Are there NPC ships?

[MagicPuncher 29]

Besides the Ghost and Army of the Damned ships from the trailers, are there NPC ships? Are there NPC merchant ships? Are there hostile NPC Pirate ships? If so, how common are these? I haven't spent a whole lot of time at sea but I've never seen one.

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

Me either. Never heard of any. Guessing they aren’t a thing atm.

[MagicPuncher 29]

13 minutes ago, boomervoncannon said:

Me either. Never heard of any. Guessing they aren’t a thing atm.

I hope that's not the case. Honestly in a pirate game you would think that merchant ships would be the whole POINT of the game.

[Percieval 1,067]

Just now, MagicPuncher said:

I hope that's not the case. Honestly in a pirate game you would think that merchant ships would be the whole POINT of the game.

I also thought there would be some kind of royal navy NPC’s. But maybe they disabled those to release a bit of load on the servers, they may make an entrance when the servers are stable. 

[cpspok 16]

from what i have seen and read there will be npc's in the ocean and land , they just got floatsam and bottles to show up on servers .

 

[MagicPuncher 29]

So digging into some of the example files that Grapeshot provided to help people get their own dedicated servers up and running, there are ship paths made for ghost ships that look like this:

"PathName": "GhostShip",
      "AutoSpawnShipClass": "Blueprint'/Game/Atlas/ShipPaths/PathFollowingGhostShip_BP.PathFollowingGhostShip_BP'",
      "AutoSpawnEveryUTCInterval": 21600,

Then there are paths made for NPC Trader ships, but the code is left blank and the spawn rate is 0. It looks like this:

 "PathName": "NPCTrader1",
      "AutoSpawnShipClass": "",
      "AutoSpawnEveryUTCInterval": 0,

So I am thinking that they are not in the game yet.

[Goldfish The Builder 105]

There will be, but currently not implemented. We should see them down the road though!

[ApatheticCadaver 0]

On my private Nitrado server with custom map, I have several ship paths set up and last night, I did come across a merchant ship. He sold the same items as the cosmetic vendor plus a token for a dragon tame that was a couple thousand gold.