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Hm, it could be possible that this is the case, we'll need to investigate. Will look into it. As for the decay timers, they are set up to work like so: PvE - 14 days (Golden Age: 1 Day, Freeports: 3 days) PvP - 30 days (Golden Age: 1 Day, Freeports: 3 days) and then to keep the timer active, you have to physically stand on the boats.

Hello, doing a lot of construction and worshiping the system and building as well as the game environment, I want to go on the construction of a big project (the famous Port-Royal pirate film of the Caribbean) even if that risk of taking a lot of time, it remains only at the end the result should be huge To begin the location of the island (find by GLOBYTHEOLDPIRATE) appears to be the best Freeport poster in a cove with a fort rather like that of the movie, the only small problem is the large statue to enter it from the creek ^^ I would also like to know if any of you have managed to find photos (from all angles) of Port-Royal, because the database (Google) does not really provide a lot of visual details to make a copy again compliant! I will post Screen of Progress hoping that you like it and give a good idea to future build And still sorry for the bad translation ( Google ) French basic language

Is there a way to end this annoying problem of foliage growth respawning through building foundations. If you put down a foundation the growth under the foundation should cease. Any growth touched by the foundation should cease so structures can be built in growth areas and then be usable without bamboo or trees having to be cut down every time you want to leave or come in your structure.

I agree, but all I can think of is it being a basic fetch quest of delivering 20 fiber to some random NPC 2 grids away, and Talono coming on here and complaining about ships in bottles being only for mega companies because it's gated content...

major update: CATS! Sure, they are not hiding content to use after wipe....

Most people? Where have you got this info? And how do they know it will all be lost soon?

i have a problem with this: that i dont have a beer

I wasn't sure what they meant about the NPC encampments, whether every island would have them and part of claiming an island was clearing them out, or if this would be something just on some islands that couldn't be claimed until you defeated them. I suppose I was thinking of the latter, since the other way seems rife for griefing. As far as wiping individual islands, I'm sure that some players would look at it like "He got something I didn't get". On the other hand, it could be looked at like "I get to keep my character, this other spot has been given to replace my claim, and I've got 4 ship's resource boxes full of everything I need to put it all back (which the devs could do easily if they're smart). Seems like biting off your nose to spite your face to insist you get wiped rather than moved. If the devs are interested in retaining players it's the choice between pissing off 50 players vs 2000 players...seems worthwhile to consider it.

He won’t need to, but he’s a grinder, so he will likely feel the need to. I’m just trying to make him aware that there are mechanics that are meaningfully different from Ark’s because he has been waving a hand from the beginning and saying “It’s Ark” without really understanding how it isn’t. @Realistif you really want to sit in a cave and build and breed and do nothing else, then yes, I can see how you would be able to warp your Atlas experience into something only marginally different from Ark. I can even respect that you might do so because your friends are playing and you want to share the experience. That would make you a much more loyal friend than most people I know, who are out the minute they feel the faintest whisps of boredom or difficulty. All I’m asking is that you realize that for the vast majority of Atlas players that is not the experience they want. Many players are seeking a sailing and exploration experience, not mass taming, building and breeding. They aren’t doing so because Atlas was promoted as a Minecraft clone or Ark with elephants, but because it was promoted as a pirate fantasy adventure, and that is a fundamentally different experience than Ark. It is a fundamentally different experience despite some game systems and mechanics having more than passing similarity to Ark’s

It was confirmed by Jat and Dollie that ships on PvE decay in 2 weeks not 3, and you just need to step foot on them, physically touch them.

I did that a few times, got some good loot too!

The NPC encampments may or may not require a wipe. Depends on how they do them. They've added islands with no wipe before. It's also possible to make changes to the game while preserving part or most of it. You could wipe the landscape and preserve the player data, for example. If they wanted to grab 5 islands out of the map and do something with them, they could wipe 5 islands. There are a lot of ways to go about it without wiping 100% of the game. I agree, but I think people *might* put up with another wipe if it meant something great was coming. NPC settlements may or may not be enough for that. A cat, a sub, a giant crab..none of those things would be enough, I think.

Preaching to the choir.

you know where they already adressed that issue?? in satisfactory, wich was released at a later date than ATLAS couldnt help but to remember it with a sarcastic grin on my face, if only coffe stain studios would develop a survival game, oh boi i would be happy

The days where you used to run around your own island looking for demolished buildings and grab the loot, they were the days

Couple reasons this wouldn’t be a problem: 100 galleons would require 600 crew just to man the sails. That’s not counting a single gun. The issue of crew alone solves the problem of taking ships in a bottle elsewhere to grief other players. Also, if another company has 100 players to captain all those ships, the only thing this scenario gains them is the element of surprise. If they didn’t have the bottle, they would just sail all those ships to your base and face roll you. What exactly would you do to stop them assuming for some reason you knew they were coming before all those ships hit render range of your base (doubtful)? Being able to put the ship in the bottle would really only gain you the surprise advantage from render range to at your base. A cool down from being pulled out could nullify that. Also personal and company limits on the number of ships that can be uncorked within a given time period could also mitigate this. If the crew can’t be put in the bottle with the ship this would have the practical effect of nullifying the pull it out for a quick strike problem because you’d have to take the time to assign crew to stations.

My first thought that the reason they haven't introduced the wild NPC encampments onto official servers yet is because for it to work properly they'd need to wipe. A lot of people told me I'm wrong and that i'm trying to stir up wipe rumours. I mean it just takes commonsense to realise it, but I guess those people are pretending because they don't want a wipe. I'd find it hard to believe they can introduce it without a wipe. Official release, I dunno, ARK never wiped on official release, but they did add new servers. The official servers on Atlas isn't as simple as just adding new servers, so for that reason they may wipe, but it's not guaranteed. Who knows what the server population be at release anyway.

In game the berry tea gives vitamin A when it really should be giving vitamin C. An easy fix for you that should be in the next patch.

Well I am mainly waiting for water tames(which I am sure we will at least get one). but no, I bred all of my fliers and boss rexes in my cave. You should have seen it, it was awesome. All I needed was a tek teleporter. The alpha I was with let me do what ever the hell I want down there as long as something good came back up. yeah I had a turret wall that covered that huge entrance. Used normal generators as well just made sure they were above water in the cave. Plus the ungodly amount of turrets and xspecies at the waters edge. i actually really liked breeding mosas. I had a single raft which was directly above the opening as a reference point for others. They would then go do the meat run and let me know when they arrived at the raft. I would bring one of my mosas to the surface and transfer all of the meat. i spent at least a good week down in the cave without seeing daylight except to come up to the surface for supplies. so yes, it might be true that a solo being down there wouldn’t be feasible. However, I don’t need a ship. I just need people to float above and give me supplies. this actually brings me to the whole economy thing. If the rest of my company is above water and makes a trade, I can actually have a trade company(a different company) float above my location until I bring the sub(or water tame) to the surface. this makes them happy because they can successfully trade. It makes me happy because I am not bothered by something other than what I am working on. sure atlas is different, but with enough people I am pretty sure I will do whatever I did on ark in the same fashion(which is what I plan to do). I am not sailing for a long distance. They people that like to do that can do that. i will build my company their base and then I will go tame and breed. They can worry about upkeep. I have said numerous times what I don’t like about this game. Those are the things I will simply not do. Others can worry about that. I guarantee I will do the same thing I did on ark. Please don’t say “then why bother” my only answer to that will be that this is a new ark map to me. I always play the new map and this will be a new surrounding, but yes, I will be playing atlas like it was ark. mass taming, mass breeding, mass building. I don’t really see the difference

Yes, that is the choice you should have to make, but not because anyone is arbitrarily trying to make you miserable or because you’re solo. It is because of the other side of the gear coin. Acquiring high end gear in Atlas is not really about the bp’s. Higher end bp’s are almost too easy to obtain from running maps. It is about acquiring the far flung mats needed and that is mostly about travel. In short if you do not have high end gear it is not because you can’t acquire the bp’s but because you have been unwilling to do the traveling necessary to get the mats. Because this is a significant effort, the spread in effectiveness between basic gear and high end needs to be significant in order to justify the effort needed to get the mats. You could easily do the the same, you just have chosen not to and are suffering the consequences when facing those who have. The reason I know this is my company is all of 3 people. We have plenty of higher end bp’s, getting the mats for our gear was far more effort than getting the bp’s themselves, but neither was hard for us to do, both just required an investment of time.

The massive power gap between players is a tough one for me to swallow. As a solo player on NA-PvP my gear (Ships, Sails, Planks, Armor, Guns .... etc) just plain cannot compete with anyone who has spent time in a larger clan and is running around with high end blue print gear. I do get that high end blue print gear should be better/stronger than vanilla gear. It is the vast difference that gets me. I get a head shot off and it does 45 damage to someone whos health bar barely moves. I take a body shot and dead. Again ...... there should be high end gear available to those who put in the time and effort ..... the separation is just too substantial. No chance except to run away or try to sail away (Which is incredibly difficult anymore due to high end sails) it is not fun. After rereading the above it seems I can solve my issues by just joining a good sized clan. Problem is I don't want to .... should I have to? Maybe so .... maybe this is just the way Atlas is and that will not change. Solo and small clans get ready to join or get ready for some pain. I just don't think many will put up with it for very long and current populations seem to reflect that. If and when populations rise, this unfortunate fact will become abundantly clear to new players and start the cycle all over again. That is until a better option becomes available to players in the form of a different/better game. At that point it will be lights out for Atlas.

ok buddy listen they can still add underwater caves it doesn't matter if it frees up land or not it is still fun and cool to have a base underwater and if you played ark you would know how awesome it is to have one.

They never spoke about a game going for 30 years. Instead of trying to bully someone that may not have English as their first language, try using your own brain and simply read what they said and figure it out yourself. It's pretty easy to understand what they were saying when they talked about 30 years.

We still need confirmation of how ship decay works on PvE @Jatheish @Dollie We so far have the players guessing (we shouldn't have to guess) that the following things are required, yet all contradict one another. Decay is 7 days Decay is 21 days Stepping foot (boarding) on ships or fast travel to ships refresh timers Stepping on ships and simply raising and lowering anchor is enough Stepping on ships, raising anchor, slightly moving ship, reanchoring refreshes timers. Ships have been inactive for longer than 3 weeks with no issues So we need to know once and for all, only the developers know how this works, what exactly refreshes ships decay timers, and how long is the decay timer? Either that or simply place the decay timer on screen when you look at the ship just like structures. This is simple basic things that should not require repeated requests. People shouldn't have to guess at this and learn from losing ships.

I can’t recall if you’ve mentioned playing Ark in the past or not, so forgive me if this is redundant to something you already know. Ark started off being easily the most poorly optimized game I’ve ever played. Over the course of its lengthy EA, it got slowly, incrementally better to the point where those without top of the line hardware could hope to play the game at non minimal settings with decent performance. It came a long way from where it started, but to this day it requires better than average hardware to achieve average performance. I expect Atlas to follow a similar path. If it is useful info for comparison sake I run a GTX1060 6gb at 1920x1080 res, 32 gigs of Ram and an 8700 series cpu and other than the ping 255 issue my performance is fine.

Tbh, sail skins.....cats.....seahorse I dont think that this is enough content until the next "mega update".

It’s an easier thing to dismiss when you’re on the end that got the advantage. One of the reasons people buy a just released MMO can be to get in when it still has that new car smell. The existing servers already smell like Salty Jack’s feet after an all day disc golf tournament.

Oddly enough, I always thought is was a fun “quest” to find loot demolishing stuff in PVE. When they took that away I lost one of the reasons to play. And it is certainly not the same waiting out a timer. Abandoned structures gave the game a unique feel that you could explore ruins that were actually real ruins. If I had one wish, I would like auto destruct turned off. *please

Introduction For this forum post, I thought I would cover some of the wind mechanics. I think this will conclude my discussion of the wind mechanics (unless anyone can think of something else to test!) that started with ship weight and cargo racks (somewhat related to wind mechanics) and continued to my discussion of the sextant buff. Once you finish reading the guide, you should have a very good idea of how to efficiently travel around the ATLAS, armed with the knowledge of the invisible force in ATLAS that allows ye' scallywags to explore the open ocean - the wind! To organize the post a bit, I will try to progressively get into more of the details toward the end of the guide, and reserve the beginning as a summary for people who don't really care about the details. I will summarize the main points in the "Big Questions" section, and most of the discussion will be in "The Bulk" section. For those interested in the intricate details with how I did my testing, I will leave most of that to "The Details" section. Big Questions How do the different types of sails (speed, handling, and weight) differ? The sails differ in the effective angle and maximum speed that they can give the ship. Speed sails give more maximum speed than the other two sails, and handling sails give a larger effective angle than the other two sails. Weight sails have the same effective angle as a speed sail, but they contribute much less to the maximum speed than speed sails - in return, they will add maximum weight to your ship. When should I use one type of sail over another? Weight sails should only be used when the ship is very overweight. As a rough estimate, put on the first weight sail around 65%, and add more weight sails every 7% weight you add on from there. Handling sails are faster than speed sails only when you are sailing against the wind (up to 27 degrees either direction from directly against the wind). The benefit with handling sails is that you will never bottom out on speed, unlike speed and weight sails which bottom out quite easily. However, if you aren't making a ship specifically to sail against the wind, speed sails are more widely applicable, just use them. How does the wind rotation work? The wind rotates in a large circle at a constant speed. It takes about 5 real-life hours (+/- 5 minutes) for the rotation to complete, and it goes through 2 full-wind/low-wind cycles every time. That means that if you are currently in low wind, wait 75 minutes, and the wind will be strong. Furthermore, the strong winds only point North or South, and the weak winds only point East or West. If you have the luxury to plan multiple bases far apart, this means that it will be easier to get back and forth between them if you put them close to the same column (vertically). Does sail angle affect ship speed? How about wind angle within the effective angle? Unlike in real life, the angle that your sails make to your ship's body make NO difference to your speed. The only angle that changes your ship speed is the angle between your sails and the wind. As this angle increases, the ship speed steadily decreases, even at small angles within the effective angle. Similarly to how weight effects your ship speed (in-depth discussion here), the speed drops off very quickly as you approach the effective angle. Therefore, it is wise to minimize the angle between your sails and the wind whenever possible. Related questions that I will not be answering in this post: How does ship weight affect the speed of the ship? How accurate are the numbers that the sextant buff gives you? The Bulk 1. How do the different types of sails differ? All sails have 5 values that dictate their differences: Maximum weight addition, effective angle, acceleration, maximum speed, and turning effectiveness. I mainly tested what I believe to be the most important values, and I may update this post in the future to discuss the acceleration and turning effectiveness, which only affect the handling sails. The rest of this discussion talks about the maximum weight increase, maximum speed, and effective angle of each type of sail. Speed Sail: Speed sails have an effective angle of about 82 degrees, and by far have the fastest maximum speed of any sail type. In addition, they don't add any maximum weight to your ship - they are the simplest and most reliable type of sail in the game. Weight Sail: Like speed sails, weight sails have an effective angle of 82 degrees. However, they produce less maximum speed than speed sails (about 60% speed) in return for increasing the maximum weight of your ship. Small weight sails will increase the maximum weight by 1,000 kg, medium sails will increase it by 2,500 kg, and large sails will increase the maximum weight by 4,000 kg. Handling Sail: Handling sails have the largest effective angle of any sail in the game, at around 118 degrees. Their speed is between the speed of weight sails and speed sails (around 75% of a speed sail's max speed), but they have the fastest open/close times of any sail, and they also rotate faster than the other sails. Side note: Since the angle of the sails to the ship body doesn't matter, and the sails can be rotated to +/- 75 degrees, you can always reach a max speed for the first 75 degrees by rotating the sails. After that is when the effective angle starts kicking in, and you will bottom out on speed at 157 (82+75) degrees with a speed sail, and 193 (118+75) degrees with a handling sail. Since 180 degrees is straight behind you, this means that you will never bottom out on handling sail speed unless you purposefully point your sail in the wrong direction. Speed sails, however, have a 46 degree arc toward the rear of the ship where you can bottom out in speed no matter what you do. 2. When should I use one sail type over another? In typical sailing conditions, speed sails are almost always faster than weight or handling sails. Unless you like the feel of sails opening and closing quickly, I would argue (although this is speculation, I haven't done the math on this) that speed sails are always better than handling sails, when used optimally. As for why I haven't done the math on this, consider the following complication: Handling sails are faster than speed sails only past 153 degrees. That gives you a 54 degree window for which handling sails would be better. However, it might be faster to just adjust the angle you sail at to make the speed sail faster, and then tack back toward your destination when you get closer. It makes your trip longer, but you also go faster. Weight sails have a bit more utility for hauling large loads. However, they only add a fixed amount of ship weight (not a percentage), so they are relatively less beneficial as you put points into weight. Additionally, you can split up your haul into 2 trips if you really have to carry a lot, and that may even speed up your haul time. In general, it is beneficial to add your first weight sail at 63% weight, and then add another one every 8% weight you add after that. If you have not read my guide regarding cargo racks, I highly recommend you read that if you have a heavy ship. At any weight that you would consider using weight sails for, you should also be considering cargo racks, unless you have a lot of weight that you cannot put in cargo racks (such as cannons and cannonballs). This is a section that I can definitely do a bit more testing and mathematics (trigonometry, here I come), so I will be updating this in the future. Until then, much of the notes in this section are speculation based on dozens of hours of testing these mechanics. Trust them or don't, it's up to you. 3. How does the wind rotation work? The wind rotation is locked into the cardinal directions - strong winds always go North or South, whereas weak winds always go East or West. Furthermore, the rotation is locked into the clock as well - strong winds always happen at Noon and weak winds always happen at Midnight. There is a day in between strong and low wind, so if you have strong wind (at Noon on some day), the next low wind happens at midnight the following day, 1.5 days later. If you currently have low wind, just wait 1.5 in-game days for the next strong wind period. Since one in-game minute is 2.1 seconds (see my sextant buff post for more details), This means you should wait for 75 minutes to get the opposite strength of wind. The wind strength does not change consistently over the course of the rotation. From Noon on the day before the weakest wind until Noon on the day after the weakest wind (for a total of 1 in-game day), the wind strength drops to the minimum and then rises very quickly, starting and ending at about 50% wind strength. Therefore, most of the time the wind is above 50% strength, and if you find yourself caught in a low wind period, you only have to wait until the next Noon for the wind to become strong again. Pull over, feed your animals, pay your crew, and you can be on your way again in no time! The image on the left shows how the wind strength arrow changes over time, with the in-game time overlaid around the image to show you how fast it rotates. You can see in this image why you should wait for the next Noon after a low wind - that is when the wind starts picking up again! 4. Does sail angle affect ship speed? How about wind angle within the effective angle? As long as your sails are pointing with the wind, the angle your sails make with the body of your ship does not affect your speed. Therefore, only the angle between your sails and the wind makes an impact on your speed.This angle makes a big difference in your speed as you get close to the effective angle. For example, if you are 75% of the way to the effective angle, you still have about 61% of your max speed. Once you reach 90% of the way to the effective angle, though, your speed drops to 44% of your max speed. At 95% of the effective angle, you only have 35% of your speed left. Wind-sail angle effects your ship in a very similar way to weight. The biggest difference is that when you reach the effective angle, you go a minimum speed of 29% of the max speed. However, because of the very fast drop-off of speed as you approach the effective angle, it is generally wise to not get anywhere near it. In-game, this means that you should avoid sailing in a direction that makes your sails turn red in the HUD indicator, and think a bit about your heading if your sails are dark orange. It may be wiser to turn a little more with the wind, and then cut back in the other direction (tack) when you get closer to your destination. The Details Testing Details All numbers in this guide were obtained through testing in single player, and confirmed (somewhat) using the numbers in the devkit. It is hard to convert the numbers in the devkit into actual usable in-game numbers, but I did my best. If anyone is familiar with the devkit and would like to give me a tutorial, I would love to talk to an expert, just message me and I will give you my details. For the most part, the tests I ran involved getting the sextant buff, then equipping a ship with a specific sail configuration and sailing it across H8 (no islands, so I can stay within a single grid and get about 19k meters of testing space, along a diagonal). Once the knot display reached a stable speed, I recorded the time, latitude, longitude, and speed in knots, given by the sextant buff. I recorded this data again at the opposite end of H8, and computed the total distance traveled and the time in game-minutes it took to travel that distance (in longitude units). I then converted this speed in long/game-minutes into ATLAS knots (see my sextant buff post for details). For the effective angle calculations, I had to do something slightly different. I aimed my ship as close to true North as I could. This involved setting the wind direction (using setdir 90) to North and the wind speed (using setwind 12) to the maximum strength, and rotating my ship until the wind arrow had no pixels off of the directly vertical line. I verified my (very close to) true North heading by sailing some time and noticing no change in the longitude coordinate. In fact, for much of my testing, my ship could lean left and show one longitude and lean right to show another, 0.01 higher. Because this lasted a long time, I am fairly confident in my heading being essentially true North. With my ship and sails pointing due North, I set the wind to many different angles away from North (using setdir X), and recorded long/lat/time like before. However, there is the added complication of crossing server borders. I kept track of the time as I crossed borders (only going North, remember, not East or West), and there was no time gained or lost. The coordinates were a different matter - when you cross a border (at least in Single player), the game puts you at 0.14 longitude units further than you entered. I just had to keep track of how many borders I crossed and subtract 0.14 for each one. This added some error, but I couldn't think of a better way to do the tests without rotating the ship between tests. If I did rotate between tests, the slight variation in the way my ship was pointing would make the effective angle very difficult to compute, since small changes in angle near the effective angle make a large difference in the ship speed. Any derived numbers (like maximum speed contribution per sail) were obtained using the trendline function in Excel, or the Solver addon for Excel. Detailed Numbers I will put detailed information here about the specific numbers I obtained from testing. I will also update this section if I did some math that confuses anyone. - Since the full wind rotation takes 6 in-game days, the wind rotates around at 60 degrees per in-game day, or 1.19 degrees per real-life minute. Additionally, the strength of the wind changes twice as fast in the "low wind region" from Noon before the lowest wind until Noon after the lowest wind. The graph below shows this region where the wind power changes much more rapidly. - Weight and speed sails have an effective angle of 82.0305 degrees, and handling sails have an effective angle of 117.725 degrees - The table below shows my current data on maximum speed from each type of sail, for each type of ship. I will be adding to this in the future, as I collect more data. - Handling sails are faster than speed sails once you pass 152.59 degrees. At that point, you should switch all sails over to handling sails (if you can't just rotate a few degrees to make the speed sails worth it). Conclusion Generally, you will want to use speed sails, and only in rare cases will you want to use handling or weight sails, since their benefits don't outway the massive increase in speed that speed sails give. However, if the wind is just too weak and you are doing everything you can to milk speed out of your ship, you can always just wait for the next Noon, and the wind will be guaranteed to be at 50% and rising in strength. Finally, Avoid sailing in a direction that makes your sail HUD indicator dark orange, since your speed drops off very quickly as you get close to the effective angle, where the sails turn red. Please leave a comment if you think I missed anything, and let me know if I have not explained something clearly enough. I am happy to answer DMs or regular comments. Finally, I would like to thank @Kummba for encouraging me to look into the wind mechanics, and giving me a jumping off point with the wind rotation mechanics. See you on the high seas!

INTRODUCTION: The sextant buff is one of the most useful buffs in the game, so I figured a guide explaining how to get it, what it does, and what aspects of it you should not take for granted, would be quite worth it. I'll start by listing the questions I am going to answer, and then we'll get into the thick of the content. The Big Questions: What is the sextant buff, and how does it help? How do I get the sextant buff, and how long does it last? How large are the grids (and the whole ATLAS map), in terms of lat/long points or meters? When would crossing the edges of the map to get to another grid make my trip faster? How accurate are the speed, lat/long, and direction that the sextant tells you? What is an ATLAS knot? Related questions other posts have answered, that I will skip here: Which type of ship is the fastest? Read on for more detailed info on each of these topics! What is the sextant buff, and how does it help? The sextant buff is a buff that helps you navigate the seas. When you apply the buff, you will be given the following information as a HUD at the top of your screen: A compass showing the direction you are looking in A minimap of your surrounding area (able to be toggled on/off via the settings menu) What region you are currently in, including any special qualities of that grid (lawless, golden age ruins, etc) latitude and longitude coordinates of your current position When sailing a ship: The direction you are headed and your current speed in knots In-game map marker overlay and guidance. Left-click on an ATLAS map marker to activate an in-world guidance marker. minimap and ATLAS map player markers show the direction you are facing Although the buff is indispensable in helping you navigate the seas, it is also very useful on land. I have used the sextant buff to help navigate an island due to the minimap that comes with it, as well as to line up my camera to the cardinal directions for building. Feel free to share in the comments if you have any creative ways you have used the sextant buff! How do you get the sextant buff? To get the sextant buff, you first have to unlock and get the sextant. The sextant is unlocked by the "Navigator's Tools" skill, which is the first skill in the Seamanship skill tree. It takes 11 skill points after a respec to get to this skill. Once you have it unlocked, you have to craft it with the materials shown in the wiki page. The sextant is a tool that you can use to get the buff. To use it, you will first need to get to a high location, typically the crow's nest of your tallest sail if you are on a ship. Hold right-click to bring the sextant up to your eyes, and start looking around for stars in the sky. They will still be visible in the day, and they will have a green diamond show up around them if you get close. Once the diamond shows up, left-click while continuing to hold down right click. This will add a star to your total, and 4 stars are needed to get the buff. Once you add a star to your total, a trail will lead from it to the next star. However, you have to try to be fast, since you only have a few seconds to find all of your stars. Here are a few tips: During the day, the first star tends to be near the sun (not rigorously tested) The trails that lead from one star to the next will curve if they travel a long distance, since they move on a sphere, which distorts their motion. Try to follow the curve around, or you will end up quite far from where the star actually is. Once you click on the first star, you will have 50 seconds to find your stars (+5 seconds for each cosmology level, then x1.10 for each level in able navigator skills) If you find 4 stars, you will get 1500 seconds (25 minutes) of sextant buff. Each star above that will give you +1180.6 seconds (almost 20 minutes) of buff, up to the 9th star and above, which give you a total of 7200 seconds (2 hours) of buff. NOTE: The able navigator skill currently has no effect on sextant buff duration, although it says it does. Be aware. How large are the grids? How large is the whole ATLAS map? Using the sextant buff's guidance marker feature and GPS coordinates, you can get very accurate information about the size of each grid. For example, the center of the center maw (where the Kraken spawns) is at the coordinates of 0/0 long/lat. Moving to the East increases longitude, whereas moving to the North increases latitude. NOTE: Most real-world coordinates are given in lat/long notation, but the game chooses to give the coordinates to you in long/lat notation, so try not to confuse the two. By using singleplayer to fly to the corner of a grid, then marking a waypoint at an adjacent corner and activating the guidance marker, you can get the following size for a grid 14,000 meters along a side, and 13 1/3 lat/long along a side. This means that the whole ATLAS map is 14 * 15 = 210 km in width and length, and the maximum lat/long coordinates are +/- 100. When would crossing the edges of the map make my trip faster? The right edge of the ATLAS map is connected to the left, and the top is connected to the bottom, just like in Pac-man. Curiously, this means that the ATLAS map is not on a sphere, like our Earth, but rather on the surface of a torus (a doughnut shape). Since there are a total of 15 grids in each direction, you could go 8 tiles in one direction, or 7 tiles in the other direction to get to the same grid. Therefore, you should never go more than 7 tiles E/W or N/S to get to your destination. If your route takes you on a path with more than 7 tiles in one direction (for example, West), just go in the opposite direction (East) and it will be shorter. Never go more than 7 tiles in one direction (E/W or N/S) to get to your destination. Go the opposite way, and you can get there in under 7 tiles. The furthest grid from you on the map is 7 tiles E/W and 7 tiles N/S away from you, for a total of 9.9 tiles to get to the opposite side of the map. How accurate are the numbers that the sextant buff gives you? To start, I will assume that the long/lat numbers are exact, since they are simply related to the in-game coordinate system that the game invariably uses. From these numbers, we will discuss the accuracy of the sextant buff speed and direction numbers, and any relevant conversion factors. First up: speed. In real life, a knot is defined as about 1.15 mph, or around 0.514 m/s. Using this number, and the fact that grids are 14 km in width, a ship going around 20 knots would take over 23 minutes to cross a grid. This isn't the case (you can traverse a grid much quicker), so the game must think that knots are something different. To test this, I started a brig off in a random direction at full speed, in singleplayer. Using singleplayer commands, I made the wind a constant speed and not rotate, and I sailed for about 1/2 of an in-game day, and computed the total long/lat distance traveled, compared to the speed shown in the sextant buff. I determined that 1 knot is equivalent to about 0.077 lat/long per in-game minute, or 0.347 grids/in-game hour. To convert in-game minutes to real-life minutes, you just have to divide by 2.1 (I got this number by timing with a stopwatch for about 10 minutes and figuring out how many in-game minutes passed by). Therefore, 1 ATLAS knot is about 38.56 meters/real-life second. Thus, a ship going at 20 knots can cross a grid in just over 6 minutes. Here are a few useful conversion factors: 1 ATLAS knot = 38.56 meters/real-life second = 0.0367 lat/long per real-life second = 0.165 grids/real-life second 1 in-game minute = 2.1 real-life seconds 1 lat/long = 1050 meters NOTE: The speeds given by the sextant buff depend on your current CPU usage. If your CPU spikes, the speed will dip. I tested this by changing the slomo setting - as time is slowed down, the sextant buff indicator sped up. This is because the slower time allowed the CPU to rest more and keep up with the speed calculations. Additionally, I ran the user benchmark cpu test while playing the game at normal settings and similarly saw a drop in the sextant buff reported speed. I found that, for my game under typical settings and activity, the speed can increase by about 1% by slowing the game down absurdly, and it can slow down significantly when speeding the game up. Just a heads up - the speed is not universal, and the same ship may report different speeds on different PCs, even with all variables taken care of. The second task: Direction indicator/heading. I first noticed that the direction indicator is off somewhat when I set my ship to head North (0 degrees) and found my longitude changing still. When I set the ship sailing in a direction that had no longitudinal changes (even over a very long period of time), the directional HUD said 1 degree. More of my testing included recording start and stop lat/long for my ship, and the direction of travel. I then computed the angle from the lat/long data, to compare to the given direction. I found that the direction is accurate to +/- 1 degree always. This can contribute to error when testing and trying to determine actual numbers for these things, but I doubt it will affect gameplay in any noticeable way. The biggest effect I could see this having is if you skirt along a grid border, you should look at the lat/long directly instead of the direction, since you could end up veering off course for long journeys. Conclusion: The sextant buff is a very useful buff, which is why I try to keep it on most of the time I play ATLAS. It helps plot a course on the sea, navigate a new island, or just stay oriented in your home base. Although the speed and direction have a few small accuracy issues, this shouldn't affect your gameplay at all unless you are crazy like me and want to dig up the numbers behind the game that make it all work. That's it for this guide, let me know in the comments if there are any other sextant-related topics you want me to cover, or if you want me to make a guide on another subject that interests you. See you on the high seas!

I remember when Ark suddenly came out of EA, sometime after the first DLC, lol... I was actually shocked that it was coming out of EA because of all the bugs and poor optimization. I assumed the dev team just said where done working on it and left it half-a$$ optimized. To date, I think ARK is one of the worst games I have played when it comes to optimization during EA, besides all the abandoned ware in EA titles. Considering its popularity I always thought it would get better, but it really didn't. I really don't expect Atlas to get much better than it is right now tbh.

a) Atlas is infested by hackers. Wallhackers, teleporters and flying pople with bullseye 5km headshot ability roam all over the seas b) Atlas is rewarding submission instead of skill. Every authistic kid able to hold a wooden pick but who is member of some megatribe is level100+ with mythical weapons, ships, subs and loot. I am just level 53 as solo Player and have no more chance as a snowball in hell against one of these guys. c) death teleport. No effort needed to raid someone, just a mass of naked players with beds and grenades. d) STONE as highest tier building material is a joke. About 20 cannonballs or grenades. Huge Stone walls are a joke. One broadside of a sloop (or a raft) = game over e) Defense is not possible. Playing smart and using exploits works..and only that works ! Building a superfortress that takes months to build is full fail... 5 minutes of work for a megatribe.