Shadow Wolfe

Was able to get them to play the drums in SP, but doesn't work now on official, although the NPCs do play the accordion.

Tried the fishing rod once, got bored. Never did it again. If I need fish for something, just use a spear gun or bow and swim, much more active that way and you get more fish.

If you want to see whales, just go through the polar regions without ballistas on your boat, you will see plenty. This weekend while going from K13 to H2 in as much of a direct line as possible. I saw 2 blue whales close to each other in K14, had to maneuver to go around them cause they were flopping around and in my way. In J15, started to get chased by a sperm whale about midway across the map, my brig was loaded heavy, but was able to stay ahead of him, but then noticed another sperm whale angling towards me from the front, so by the time I was able to get him also behind me, I had 2 of them chasing me. Fortunately at that time, I had a decent wind. 1 of the whales dropped off the chase, but the other kept at it, just for giggles, I fired a few cannon barrages at it, but didn't do much damage, I only had about 200 cannon balls left and don't think it would of been enough to take him out. Anyway, I crossed the zone, but the dang whale followed me into the new zone. He also finally gave up, but no sooner did he pull off then another one spawned and gave chase. Was closed to the next zone and crossed over, but the wind died down and I was making 4 to 5 knots. So in H1 the 4th whale began to chase me, and there was no way I was gonna outrun this one, he was way to close and I had no wind. I started to tack toward a nearby island, but I do believe that if the whale just kept coming toward me, he would have caught me and there would of been nothing I could do about it. But fortunately, he turned and did a big circle which caused him to lose ground against me. When I finally got close to land, he pulled off. So in the span of 4 zones saw 2 blues and got chased by 4 Sperm whales. They seem to populate more on the weekend, cause during the week I sometimes go whale hunting and don't see any. Guess its designed that more players playing in the weekend the spawn rate is higher, but once they get killed off, takes a week before the next spawn.

I figured out just recently after almost losing a Crab off the boat. I had just killed a whale, but decided not to harvest the blubber, just got the gold off it and left the carcass floating. As I was turning the ship to my intended heading, I spotted the crab on the front of the boat start to walk off the side of the boat and drop into the sea before I could whistle to him. Fortunately I had not picked up much speed yet, so was able to cut the sails and stop. Then I dove down and sure enough, found the crab on the sea floor beneath the whale carcass. Was able to get on the crab and jump him back to the surface and took a few tries, while freezing half to death, but managed to get him on the boat again. What I had forgotten to do was place the crab on passive when I put him on the boat, so that is my new rule of thumb, if you have any animals on the top deck, or basically, any animals on the boat, place them on passive, because if they are on neutral, and you are attacked in the water near the boat, they will jump off and try to save you, and you may not always notice when they do this. Don't know if this relates to your problem, I have heard of people losing animals off their boats, and have found a few floating in the ocean a time or two, and even a crew member that had fallen off someones boat, out in the middle of no where, I couldn't claim the crew since he still had a timer on him, so had to leave him.

Before I cross any zone anymore, I always open all my gunports and place my crews on autofire. Cause I can't see whats waiting on the other side, but it always seems to see me just fine and while my slow server connection takes forever to synch up and give me access again I generally find a mess of SODS tearing my ship apart. Since I started doing this though, I have found on several occasions that my Galleon has already killed the SOD by the time I am back in control, which is nice. But, to answer your question, if I forget to take them off autofire and I drop anchor, they will immediately fire and reload continuously. So I have to give them the stop fire command, i.e. default "C'" key while you are on the steering wheel and the all the firing groups are selected. So to prevent me from forgetting that they are on autofire, I make it a habit that everytime I close the gunports, I press the "C" key as well. I also like to open gunports and put on auto fire whenever I go into a fog bank, cause the fog only affects you, doesn't seem to affect SODs from spotting you. Another thing to note, if you select a target for the crew to fire at, they will fire at it til it is destroyed, then they will automatically return to 'Stop Fire' unless you select another target. Also, another thing that you may or may not be doing, but you have to make sure that each cannon is in a grouping, sometimes they default to left, right, front and back, but not always, you have to go to each cannon and make sure they are in whatever group you want them in, and then while on the helm, make sure that the groups are selected at the bottom of screen, should be a purple hue which means that group is active and any command will affect them. Hope this helps...

The best way to scare up whales is to go sailing in a ship without balistas, always find them everywhere when I can't attack them. But when I go hunting in my whaling ship, they are hard to find. I think the whales are warning each other to stay away from certain ships. Although I was chased by a whale once while in my whaling ship, but I think the whale knew I didn't have any crew on board at the time, so chased me halfway across the map. The reason I had no crew was to free up space to salvage my wrecked ship that had recently sunk with crew. Once the salvage job was done, I filled up all the ballistas with crew and went back to where I saw the sperm whale, boy, the whale was so surprised when I filled him with ballistas.

If there are a lot of wild pigs on the island, I would just take the time to tame an army of them, and just let them run wild on the AODs.

Yes, they can grab other tames, other players or wild animals. I just used mine recently when my tame Ostrich got stuck in a crevice that I could not get out of. I was already dying from malnutrition, so upon death, respawned on the ship, grabbed the crab and went back to the crevice and was able to grab the ostrich and place him on flat land. Unfortunately, I could not retrieve the articles I was carrying from my dead body since it must have meshed into the crevice. Oh well, I can remake what I lost, got the ostrich and monkey out of that crevice though, that was the important thing.

Another fix is a pistol shot between the eyes.

You can move it, it just won't stick when you leave the inventory. You have to just remake all the folders below it.

I don't think they work on SP, I'm guessing there may be a mod that fixes it, but can't verify it. Not sure the resource boxes work on land either, at least, not if you leave crew on the land and expect them to get paid by it. Had extra crew based on land but they tended to be in mutiny everytime I returned even though there was a resource box with gold in it placed in the same room as the NPCs. I do know that resource boxes will lose stored resources if left on land and you cross a zone. They lose items even while on the ship you're using as well, just not as much. And it doesn't lose the items completely, but will routinely leave you with just 1 of said item when you may have had 10000 the night before. Same with cannonballs. At least, on SP, you can cheat in the missing stuff using the Admin commands.

Has happened to me, specially after a haitus from playing, will log back in and my whole ship is gone and everything is in the water. Think it happens when Atlas makes changes and the mod designers have to catch up to the changes that are affected by their mods. Used to use Reinforced, but too many times I lost ships because they didn't keep in track with the updates. Usually when that happens, I have to start over. But on the plus side, I know how to build a decent Brig now, which is basically the only ship I use in SP. I design it to be multipurpose, 6 guns front, 13 rear, 11 broadsides, 5 sails (modded). Have space to keep a few tames, mainly bears and lions, and space to add ballistas when I make it to whale country. I use the sails that add weight capacity to the ship so that I can carry everything with me since anything you leave on land probably will disappear once you cross a zone, so you can't really have a land base to go back to or store stuff. I don't make extra ships because, again, when you leave the zone and come back, it may be missing panels and sink before you can get to it. Has happened to me several times, and now I just use one ship, and that ship has to be multipurpose. Galleon is too big and maneuvers like a slug, the schooner just a bit too small, so Brig it is

Been playing SP on Ocean, and the Discoveries aren't working at all. You only get the initial discovery point for first step on the Island and your first whale kill, but that's all I have come across so far. Can't seem to trigger the small discoveries/interesting locations, even for the ones I know are there.

Haven't gotten into the cooking/farming aspect, so don't know if this is a workaround to the water to the grill deal. Have tried to irrigate a grill before, and it is a pain, specially if the reservoir is quite a distance away, trying to run the damn pipes is a pain, and looks ridiculous when you are done. Fortunately, you don't get clipped by the pipes, but still looks bad. Only wanted the irrigated grill to make paints easier, since I pretty much paint everything. Well, when I finally got it irrigated, I found that its not a constant flow, so you could only make like 15 paints at a time, then had to wait for the refill. My workaround to this was to make 10 water jars, fill them up, place them in the grill, then can make 100 paints at a time.

I play SP, so the silos don't work anyhow. I tested it awhile back and when I had NPCs on the land, they would still go into mutiny even with food and gold in a Silo that I put right by where I parked the NPCs. I then put a Resource Box in the same room with them and they would still go into mutiny. Basically, I have developed many workarounds for the tedious bugs that seem to be rampant and kill gameplay. But most of the workarounds require that I limit my exposure in the game, which is not a good workaround. In order to not lose crew, I only have enough crew to man the one ship I am sailing. I don't make other ships because if you leave a ship in a zone, it may not be there when you come back. I don't build a lot for the same reason, things disappear whenever you leave the zone. Can't leave resources on the land, they disappear as well. You have to basically carry everything with you when you go anywhere, So I have to use mods to increase the carry weight of my ship so I can carry all the resources and tames I have collected. I have to cheat in what resources and equipment that is lost in between logins. Every time I log in, I have to go to each crew member and take off their armor, then re-equip them, if I don't, their armor 'bleeds' away and disappears, and you have to remake the armor pieces that disappear. Can be a tedious process if you have a lot of crew, but gives me the chance to increase their health points. Before I log out, I have to take all items on my character and put them into a chest, and then go and keep a count of all my resources so that I know how much came up missing the next time I log in. Although, I don't lose resources every time. Sure hate it when I check the ammo crate and find that I am only left with 1 cannon ball after leaving 1200 in it the night before. You know, if they would just fix a bunch of these little issues, then the big issues would probably sort themselves out. For some reason, the saving process that occurs when you log out somehow tends to get corrupted cause it can't keep track of what items you have stored in the different locations. Other games don't seem to have this problem.