gonna be looted by the stupid monkeys before you have a chance to grab them for yourself. If you don't fight back, they steal your items and usually cause a hole to appear in your boat.

Now, if this all happened because you did something, such as attacking a boat that was minding its own business, then I would have less issues with monkey raids, since its an active choice the player is deciding to make. It's actually why I think pirate boats with treasure chests on them are kinda fine and dare I say can even be fun. You can ignore them easily enough (as long as you stay away from the cannon), but if you want a treasure chest you can hunt them down, though you'll have to deal with the trinkets later.

Really, the overall design of monkey island becomes a lot better if you just remove the stupid trinkets, though for the world I mentioned in the original post, it'd still be unusable since I like making boat bridges to pearl, because I hate ocean sailing, and pirate raids would ram my boats at some point.

pssst, trawlers are immune to monkey-bumps and can be placed along the sides of boats