Deadbones

I don't like the suggestions. If a company has boat limitation per freeport that would mess up a company like mine: We are lazily connected persons, who have two rules. We keep up a settlement together, so we finance them. And everyone is captain of their own ship, so whenever i board any of my mates ship, im his subordinate. I cant really dictate where they can go or what they can do, we just finance a safe harbor together, where we can dropoff excess weight from our ship I think ships should be gold trafficed for freeport region. They decay a bit faster than they do now if they dont have gold, and deplete gold instead of decay when they have gold. So you basicly "rent" the harbor for your stay. Even large companies cant keep many ships financed at freeport, they would go bankrupt. However one could finance a storage ship instead of claiming an island to bank stuff in freeport safely, but they have to make enough gold for that (its per ship and it matches how much one would play for island claims per day). For that however you need to be able to overload anchored ships, so that mechanic is needed.

I would like to suggest to have bags in the game. What they do: ( They are visualised, so your character has a backpack on it when its equipped) There are two functionalities of bags, which can be switched if the bag is empty: 1: Equipment bag, 2: Cargo bag The bag takes the shield slot while equipped, and it can only be stored on wall hooks while loaded. 1: Equipment bag: If the equipment bag is empty, equipped and used, it takes your inventory, Action Bar, and Armor slot items, save the orientation and stores it. If it's not empty, it switches its content with your gear, rearranging the action bar according to its items and arrangements then override its content with your previous gears and settings. It has no weight reduction on it, and causes no hindrance. It's for quickly swapping gear and action bar without the micromanagement. Its great for storing arrengements, so... for example on respawn, you pop a bag, and you are combat ready. Or it's good if for example you have to wander in fur armor due to weather condition but you want to have metal armors on on an ambush. 2: Cargo bag: It's similar to Cargo racks on ships. You have a weight reduction while the bag is equipped, but you can't access it's content. You can drag and drop items into it when its unequipped, but you can only access it by unpacking the whole bag (you cant selectively pick items from it). You only have the weight reduction buff if you have it equipped in the shield slot. The penalty on it is not on movement speed, it's on turning speed (mouse sensitivity), and it only kicks in when the bag is overloaded. This makes your aim harder, and thus it's a hinder in combat and pvp, not on transportation (which this item supposed to improve).

The whole point about mortars to have stronger defenses and let the folks sail more for pvp. Pvp for profit= sea combat Grudge, high effort raiding, with negative profit= base sieges I'm with the idea of bases being raidable, but only with more effort than it worth. So +1 for the npc mortar vote. -1 for the remove base idea (that's Sea of Thieves for you). However i would like to have a kind of rentable shipyard in freeports, for gold, banking for gold, and docking for gold. So one could turn their gold into rentable stuffs instead of settleing, as an alternative thing, while living only for sailing and gathering gold to upkeep themselves

I think Freeports would be better, if you could buy a "License" for ship, which needs to be equipped on the ship resource box, as skins do (for example 250g sloop, 500g schooner, 1000g brig, 2000g galleon), unequipable, so it "bounds" to the ship. What it does it makes ships able to stay in freeports , while it drains gold, instead of damage. The gold per day should be similar to island prices (sloop=small island, schooner/brig= medium island, Galleom=Large island), but it should tick more rapidly in smaller amount, like crew payments. This would allow solo players and smaller companies like us to have a day off from time to time, if we farmed our ass off for it, and still come back for an existing ship. Or we can have a harbored floating base for reduced functionality and same price as a claimed island. Also this would bring life to freeports. They are pretty empty at the moment. The license is for making it sure that folks dont flood the ports with unserious ships, it needs investment. The price is for making freeport living not worthy with multiple ships (island can bay more ships while the freeport is cost per ship).

Love the initiative, however, it has some flaw.... or it might be just out of specification: 1. Take for example a situation, where an island is taken over. I might be sleeping on the set raid window timer, and when i log on i face a new landlord that can literally bomb my house as they please and i can't do anything because i'm outside of war timer? Suggestion : refugee buff-> some immunity against the new landlord's attacks during a fresh takeover. They have a grace timer against new wars, however, the settlers also need a timer, because they can't retaliate against a tyrant landlord on that timer. 2. Outside of a war period, i'm literally unable to fortify myself, that's fine, because i could just set up an inside raiding possibility against my landlord if i could do that. However, that means i can't do any preparations against invaders either. The war period is choosen by my landlord, and also i'm paying taxes to my landlord to defend me. When the war time starts, they might just sit in their fortress and defend their property from our taxes, while settlers around are burned up for loot. Suggestion: Under the war time, settler's may choose to go "civilian". This means, that they disable all their bed on the quadrant, so they can't respawn there during the war, and for that, they containers can't be looted, neither the bags that drops from demolished containeers. Their assets can be demolished, or destroyed, but at least they won't be targeted for loot. Why? The priority target of a War should be the land owner. Settlers are both nerfed to fight against invaders, they are taxing the landlords, and .... become pinatas after war time for the new landlord anyway (settlers cant pvp, while they can be attacked by the landlord). But it is not fair, to have them become the priority target for looting against a mega-scale attacker company. The first one to be taken out should be the one upholding the law: the landlord, the claim flag. Everything else after that, after the grace period, is literally for the new landlord to take, but the war itself should not be about harrassing civilians for loot.

Dude.... what you are talking about is to include World of Warcraft LFG and flexi-instance into the game. This is not that kind of game. Take for example, a queue system. I would sooooo just make a queue, and kill anyone for their gear when they join. And why on earth would we ever want a shard system in this game? I mean.... I literally bought this game because it's unrestricted, sandbox, and everything is connected. About the whole thread: Also, to be honest, the whole concept here, is not a collection of "improvements", they are just gameplay, and genre changing reworks of the whole game on concept level. I mean, for example, in a sandbox enviroment, where players should dictate the powerplay, how could one just introduce npc factions that dictates the powerplay? Or for example, we have a working system for sails, with masts, and here is a concept, to have different sails on the same mast... Or multiple crewmembers for a mast... This literally doesn't change anything in the game, it's just a personal preference about how it should look like. Like "Turn this flower red, because i like red better than blue".

I like the vulture idea. Breeding for food.... well... it's doable right now, if you kill the babies, instead of the adults, but why would you grow an animal for like.... tons of food to get some food for it. And sheeps can be gathered with a scissor already without killing them for hide. For pigs: It should really have a shovel like gathering i think. For combat usage, they are pretty cheap, so they doesnt need to be buffed i guess

I think taming needs a kind of rebalancing in the game. I think instead of being awesome gatherers, they should be more about carrying weight and harnesses, like they are in "real life". Also, i think taming breeding need to be overhauled in the game. I mean, Ark was all about tames, and breeds, and fancy pets, but in this game, the same system takes the real point of the game (traveling and exploration). Taming itself is fine as it is now. However, after tame, the animal itself turns into a "static asset", since it just need feeding, and things like that, so people WILL flood the servers with animals and pens, and it will need an external limitation or pokeballs, like in ark. Instead of that, i would suggest to have a kind of lifecycle to animals. Suggestion: Taming is fine. After tame : the animals should grow old. Doesn't need any fancy designs, or stuff like that, just animals should die after reaching an age. Breed: Should be a lot-lot-lot more easier regarding time, but more resource consuming. I would like to suggest something like parents have an "autocare" alternative on babies, what speeds up maturation, but can't have "new" imprints on the babies. Instead they inherit the bigger imprint from one of their parent. Genetics: Since breeding would be much much much easier, the catch would be that it would punish harder breeding between relatives (incest), so it would rely more on including taming wild animals. What comes with these changes? Animals stuffed in pens just as "spare" animals will reduce in numbers. Since each animal age, having multiple at the same time simply doesn't worth it, people will rather breed them when needed. This easen server load, since there is no need for big pens, or much animals at the same time. However, replacing animals will be easier, so you don't need to have so much anyways. Also, since replacement will be faster, animals can be weaker, and because of that they won't overthrow barefooted pvp, like they does in ark. Also they won't dominate the battlefields with numbers in pvp and they don't overthrow the "pirateish" feel of the game. Also, since it'll move the game a bit aside from ark with lesser focus on pet-keeping tamagochi approach (hardcore breeding timers), people's time will be more about exploration and not being bound to a place, which is a selling point that separates the two game.

1. Why on earth you have 20 ships on sea at the same time if you don't have 0-24 coverage? You realized that you are not supposed to have that right? Servers can't support infinite numbers of ships just because each and every member of yours want to play jack sparrow on their own black pearl. You are supposed to build up an infrastructure that can replace ships fast. Not one to have them all out at the same time. 2. If protection defends you from smaller tribes, the same protection in a larger count would defend you from medium ones. You don't solve the problem, you just shift it to a larger scale grind. Ark is the perfect example for that. Large tribes will always break smaller defense. Smaller always break solos. And solos (aka newcommers, aka the renewing playerbase), would be targeted by literally everyone, since there is no retalation upwards in the hierarchy. If you are not an alpha, then this would literally mean, that you would be never protected from alphas, since they would always outpreform your defense with their sheer playercount, and materials from taxation, and they WOULD go after you, since you would simply bounce off from their autodefence without any further need to do anything, so you would be just ... a fancy pinata for them. 3. You seem to misunderstand Atlas/Ark pvp pve difference. In pve you grind for stuffs to HAVE them, but you can't do much with them. In pvp you work to get gear to DO THINGS WITH them, not to HAVE THEM forever. Imagine it as a battle royale game, where your base/ship is your character. You can get sniped from a forest in a battleroyale, unfairly. You can be offline raided here too. Part of the game. Building and punching trees nakedly for crafting your first bed, is not an early game stuff that you can leave behind. Just maximize fun value between two wipes, make raiding your base as annoying as possible, for as small loot as possible (= use up your stuff instead of bulking them up). These are your goals. Your lawless bases will mostly stay intact anyways, it cant be stolen, it will have some holes on them, but it would suit for fresh starts, since you just need to replace some walls,where they break in, a bed and a smithy max. Just don't store anything in it, once you built your ship, upload the remaining materials into the ship you made. 4. For god sake.... They made a Captain's log series. They tries to connect community as much as they can. They gave taxation to claim holders. Realize it already, that you don't supposed to own a territory, they are spoonfeding you the fact that you should cooperate with mega-companies, and live on their territories. They'll protect their own claims, with their different time zone players, and their sheer numbers, so noone will steal your bases, and they patrol their seas, lands for offline protection. Thats your offline protection / revenge force. You don't need anything else.

Or, have the floating ship of the damned crewmember that can be recruited a rework. Let them have a damned appearance while unclaimed. If you claim them you free them of their curse so they join you. If you choose to sacrifice them, you still free them of the curse, but you harness the power of the curse not to give them their life back, rather to drain life power to yourself. So each members freed like this gives you 2 years back. I think its still a good choice over freeing then and letting them drown since the ship is full xD

Thanks for including me. It's really a well evaluated idea. Still you are working to add an rpg system to a mainly sandbox game, and automate possible things that player can work in the game just to focus purely on firing at each others. It would improve singleplayer/private server experience, but it removes the mmo sandbox vibe of the game. For example if you automate merchants, my "role" as a sap importer, and trader would be just.... gone. Since everything will be npc made, then all what would left to be done is just to shoot at each other and sail. It's like a well paved road, but its stricly limited. Which would suit a game for example like Sea of Thieves more.

Making sure that solo players and smaller groups feel safer when logging off, or that after they’ve taken a break they can come back and know that it won’t be such a difficult feat to get out on the seas again. Please.... No total invulnerability protection. I don't want to play whack a mole in a 40 square miles area with 2 online players, to find the only raidable base. Also, please don't make this also a bulletsink/bulletfarm simulator, where raiding is literally standing in the edge of turret range with a ship, and defending is soulless metal grind for bullets for days. I mean, a mechanic that discourages raiding an offline base with turning it into boredom, or a defense where you need to give up exploration for the sake of farming enough bullets. I think there should be a combination of 3 working solutions that doesn't break the game too much. 1. I would like to suggest that every npcs that are mounted to guns (not only puckle, but swivel, and cannon too) become invulnerable on land if mounted, even online, so the gun they are using should be killed first (To prevent sniping them). Non-mounted npcs should have a turret mode, where they can use pistols and rifles, and have their stats, and hp regen buffed, and also generally npc stat should raise significally while players are offline and they should autoloot killed players into a lootbox in range. For ships the turret mounted npcs should only be invulnerable when players are offline, they only have stat buffs when online. 2. Freeport banking, and ship insurance. Basicly a gold over time costing storage, where the cost depends on how much stuff are banked there (based on weight not slots). It will be possible to bank with player traders with infinite prices, so... i think it would be better to filter those "not really selling anything" shops before people start to spam bankshops. We don't need invulnerability, we just need something that prevents us to start from scratch each time when someone raids us. 3. Fix logging, and add an extra bounty system. The bounty itself would be paid by players, and it would pay out with sunken ship of the criminal (connected only to ship class, not to any kind of assets on board, and it removes a little fraction of ship skeleton price's worth, so it cant be removed material effectively). Better ships sunk means better plunder on the wreck anyway. Also, people should have a criminal ID, what's visible on crew logs only on hostile actions, where you put the bounty on (1 time payment only, afterward the criminal ID can't be used). Doing any hostile action after bounty is put on somebody, reactivates the id, so people can put bounty again one time then (hostile action: attacking a people who did not damage to you in the last 10 second, doesn't have bounty on his head, and doesn't killed you in the last 24 hour, and any kind of tame-ship-building killing/stealing). This way innocent people can't be bountied. Auto paid bounty from npcs can be abused to give gold to a friendly player, it reward sin, not punish it. Also if bounty is tied to ship sinking, you only hinder their sea movement, not ruin their life, and they are playing pirates in a pirate game, they should be not offline raided for money, or tortured, or locked into a cell for hours, just have people hunt them, and have them lose assets due to their work. However. I'm perfectly fine with the current system, i only miss a good crew log. I can already box npcs bodies behind a swivel gun, so i can do a good offline protection, so its just aestetic difference if their body would be invulnerable or not, that's why i think that should be a thing. Just please.... don't remove pvp from a pvp game. The lack of a good offline protection is the only motivation that make people want to move on a mega-tribe claim for protection. This could be the community forming stuff that could include solo players too. So basicly the best solution for this problem is this: Incentivize companies to neutralize their territories, inviting others to make use of their land so that both can benefit.

I think Ship of the Damned should drop a weak flasked alternative of it for example 5% of the time. This one removes 20 years only from your age. People will trade it for gold for a price depending on market, once player shopping would be implemented on freeports. EDIT: I don't really prefer mechanics that deepens grinding instead of promoting fun content in its place (i mean cannonballs are also grinding for sure, but the loot is tied to the fun part, not the grind itself).

Voodoo Posession: Allows one to create a Voodoo doll of an npc. If you use this doll, you replace the npc, for strangers, it gives a minimalistic right to the company (such as opening non-pincoded doors, fireing cannons, opening non-locked containeers). The only way to break this replacement, is to kill the npc. Voodoo dolls are soulbound, meaning it will always travel in the inventory if someone dies, so the holder will have it when they respawn. In case of a possessed npc, it travels to the player on respawn, since that npc's soul is replaced by the player's soul. Explanation: Voodoo magic is dark magic. Basicly this replacement will cost the life of that npc (thats the only way to go back to original form, and lose the access rights to the npc's company). If you for example give a friendly but invidual people a voodo doll, he/she can join you in your voyage. He can spawn on your ship once, replace that npc, have the gear of the npc, and use ship parts like cannons, containeers, helm, etc. It's like a party system. However, once that npc dies, the one possessing the npc lose the rights, and can only respawn on their own property. Giving a voodoo doll to a possessed body would transfer that doll to the respawned player when he die, so they might rejoin on a different npc. Basicly it would be a token based respawn system for inviduals not belonging to your company, what you can give to them to join/help you on a voyage.

About the law system: Bounties should work otherwise in my opinion. Instead of being a predefined added value, it should be player added. For example if i was raided, and lost a mythical recipe, and the automated system put 100 gold fee due to just one box was destructed it doesn't represent a true value of that crime. Also one could just log on and afk on jailtime, so it also need some mechanic that makes them spend their time in jail, not just afk their time through it. I mean, imagine someone shooting peoples to generate a gold bounty on their own head, then make his friend jail him, and generate more income to a friend, while he goes on a long weekend holiday away from computer. That's literally rewarding not punishing. Alternative suggestions: Let players put their own gold as bounties. Let destuction of assets be the decay measurement of bounties. The bounty declines with lost assets (unretrievable lose). For example, i pay 1000 gold bounty on a criminal. A galleon worth 5000 gold, a schooner 500 gold, a sloop 100 gold for example (not equal to their real value, just a small fraction of it). If someone sinks a ship, they get a payment equal to that ship cost into their nearest ship resource box in range (just put one near if you for example bombard a ship with a weight harness cannon). Even with the reclaimed assets, the whole payout would be just a little part of the ship's worth so it couldn't be abused (cleared intentionally) material effectively. The following numbers are just relative numbers, not optimal calculated values. If someone sinks a sloop on an 1000 bounty criminal they get 100 gold, and 900 bounty left on the criminal. If someone sinks a schooner instead, they get 500 and 500 bounty leaves on the criminal. If someone sinks a galleon, they still get only 1000 gold, and the criminal's bounty is nullified. Also, the ship itself have to be some times old (for example 10 minute old at least). This is a check to make sure that the ship itself can float, and someone doesnt throw just skeletons into the water with some weird glitch that counts it as enemy sinking, and prevent players to rapidly sink their bounty with an invidual company friend. Since every asset of a sunk ship can be plundered, and since a well armed criminal should be threatening the bounty shall only depend on the ship class, nothing else (sinking a well armed ship worth more, since you can plunder it better, but its the same bounty as a minimalistic ship). Stolen ships doesn't count, only sunk one (since it could be retraded and abused). Also there should be 2 types of bounty: 1: Company bounty, 2: personal bounty. The difference is, that if someone have a personal bounty, it still affects company bounty, but if you kick that person, the person inherit the bounty, and the company is cleared of it. However with company bounty, company assets inherit the bounty, for example, if you claim a brig from a company, you inherit a brig's worth of bounty with it (so a company with bounty can't save their ships to a brother company, or sell out threatened ships). Also, if everybody leaves a company, the last person to leave inherits the company bounty as personal bounty (if a notorious pirate group have like 10000000 gold bounty they could easily clear it by reforming the company). Jail time: To prevent people just afk their time through jailtime, i would suggest to have a fixated amount of bounty cost on bringing a criminal to freeport jail. For example one people is caged for 2 hours, and remove 200 gold. After that time, the cage opens, and there is two ways to go: Left side is a courtyard, where you'll be hanged. Right side is a yard, where you can work to further decrease your bounty. If you go for the hanging, you are free of the jail, but all your other bounty stays. If you go for the right, you'll be suited with with a black and white stripped cloth, and you can mine in a pistol reload like minigame. Whenever you succeed in the minigame you remove a bit of bounty from you (like 1-2 golds). Those golds go to the one who captured you (you cant enter prison without someone bringing you there). Why? 1: One who goes to a long weekend holiday, can not just afk through they bounty like that. People spent effort on that bounty cost, so jailed mates should do the same bringing it down 2: Some people literally overdo jailing... They go torturing, shaming, etc on caged person. Some others are respectful, and well... not about being the torturer, they just do the necessary bad to prevent bad guys to do bad stuff. Criminals could make a choice, that that person was a dck, so they won't give them any more payment, and hang themselves. Or they should think, that "well... he was kinda fair, doing his job, i'm either lost another ship, or spend some time here to clear my bounty, so i clear it, i don't mind that guy getting some extra". Conclusion: Pro: +As you can see, if players pays for bounties, you can have a better price on bounties according to the victim's esteem of his own damage, instead of an automatic system +One can hardly skip their jailtime afking, thats a way more ineffective way to decay your bounty (only 200gold/2 hours removed). Since in jail you don't lose assets, you must lose time that you could spend on making those assets, not just afk time. Or lose time getting jailed. +People tend to shoot at criminals like this. The whole bounty system is to make other people get revenge in your place. If it's a hard "capture him, transfer him to prison,etc" kind of complicated thing, lesser people will take the time to do so, so it won't be as significant to have a bounty on someone +One "fair" company should have a kind of CV of a player. Traders don't hire pirates or griefers, they see the bounty there. However pirates would hire criminals, since they want that extra thrill of bounties and being engaged in pvp more Cons: - Well, it's not really a con, but it need to have a good balance. Since players pay the bounty, they want something for it. If too much gold is removed by the jail minigame, it'll be a gold sink. If too little, noone would take the jailtime. If too much gold goes on ship sinking, pirates may just sink his own ships with a friend, to profit on their own bounty. If too little, since the costs on ships are fixated it would not worth the risk/reward of attacking an armed galleon. - It's only ships, not buildings, or tames. From law side, the bounty is about prevenging crime. And crime is about bad people moving around doing bad stuff. Since criminals are just players, and not real criminals, in my opinion criminal movement should be hindered, not their character's existence, so their main hindrance should be the constant paranoia of driving any kind of ship, and not about getting offline raided from time to time. However that would mean, that grounded pirate groups are not really affected by this. But to be honest, these kind of pirates are territorial fighters, and they are reachable, not the folk that goes around and cause harm to multiple regions then vanish, so in my opinion its okay. But since its just a point of view, i should mention it in cons EDIT: I found out another con, but i have a solution for it: - Innocent people can be bountied. Solution: To be able to bounty someone you must have a log of that people/company doing wrong. They should have a "criminal ID", which only appears on hostile actions and only in event logs. If you clear your bounties your criminal ID changes, and you have to commit another crime to have a new one. This means people who don't know you don't know your criminal ID so you cant recieve bounty, since they can't target you. And one mistake doesn't gonna provide you a permanent id, so if you clear your name, you have a new id, so you can't be targeted until you "share" your new id with crimes.

I'm a solo player, with weekly 20 hours of playtime, and i'm fine. Don't generalize your own selfish desire to own a claim, and literally trash all multiplayer interactions instead of contacting a megatribe for rights to build on their claim territory. In this game megatribes are like nations. THEY supposed to own territories not each and every person.The colonist in this era was all belonging a nation, like spain,england,portugese,etc. If you live on a megatribe territory, they handle patrols, 0-24 coverage with their playerbase, while you pay taxes to them. If you want to replace a whole nation infrastructure alone, that's the part where you fail. And you dont need to be able to. Also, don't praise ark. It was a bulletsink simulator... the defenders had to farm bullets and turrets like hell, and attackers had to bulletsink for hours standing in the edge of a range for long period of time. It was literally no fun, it was a soulless grind. If you meant it this should be like it.

The heck you talk about. Why should someone who wants to pvp would go pve in the place of someone who would rather implement an immunity to pvp, what pve already has ? Also, many quadrants have something like 4 active members on official servers from time to time. Should i play whack a mole to find in square miles large map the only vulnerable base before they log off? Thats literally unviable and unfun. Also me , and everyone else would abuse the shit out of offline protection. I would block ships with mine, then logoff, and they could do nothing. I would make a second account build a second house, pin the doors and stuff my loots into that house with my main acc, which would be offline protected since i wont log on with its owner acc. What you need is a half pvp half pve server instead of literally ruining pvp. Which have pve quadrants but also have pvp ones. Where claims on pve have gold costs, so basicly you have to farm gold on pvp to keep claims on pve. And getting gold would be connected to pvp quadrants only so noone could avoid consensual pvp if they want a safe claim on pve.

No thanks. If i would like to play a bulletsink/bulletfarm simulator, i would have stay on ark. And offline protection? Really? In a hardcore survival game? What would i do on a 4/150 pop quadrant? Should i play whack-a-mole finding the only vulnerable base out there? :D:D:D Whow this suggestion is dumb, you don't get the game at all. Go pve, or play Sea of Thieves. This is a survival mmo, where you ask for a non-survival, non-mmo approach.... You want to be viable as a solo person? Inviduality, life, EQUIPMENT/GEAR. Choose two. See more on explanation. Your only problem literally that you want everything for yourself by yourself alone. If they balance the game like that, each and every person will be riding galleons, and endgame stuff, there would be no variety, and no "whoooa thats a galleon" vibe to galleons. There would be no sloop captains, everyone would keep elephants to harvest wood like a god, and go galleons. You are NOT supposed to be capable of that. Big corps supposed to. You neither should aim for owning claim areas. Contact a big corp, ask for settleing right for tax, they'll secure the area for you. They have the 0-24 coverage. You don't need to be a no-lifer, but for the love of god.... give up being the badass with the castle with 2 days a week playtime on PVP, there is PVE servers for that, don't ruin pvp by cutting out inconvential pvp. Just choose someone who is capable of making castles and support them, even if you don't exactly join them xD About protection, gunport+swivel+npc. Build an "umbrella" for them, so they only shoot downward. from outside of the umbrella, they don't have the vision on the npc. Once they come under it, the swivel can shoot too. Or put down a gunport backward to a spot where two floors touch, with its back there. Put a swivel on it, assign crew to it, then build the wall between the swivel and the npc. The npc body will be behind the wall, so it cant be sniped, but since the swivel is outside it can shoot. ///*******EXPLANATION ZONE You want to be solo right(1. pick inviduality)? Fine. Don't go for galleons, claims, rare equipments. You can totally do nearly anything with Sloops and Schooners and primitive gears (except the kraken and ghostships, but thats group content to begin with). You don't want to wander around with a galleon with low crew, or solo EVER. Have a replacable sloop for close range exploration/gathering, and a schooner for long voyages/bigger projects (powerstone/pvp). Always undock a ship wih a one day single purpose, where it redeems its cost in one day, and enjoy if it stays after it. You can have a blast as a commoner, if you build in lawless, without any kind of defence, even if they break in, you can stuff the bigger holes with the same investment that your raider did. Don't stash, always build an extra wall if you have materials for it instead of bulking up. In lawless, everything you build will stay yours, they can't steal buildings. If you choose freetime (2.pick life) then you won't be able to have endgame content, since you'll lose that. Or you can choose to farm your ass off (2.pick endgame gear), then you have to be 0-24. (Life, endgame) If you don't choose inviduality, meaning for example that you give up having a claim (by the way, its really overrated to personally own a territory), and you agree with a corp to settle rights for taxation, you basicly pay for your protection, they'll patrol for bigger invasion fleets, and hunt pkers in your place 0-24.