Server Help

[Kora Ann 0]

My first question is about servers in general:

We started playing Atlas a few weeks ago (there are 2 of us).  We originally wanted to play on a dedicated private rented server and invite another friend or 2,  but chose to play the single player on a non dedicated server (tethered) after reading that we'd have to rent several servers in order to get access to a large portion of the map on a private server.   I'm still not sure we understand how the servers and maps work,  and how many squares of the map you get per server that you rent.   We just want to be able to enjoy all the content of the game with the boss fights,  power stones,  kraken , ghost ship, etc. ..  and were afraid that we'd miss most of that if we only had a couple squares to work with.  Can someone explain to me how many squares of the map you actually get per rented server?  Also,   if you only get a few squares to work with, does that mean you just never get to fight the bosses or see the content in the other squares you don't have access to? 

 

Okay,  my next issue is regarding our non dedicated server randomly "breaking":

Okay,  so when we first started playing we played for probably about a week with everything seemingly going okay. We were enjoying the game and learning the ins and outs, building things, leveling etc.  One evening the game crashed on us repeatedly and when the host tried to validate his files in Steam,  it said 1 file was unable to be validated. We assumed something glitchy happened with some update and we just decided that although it was a pain in the butt,  we'd just start over.  We then found out that the spyglass was the culprit of our crashes,  and it was each time the spyglass was used that crashed the game.  We decided to just go ahead and start over anyway since we really weren't that far in,  because of the file that said it couldn't validate and since the spyglass issue things were acting weird anyway.  

Fast forward now we're almost 2 weeks into our fresh server and now last night it seems like the server broke on us again. There is no sense in continuing to play if we are going to just have to start over every 10 days or 2 weeks. I'm hoping someone can give me some insight into what we can do to fix this.  

Sorry in advance for the long story,  but I want to go through most of what I can remember we did,  in case it is something we did that "broke" things again.

Most of the evening of us playing went fine,  then all of the sudden I crashed and it said I lost my connection to the host.  While trying to re-join it would not show our sever in the list,  so the host had to reboot his game and then it would show for me.   We've never had those issues before last night.  After the 2 times of that happening,  everything seemed to work fine.  We were able to continue playing with no issues for a while.  We decided to go do some ship exploration, get some resources,  and then do a couple of treasure maps. For a while everything seemed normal, while sailing, with normal ship attacks, shipwrecks to dive, flotsam floating etc. During our exploration we found what we believe may be the Kraken location (we aren't positive on that) and went inside the swirling water (nothing happened when we did).  That was in F4.  Then we went over to G5 and hunted the ghost ship for a little while. We think we may have found it during the day, as our ship started having some weird ghosting effects. At that time we didn't realize the ship only appeared at night.  We decided to go ahead and do some treasure maps.  We were going to sail home to C9 to drop our resources off and lighten our ship,  then head out.  At some point during that journey we realized we hadn't seen a Ship of the Damned in quite a while.  Then realized we hadn't seen any shipwrecks or flotsam.  We decided to re-log in case that was the problem.  After we did,  the shipwrecks and flotsam all re-appeared,  but we still didn't see any Ships of the Damned. We sailed the rest of the way home and never saw any.   I picked 3 Journeyman maps in A9. The host picked up the maps and noticed they said the minimum gold awarded for them were 0,  which was odd.  He handed them over to me and each one said the minimum was around 15k.  While that was strange,  we decided to go ahead and sail out to do them.  We sailed from C9 to A9 and still never saw any ships,  but did see shipwrecks and flotsam.   We got to the location and the beam didn't show up for the host.  He handed the map over to me and the beam showed up just fine.  I walked over to the beam expecting it to activate the spawn,  but nothing happened.  I took my shovel out and started to dig and it crashed the server.  We both came back in and tried again and it crashed again as soon as I tried to dig.  We came back in a 3rd time,  and this time we decided to pick up more t-map bottles to see if they also said there was a minimum of 0 gold as the reward.  The host tried to pick up 3 bottles,  and although it showed him picking them up..  the bottles weren't showing in his inventory.  I went and found a bottle to pick up and the same thing happened,  it wasn't in my inventory.  We ended up just logging out after that.  

 

What would cause a server to just randomly seem to "break"?  Is there a way to fix this?  This game is unplayable for us if we have to restart from scratch every 10 days or 2 weeks because something breaks the server. We are really enjoying the game and want to continue to play.  What can we do?   

 

Thanks for your time!