Salty Del

22 minutes ago, MeatSammich said:

From my experience, at least with my schooner, the anchor ability point is toward the front of the ship. I have a spot with a similar situation to yours, and if I back in, I run aground before I can drop anchor. But, if I pull in forwards, It anchors fine as soon as the front 1/3 or so is into the shallows.

Its funny  that my anchor can't drop off the back of the ship into about a foot of water, but if I drop it pulled in forwards, the anchor chain drops down into the abyss. Not sure how deep it even is, I've tried to see and ran out of air before I got there.

A solution would be to make it so that as long as you're in the light blue area on the map, what I assume is essentially the continental shelf, you can anchor. Would clear up a lot of the problems people are having with finding anchorage.

That’s interesting. I’ll have to try that.

The spot that I found to anchor, I thought that I had gotten the middle over the low point, as the front had gone across it already, and from the camera views it looked like the middle was over a shallower point than the front.

This needs further experimentation!

My wife and I were finally able to find a claim to build a small house. It is literally an underwater shelf next to a cliff, and we have ownership of the cliff to about 1/8 of it’s height (not very much at all).

We built a house on stilts and a dock with bays for our schooners, but the brig we recently built can only drop anchor in a very particular position. The shelf is too shallow to get the brig over without probably sinking it, and the underwater ledge is too steep to easily find a spot that we can drop anchor on.

I did some experimenting with building a platform underwater to try and anchor the brig, but it had no apparent effect, as the brig still could not anchor over it.

i’ve been trying to find the exact point on the ship that the game uses to determine when you can drop anchor. It’s definitely not the anchor, as I’ve run a schooner aground while backing in to get an anchor point at a different island. I suspect it’s in the middle, which on a brig in our location is incredibly difficult to get properly positioned.

Our schooners are almost bottoming out backing in, but are able to reach the anchor depth before they actually start to bottom out. I haven’t tried a sloop yet, but I’m pretty sure I can anchor it right over the shelf.

Does anybody know what the maximum depth, in pillar height, the brigantine is capable of dropping anchor over?

Has anybody found an ideal way to find an anchoring point? And no, just going back and forth watching for the icon to appear is not ideal. Spending 5 minutes trying to find the exact spot to anchor is a bit tedious, especially ia

ly when you can see the anchor hovering right over the shallows.

A suggestion for the developers would be to change the point used to determine depth to anchor to the anchor point. Most people have figured out how to back their ships to shore, judging from how many I see parked exactly like that. If they’re rushing headlong to shore, the center may be the lowest point, but that’s also the risk of dashing to the shallows, bottoming out the ship.

We haven’t built a galleon yet, but I can just imagine what trying to anchor one at our home would be like.

I still see three ships on our map that were sunk not too long after launch. Two that were sunk by grief era, and one that was lost in a storm to ships of the damned.

I’m certain that they are all long gone, but they still show up.

On the other hand, we lost another ship when the servers booted us while there were the possible issues with Steam, and while we were not the ones to salvage it, we did find it and it’s no longer on the map.

it may be that because I have not gone back to those specific locations they have not updated. Or maybe it’s a bug from an older version that has just carried forward in my local files.

One of them isn’t too far from our current home, so I’ll see if I can swing by tonight and check it out.

Under the current system, when a claim flag expires it becomes claimable by another company.

if the claim flag were to instead expire and disappear, if not renewed, this would let others see that there is a space and claim it themselves.

While this does give companies the ability to more easily take over an island slowly, it also helps smaller companies find claims on lands not inhabited by large companies.

It would also clean up much of the ocean, as well as get all unused claims back into circulation sooner, as they are easier to find.

My wife and I have been noticing that when we place items like water jugs and seeds into a larder, when we change regions they disappear, but the food remains.

Has anybody else seen this issue?

I was thinking about exactly this last night, with much the same conclusions.

The only thing I would add is that you would set a bed as your "home" bed to resurrect at. You can only set your home bed by visiting it. When you die, you can choose to respawn either there or at a ship with a bed in the same grid. Or at a freeport.

You can also try crouching and maybe putting some points into the Sneaking skills. I cannot say definitively, but it does seem to help me.

Have you tried manually removing the configuration files and then allowing it to create new ones?

I think that some of the changes they made to not allow certain settings in the .ini files may be negatively affecting people.

Actually, reading the 18.6 patch notes again, they disabled certain .ini settings that disabling could give players an unfair advantage in PvP.

If people with lower spec hardware were using these settings to improve their gameplay, this may be what’s causing the performance loss.

It's not just you. My wife's PC is having the same issue and I've been trying to resolve it.

It's an ASUS laptop with a GeForce GTX 960M. It played fine before the patch, but now it's very laggy. Even after I got the framerate back up to almost normal.

I've updated drivers, set the GeForce GTX 960M as the default video card in case it was trying to use the Intel HD, removed all of the settings so it reverted to default, and verified local files. It's better, but still borderline unplayable with the lag.

Has the beta GPU performance patch been updated for the new version? Last time I tried it, it was still in version 17.

1 hour ago, Zlax said:

It might be due to the way waves are coded, but I could be wrong.

I think you may be right. I can see it being related to the waves, and it being the mechanic that keeps your head above water when waves get bigger.

Two things I forgot to mention:

You will end up with a smaller territory at the surface. Your claim is widest at the ocean floor. Not where you’ll be wanting to build your base.

You may plant the flag deep enough that you have no territory at the surface. But you’ll have a tonne at the ocean floor!

Edit:  If you’re a big company, there’s nothing to see here. Move along. If you’re a small company, keep reading.

If your like my wife and I, all you want is a place to anchor your ship for the night with some hope that it will be there when you log back in to continue your adventures. This means find a piece of land or sea that you can claim to anchor your ship in. Not an easy thing to do these days.

It seems impossible to do right now. Every island you got to has red rings covering it, with only small gaps that are too small to place a flag in. The territories on the map aren’t accurate either. You see a small corner that doesn’t look claimed, but when you get there you find that the territories extend well beyond what is shown on your map.

What’s a sailor to do? How can you kick back and enjoy your rum when your precious ship could be at risk? I’m rather attached to our ships (we have a sloop and a schooner). I’d be incredibly sad to lose either, with the amount of work we out into making both.

So, I started thinking outside the box.

On every island you come to, you see flags everywhere. A lot of them don’t even have anything built anywhere near them. I know, I know. Some companies want to protect the resources around them. If everybody built everywhere, eventually there would be no resources respawning. I do get the mentality, even if I don’t agree with it, but that’s another discussion altogether.

What you may also notice, however, is that sometimes their territory doesn’t cover the whole piece of land. Sometimes there is a small corner that is just cut off from their territory,  it not large enough to place a flag on. I’ve seen lots of barrels floating with flags on them, but I haven’t worked out yet how they work.

Instead, I found my own solution, and discovered something interesting.

I found that you can place flags on the ocean floor. You can swim all the way to the depths and place a flag. You still can’t put it in close proximity to another company’s flag, but that’s also how I found out something ELSE that’s interesting.

Territories may not be a cylinder in shape. You’d think that the flag would cover the area, and then all vertical space in that area belongs to the company. I thought that as well, until I started trying to claim these small pieces of land.

The reality seems to be something else entirely. Something unexpected. The territories are actually sphere shaped. They claim an area that is all points equidistant from the flag, both vertically and horizontally.

What difference does that make, you may be asking? A BIG difference, actually.

If you place a flag at the bottom of the ocean, you’re not just putting your flag further from the other company’s flag horizontally, you’re also doing it vertically. In some cases, the height difference can be quite large. This means that since the height difference is so big, the horizontal difference doesn’t need to be. You can now put your flag horizontally closer, without contesting their flag. You can use this to take some of those small pieces of land that are leftover.

You may not get much land, but you can at least have a safe-ish place to a anchor your ship. And if you’re dedicated enough, you may even be able to build a small base out in the water itself. You don’t always need huge tracts of land. You can gather your resources from anywhere and bring them back. But you do need a place to bring them back to, and this is how I found to make ours.

I hope this helps out some fellow privateers. Some people are happier just sailing the seas alone or in a small group. But every captain needs a mooring spot where they can hang their hat in peace.

See you on the high seas!

Del

NA PvE (The Hydra’s Den)

Second edit:  Captain’s should be general neutral. I just noticed and corrected it. I may steer the ship, but my wife’s the captain

For those of you having difficulty, I’m going to try to explain how you can sail the raft. This may be a bit long and wordy, but I want to try and give you as much information as I can to get you started.

It’s a bit different than sailing a ship, from Sloop up to Galleon. The major difference is that it doesn’t have a rudder, it sails and steers purely by sail. This can actually be a good thing. You may actually be able to sail into the wind faster on a raft than on a ship because you can keep pointed (mostly) into the wind.

Let,s start with the basics. The first thing you need to know is that you have a top-down picture of a ship in the top-right corner of the screen whenever you’re on your boat. This picture has some very important information, so you need to pay attention to it. It shows you the direction the wind is blowing in relation to your ship, and the direction of your sail and how much wind your sail is catching.

The wind strength and direction is shown with a white arrow. The longer the arrow, the stronger the wind is blowing. This is the important part:  the direction the wind is blowing is always relative to your ship! The wind blows in a compass direction, but you’ll find that’s not really relevant. You only care about the direction you want to go, and the direction the wind is blowing. Knowing the compass direction can help you plot a course that may be more beneficial, but that mostly just applies to the larger ships that are more constrained by the wind direction.

Your sail is represent by a horseshoe shape, with a perpendicular line opposite the opening of the horseshoe. The opening represents the back of the sail, the part that catches the wind, and the line shows the direction the sail is putting the power that you’re harnessing from the wind. The colour of the sail shows how much power you’re getting from the wind;  red is no power and green is as much power as the sails can make. Remember the length of the white arrow, that will show you how much power is available.

You control the sails by walking up to the mast and then holding down E to access the sail controls. Your options are to rotate the sail, open 100% ( full power), close 100% (no power), open sails +10%, close sails -10%.

The other important control you need to know about is the anchor. If you look at your raft floor and hold down the E button, the first thing you need to know is to not scuttle your ship! That will destroy whatever ship you’re on, certainly making your shipmates very salty with you. The option you need to know about is to Raise or Lower your anchor. You can only anchor in shallow water, so you’ll need to get close to shore. It’s best to come into shore at an angle instead of heading straight in. It’s easier to leave when you’re ready, and helps keep you from beaching, and possibly destroying your raft. If you’re staying in one place, it’s important to anchor. And then raise it when you want to leave. Think of it as your parking brake.

When rotating your sails, you’ll see a whole lot of numbers come up in a circle. The numbers go from 0 at the top all the way to 180 at the bottom. The right (starboard)  side is positive (+), and the left (port) side is negative (-). These are the degrees that you can turn your sail to, and on the raft this makes things really simple. Look at the ship diagram, then choose the number that is at the same orientation to the circle as the wind is to your ship. Your raft will turn towards that direction, and as the colour turns to green from red you’ll start going faster. Always remember that these numbers are in relation to the front of your ship, and not compass direction.

Before opening your sails, decide which way you want to go. If you find yourself in a situation where you’re stopped and there is an object directly in front of you, steer your sail into the wind, or as close as you can in the direction you want to turn, make sure that your sail is red for this, then open your sails. You won’t move because there is no power from the wind going to your sails, but you will start to turn to the direction your sail is facing. You don’t need to turn all the way to the direction you want to go, just close the sails to stop, then you can start going around the obstacle, or in whatever direction you need.

You do not need to go the same direction of the wind though. You can go 90 degrees to the wind on either side. Your sail will be  yellowish, but you’ll still be going the direction you want. Just not as fast. With some practice, you can even sail towards the wind. This is called tacking, and it goes like this:  you change the direction of your sail (or ship, if your not on a raft) to follow the direction of the wind, and before you turn to having the wind blowing at your side, you change the direction of the sail to the opposite side. You’re not sailing directly into the wind, but sailing to alternating sides of the wind. The amount you move side to side cancels each other out, and leaves you with  you moving (mostly) directly into the wind. 

Tacking on the raft is easy. What you do is get the wind arrow pointing towards the back of your boat. To make it a bit simpler to start, have it off to one side. It doesn’t matter which side. With the arrow point downwards, rotate your sails to the side the arrow is pointing more towards. When the arrow starts pointing diagonally down to one side, turn your sail to the other side. Your raft will start turning towards that side, changing the direction the wind is blowing relative to your raft. You basically want to move the arrow back and forth like a pendulum, pointing to the rear of your raft.

If you want to go a step further, you can optimize your tacking by making corrections to your sail as you’re going from side to side. Remember, the wind and sail directions are relative to your raft. If the wind is blowing towards the lower-left corner, when you rotate your sails to 175 degrees to the right, your sail will not be catching the full wind. It will be at an angle to the wind. As the arrow is moving to the new side, once it points straight down, click on the 180 degree button. This will point your sail to directly catch the wind, resulting in you going faster than if you just clicked on the 175 degree button alone.

This is one of the areas that the raft really shines. Because you have such full control of the sail direction, you can effectively sail directly into the wind. The small-large ships can only change 75 degrees to either side of the ship. This greatly limits how close you can point into the wind before you lose power. Handling sails can get you a bit closer to pointing towards the wind, but your ta is will be a lot longer than with the raft.

Before heading out on your adventure, be sure to make a bed and either a couple of small boxes or a large storage box. The bed will let you pop back not your raft when you die, and the storage containers are vital in the free ports. When you die in the freeports, your body disappears and you lose everything you were carrying. Keeping stuff in the storage boxes keeps them safe. So long as you pin code them to keep out would-be pirates.

Putting a smithy on your raft is also very helpful. Keep all of your items in the storage box though. You cannot pin code the smithy, or any of the other crafting stations.

As an added bonus, the Ships of the Damned won’t attack your raft! For now. Unless you provoke them.

When you’re ready to go up to a ship, the sloops are relatively easy to make, and are quite easy to handle solo. You can solo sail a schooner (or any of the larger ships), but it does get more difficult the bigger you go.

I hope you find this helpful, and if you have any suggestions to add or corrections that I should make, please let me know.

See you on the high seas!

Del

NA PvE server (The Hydra’s Den)