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Chicken - let eggs be more valuable. Make them more drastically increase Vitamin A. Sheep - let them drop Mutton and let that act like the eggs described above. Also, let their hide give a boost to cold weather gear, including a buff against wetness effect on cold. This is how wool acts in real life. Wool, in fact has the unique ability to keep you warm even when it's wet. Horse - Give slight increase to speed. This should be the Meta fighting scout Give armored saddles, and weapons that are easy to use when fighting from the back of this mount. Give a heavy armored saddle that cuts the speed to slightly under the current speed. Add a lance that you can use from the back of this heavy mount, but also add in a collision/trampling damage when this horse crashes into an enemy infantry. Pig - Allow its poop to act like fertilizer. Allow it to stack a bit, and not decay so fast. What else would we use it for? Everything gives meat, so its main purpose in real life is diminished. Bull - allow the horns to penetrate armor better, and do more damage. Maybe also stun an enemy so that they fall to the ground, bleeding. It should do more than just put blood in front of your eyes. This should also be the meta for towing a cannon. Create something like a combine for it to tow over growing food. Doing so drastically increases food production. Bull should be meta food gatherer with this. Cow - pretty good as it is, since milk gives medicinal effect. Maybe increase that slightly. Maybe change the meat of both the cow and bull to also have a small medicinal effect since beef is the safest meat to eat. Maybe allow their meat to be eaten raw. Allow it to also drop some prime meat. Fish - allow their meat to be eaten raw. Sushi anyone? Make all raw fish meat and beef give more health but this is offset as it decays faster than cooked meat. Rhino - Should be the Meta battering ram to knock down gates. Allow for an armored saddle for the rider. Rider can't shoot or fight from the back if using that saddle. Elephant - platform saddle with siege engine...catapult, Ballista, etc.. This should be the Meta Fighter, not the bear. It should have much higher weight, health, and melee than current. Stamina is OK, but the run speed should be increased some. They aren't actually that slow in real life. Giraffe - Without getting to ARK'd up, hard to say on this one. Maybe add a rope ladder that allows the rider to climb up to the top of the head for sniping and scouting, and mining things too high for you to reach? Maybe allow the rider to stand on the saddle? Lion - Allow pack buff. I like that it pulls riders off the mount, but instead of the silly looking current version, let it pin the person on the ground. Remove the superman jump ability, but buff health and melee. Wolf - Give pack buff. Wolves, dogs in general have excellent hearing, so they should make excellent fighting scouts. Maybe give them a similar ability to what the Troodon had? Maybe give them the realistic role of sentry. They sense the nearby presence of the enemy? Tiger - No pack bonus like the Lion, but should have sneak ability vs other animals. Should counter the wolf enemy sense, but not be immune to it. Only have this while being quite...walking slowly. Running cancels the sneak buff. Bear - Should be Meta fish and honey gatherer. Should attack you if you get too close. ARK had that right. Should keep you warm when riding them in Tundra and Polar areas. Parrot - increase the cooling buff. Use for keeping babies cool. Penguin - increase heating buff. Use for keeping babies warm. Monkey - no change Raven - no change Vulture - Allow it to see the quality of nearby animals. In other words, it can tell the difference between the Alphas and the Omegas, the strong and the weak. Seagull - Act as a sort of radar at sea? Rabbit - add a "lucky" buff to items crafted. Make this 4 decimal places, and use in anti-cheat to detect duped items. No item should have the same stats, and lucky buff. Can also have this same luck buff when tarot is added.

Bear - It’s clear that the bear is the popular choice for best all-around tame. I think that the bear’s combat ability is where other offensive tames should be. In addition to all that strength and health..and stamina..and carry weight, which makes sense because it’s a bear, their strongest attack also has a conic radius and they are unmatched at gathering underbrush resources; and their bite or swipe gives you the ability to gather meat or hide at various rates. They can run fairly quickly at top speed, but easily bump into things and lose their momentum. Their biggest negatives are that they can’t jump and are not very nimble, so backing up or making sharp turns can be slightly difficult; but their swipe is conic so that’s usually not a problem in combat. Most people are pretty happy with the bear and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. I think it really shines because it doesn’t have much competition; by that I mean that most other tames feel fairly useless in general. I can only think of two reasonable things to change about the bear without painfully nerfing its stats. Make it T3 and lower its attack speed. Attack speed is the huge thing here. It would lower its ability to both attack in combat and gather at a high rate without making it too weak at anything it’s currently good at. Chicken - It gives you eggs. Not worth breeding. Cow - It gives you milk. Not worth breeding. If anything, add the ability to ride it without a saddle like the pig simply for a quality of life improvement. Bull - Please enable the use of cargo saddles for bulls. Increased carry weight and possibly buff damage. I would really like the bull to be useful for something. I think it would be great to give it the ability to gather materials that currently do not seem to be gathered at increased rates by any other tames, such as tree fibers like bamboo and silk as well as secondary resources from trees such as cocoa and limes. Crow - It buffs intelligence at a decent value. Definitely the most useful shoulder pet. It’s not the Crow’s fault that intelligence rolls blueprint bonuses on a percentile and simply increases your maximum while doing nothing about the minimum, still letting you roll a natural 1, so that almost no one bothers to put their stat points into it when they could use those points for something more concrete. Or that it’s only semi-useful when crafting special blueprints and absolutely nothing else like gathering rates or something. Please increase the spoil timers on worms because birds are hard enough to tame already. Razortooth - I’ve heard it’s a picky eater so I really haven’t tried to tame one yet. But I’d definitely be upset if something I traveled so far into the most dangerous territory in the game for and worked so hard to tame died because it’s squishy. It’s not even in a tier, so it should be that strong and scary. Shieldhorn - I heard it stops bullets which is pretty cool. I see a lot of people saying to buff its stamina so I’m going to assume it needs that. Again, it’s difficult to get to and tame so it should be better than T3. Definitely seems like the tank tame so I’m hoping it has very high health. Elephant - Elephants are great. They gather wood and can kind of stomp on things. I love the carry weight buffs. But I think it needs a couple changes to really shine. Something so big and heavy shouldn’t get stuck on snakes and and puppies. If it’s possible, adding some sort of collision change that lets you push creatures out of the way or walk over them more effectively would be fantastic. Please remove the collision from their tusks though because they get stuck on literally everything and you can barely even walk around them. Giant Pig - Everybody poops. You can ride it. But you can’t make it poop while riding it. I tried. Giraffe - I love the recent changes to weight and thatch gathering. Exactly what this tame needed. Horse - They’re very fast and can carry a decent amount of weight, as well as gather seeds and some berries and vegetables if you need them. Useful for exploring new places and traveling in general. They are so ridiculously annoying to catch though. Taming them is easy, if you can catch them. Basically, you either make a trap and hope one decides to fall in or you chase it down with another tame and somehow trap them between a rock and a hard place and hope they don’t get free in-between bolas. That’s if they don’t run into the ocean and swim around in circles until a shark eats them first. Please lower their movement speed, preferably only while wild if that’s possible, or make them semi-aggressive so they only run away at a certain health threshold. Lion - Good at killing things, but they should be stronger than bears. Please buff their carry weight and stamina so they can be a little more useful for other things as well. I’d like it if they didn’t sound like rubbing sandpaper while running around too. Monkey - Health regeneration is cool, though it’s not much so I think this should be increased. Making their buff more noticeable would make them more desirable for map hunts and Golden Age Ruins runs. They throw poop at things too, but that’s about as useful as a ball of poop. The Monkey is small, but it’s quite nimble and reflexive so I think it could use a little more health for survivability. Ostrich - The ostrich is one of my favorites because I love the temperature regulation buffs. It is by far the most annoying tame to be around though, so please lower the interval at which it makes that horrible vocal noise. It’s smaller than a horse so it can’t carry as much weight, but it also seems to have lower health which makes the horse a more desirable choice for a travel mount in any biome but the desert; or maybe a heat wave in the tropics. The hyperthermic regulation is great, though obviously only useful in warmer climates so it’s very situational. I think that it needs a slight buff to compete with the horse, either movement speed or jump strength to make up for the difference in health and carrying capacity. Parrot - By far my favorite avian. The available color schemes for this tame makes it kind of fun to seek out. I love the fortitude buff, but it’s such a small amount that it’s hardly worth the effort. Taming any of the avians can be fairly challenging, and they all have very low health values so they can die easily if anything goes wrong. I think the fortitude value should be greatly increased, by at least 4-5x. Currently a decent level parrot doesn’t even provide you with a third of what you get just from balancing your vitamins, and even the vitamin buff doesn’t make a huge difference honestly. Bird tames aren’t designed to fight or gather, their only value lies in that buff they provide when on your shoulder. Currently not worth the effort to tame or take with you on your travels, especially when zone changes cause shoulder-mounted pets to get lost in transition and tames in general fall off or clip through boats so easily. Not even worth the crew slot it takes to bring them with you. Penguin - Adorable and cuddly. They help keep you warm in the coldest of climates but restrict your actions while doing so. They’re slow, weak and only eat fish which makes them extremely high maintenance. Currently not worth the effort for any tamer or breeder unless you’re simply trying to stay alive in your own home during a polar cold snap. But even then, you might as well just save the ironwood in your grills, give in and wait until it’s over. You already have to travel to the most dangerous waters outside of Golden Age Ruins just to get to the polar biome where penguins live, through high level ships of the damned and aggressive whales waiting to destroy half your planks with a single tail sweep, to the harshest biome of the game with dozens of the most dangerous non-mythic creatures around every corner, waiting to punch you in the face. Their buff should be applied in a small radius with a proper icon, specifically for tamers willing to handle the nightmare of breeding and are wishing to raise baby animals. Penguins should be able to eat regular meat too. For our sanity, please. Rabbit - Cute, squishy, I guess they warn me of danger. Kind of useless. They should provide a movement speed buff that scales with level. Rhino - Rocks are heavy, metal is heavier. The rhino needs more carry weight than the elephant honestly, especially since the elephant handles easier for some reason. Currently only useful for destroying player structures on PvP, but even then it would probably just get shot. Seagull - Definitely the most useless tame so far. Why an animal that can’t breathe underwater provides you with a buff to oxygen and swim speed, I don’t know. Maybe so I can swim one second faster to the shore from an anchoring point 20 meters away, or I could just use a dinghy if it’s really cold or something. And it only eats fish? No way am I going fishing every day just for that. Making it so aggressive creatures won’t go after PCs in a diving suit has made it somewhat viable. But please, if it can’t breathe underwater, at least give it so much oxygen that it won’t need to; without having to waste all its stat points by putting them into oxygen. I’d rather put them into food so I won’t have to fish as much to feed this thing. Seagulls basically eat anything in real life, so I don’t really understand the fish-only thing. Please buff oxygen and let it eat regular meat if not berries and vegetables as well. Sheep - It gives you fleece, so that’s cool. Or I could just ride my bear around and kill all the sheep to get even more fleece. More fleece is always good. Tiger - The tiger is my favorite tame overall. Not because it’s great, I just like large cats. The bleed attack is amazing and actually makes it viable to take on stronger enemies, albeit in a sort of kamikaze way since elementals and most other mythics pretty much decimate anything in their path. Needs a stamina and carry weight buff, like the lion, for a quality of life improvement. It should also, like the lion, do more damage than a bear without relying on the bleed; especially since it has significantly lower health, is designed solely for combat and not to gather much of anything at all. Not sounding like wet leather while running would be a very appealing change as well. Vulture - For such a biome-specific and annoying creature to tame, I was disappointed to find out that vultures do absolutely nothing at all. If you attack one, all of the vultures in the area aggro to you; as if trying to tame avians wasn’t difficult enough. They only eat rotten meat, which is kind of silly. I get it, they’re vultures. But why would they only eat rotten meat and not regular meat? Do they sit around and wait for a corpse to decompose into filth before coming at it like flying piranhas? No, they dive right down and eat anything and everything in their way. They desperately need something to make them desirable to players. All of the birds are completely useless in combat, even the vulture. Buffing its health and damage to make it at least usable as an attack pet would be a good start. It’s bigger, tougher and more aggressive than any of the other avians but their stats don’t reflect that at all. Still, a vulture could never kill a wolf one-on-one, and I wouldn’t expect them to be able to. But being able to provide support damage and possibly buffing their carry weight and hide or keratinoid gathering rate could make them somewhat useful to bring along. Even if you added all that, I still think it would need some sort of player buff while shoulder-mounted to really make anyone want one. What buff exactly though, I’m not sure. Perhaps a melee damage buff that scales with level to make for a great partnership. Wolf - Lastly, and certainly least, the wolf. It was my second favorite, right after the tiger. That was until I found out there was no pack buff, then their health and damage got nerfed so significantly that they became only just slightly more dangerous than a dog with a chew toy. They’re about as useful as a warm blanket. They keep you warm, but they have such low stamina that you can’t run anywhere with them, such low damage that they can’t properly defend themselves and such low health that they die quite quickly after you find out that they can neither run away from nor fight anything even remotely dangerous because all of their stats are so poor. You can’t carry anything while riding them and they don’t even get a secondary attack. Just some howl that you think might actually do something but it does nothing at all. With Nature’s Roar, my wolf was still doing less damage than my bear’s normal attack. I get it, wolves were scary at first and a lot of people probably cried about it because they’re aggressive and are in many more biomes than other aggressive animals, and they can chase you down unlike the rattlesnakes, cobras and crocodiles that you can just run away from. Lowering their aggro range was a good idea, but lowering their damage and health made them completely useless as a tame. They weren’t even all that useful before. Keep their health the way it is, that’s fine. But buff their damage back to something reasonable and give them significantly more stamina. Add a bit more carry weight, at least enough so that they can carry some hide and give them 2x rates for hide and keratinoid. This will make them desirable and useful for travel and hunting across all biomes, but not too dangerous in the wild. Turning their howl into a timed pack buff that scales with the number of your own wolves in range would also be a welcome addition. Some additional notes, please fix the things like….tames falling through floors, falling off boats, flying off into the sky, getting lost in the abyss during zone transitions, floating or clipping after anchoring, falling through the back of the boat when porting between decks, wild animals spawning inside player structures and attacking all our tames. Thank you. Also please add saddle blueprints that are better than regular saddles. War saddles would be really cool too, like they weigh a ton but provide much more armor than a regular saddle. Nerf fire elementals. If you’ve read all this, thank you for your time.

They really need to redo the weights across the board on a LOT of things. Gold, water pouches maybe a bit light, water barrels empty/and full way too heavy, lighthouse very light, berries heavy, the boat weight should be increased or the plank weight shouldn't factor into the ships carry capacity... somehow a large plank on a boat which uses around 300 weight of raw mats is only 20 when finished???? The current pure metal once processed into ingots weighs less and its more efficient to ship bars if you need them vs the raw mats. would love to see a foundry where you process ore into metal. then can cast hot metal ingots/blanks for tools which slowly cool down. If you fail to use them in enough time throw it back into the furnace for a heat up. If they ever bring in inventory pulling you could pull from a furnace into a smithy to craft things with metal. They greatly increased the cost of a large stone door to make and it still weighs little but if you break one back down good luck walking off with that. Producing large stone gates at distance is even more efficient than moving the alloy bars. I don't know who their balance specialist is or if it's just up to the dev who is working on item X to assign a weight but they really should have someone who has final say across the board and also takes the time to go back through everything and balance it all back out. Ship hull , mast and deck weight should be part of the ship... not add to the weight capacity of the ship the ships capacity should be anything added that isn't part of the base ship weight itself.

Imagine if our sail from X2 to X8 would be a 3 hours of "autopilot" straight line sailing? We will die of boredom then, right? So there must be something in sea. There must be some challenge. And weather - is part of it's challenge. At least that HOW IT SHOULD BE. But before IT HAPPEN - amount of SotD's should be dramatically decrease somehow. Right now the situation is just stupid. I did a lot of traveling lately. And situation like that. For past months I met in a ocean: - 15 players ships. - 1 trade ship (i met it just once since EA started). - 5000 damned ships... (digits are not exact but I just wanna show the situation like it is). So right now we have an ocean where only challenge is SotD's and everything else - is just addition to SotD's difficulty. Fog? Beware of SotD appears from it. Counterwind? Pay attention - how you avoid SotD. Rain with crazy winds? - Pay attention - how you avoid SotD's. Tornadoes? Caution - SotD can appear from funnel. Coldwave? You might been killed by SotD's while you warming inside your boat. ETC. I would feel fine if there would be many of them around Golden Age (after all ppl do need a place where they can farm them). But in the rest of ocean. NOT. Just few per server. And then - another challenge must come out. And I say it once more. The weather itself must be part of this challenge. FOG - must require for you to slow down for some purpose. Maybe to avoid some random trash in a sea. Coral reefs. Random heavy seaweeds zones. Random icebergs in polar regions. Maybe some friendly ships. Storms must damage fully open sails. Rarely lightning strikes to masts (oh I wish there would be a st. Elmo's fire before storm!) Tornadoes... well my brother came up with Idea so there must be a just one huge scary and deadly funnel. You must be able to avoid it but if you hit it - your next destination is a closest island for general repair of your ship. Rains - must make sails wet and heavy. Snows - ice whole ship and sails. I'm sure everyone can come up with a lot of ideas about weather challenge (there must be something more in open waters as well). And yeah... the wind. Right now it just the same through whole world and it slowly rotates it's direction clockwise. So I you unlucky and start you travel with counter wind - you'll deal with it. I wish it would be more random and there would be a steady wind for some times - not rotating.

The Great Tea Race of 1866 At the height of the sailing era, four of the world’s fastest clippers raced home with the season’s precious early cargo of tea. <a href=""> By Mike Dash SMITHSONIAN.COM DECEMBER 15, 2011 Captain John Keay, master of the crack new British clipper ship Ariel, had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He had secured the first cargo of tea to come to market at the great Chinese port of Foochow (modern Fuzhou) in 1866—560 tons of first and second pickings, freighted at the high price of £7 a ton: the very finest leaves available. The cargo had been floated out to him in lighters, packed in more than 12,000 hand-made tea chests, and stowed below decks in the record time of just four days. Now Ariel was weighing anchor at 5 p.m. on the evening of May 28–the first tea clipper to sail for London that season. She was a brand new ship: “A perfect beauty,” Keay recalled, “to every nautical man who saw her; in symmetrical grace and proportion of hull, spars, sails, rigging and finish she satisfied the eye and put all in love with her without exception. Very light airs gave her headway, and I could trust her like a thing alive in all evolutions.” Ariel was indeed the fleetest vessel of her time; flying the astounding total of more than 26,000 square feet of canvas, she could reach speeds of 16 knots, far faster than contemporary steamers. But the advantage that Keay held over the other clippers crowded in the port was minimal, and Ariel was unlucky with her tugs. The paddle steamer Island Queen, hired to take the clipper in tow, lacked the power to carry her across the bar of the Min River against a falling tide. Stranded for the night, Keay and his crack crew were forced to lie at anchor and watch as their rivals completed their own hurried loading and started in pursuit. That evening the rival Fiery Cross came down the river towed by a more powerful tug, edged her way into clear water, and set a course east across the China Sea. Keay was still negotiating the bar next morning when two other clippers, Serica and Taeping, appeared beside him. The Tea Race of 1866—the most exciting in the history of the China trade—was on. Tea was one of the very few commodities carried at speed in the heyday of sail. Other cargoes were either too bulky or insufficiently valuable to make it worth risking a whole ship and crew in racing through the typhoons and the shoals of the South China Sea with all sails set, just to be able to dock in the Port of London a few hours or days ahead of the pack. But in the middle of the 19th century, demand for fresh tea was such that the first vessel home from Fuzhou or Shanghai could command a premium of at least 10 percent for her wares, and a clipper ship that cost perhaps £12,000 or £15,000 to build might bring home a cargo worth almost £3,000 on her first voyage. The tea trade dated to the mid-16th century, when the Portuguese established a base at Macao, just west of Hong Kong. But the remoteness of China, and its emperors’ hostility toward Western merchants desperate to trade in silks and spices, meant that the beverage remained almost unknown in Britain until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. When the English East India Company, which had secured a royal monopoly on the trade between England and China, wished to thank the monarch by making him a present of tea, its agents had to scour London to find even two pounds of leaves. For the next century and three quarters, the monopoly gave the Company little incentive to hurry its cargoes home. But it ended in 1834, and the subsequent repeal of the ancient Navigation Acts—which banned the import into Britain of goods not carried in a British ship—spurred the construction of far faster and more capable merchantmen. Another incentive was the growing competition from the United States, whose yards were turning out sailing ships as good as or better than the best that could be built in Britain; still another was the burgeoning trade in opium, grown in India and sold in Canton—one of the few cargoes carried in Western vessels for which there was real demand in China. Since the companies now trading with China were reluctant to drain their treasuries of silver to purchase tea, the opium trade was much encouraged, even though the Qing emperor had declared it illegal in his dominions. Sleek sea greyhounds of the clipper class proved admirably suited to the task of running British drugs up the China coast. Some hundreds of clipper ships were built between 1845 and 1875, mostly in the U.S. and Scotland, and tested against each other in what became highly publicized “tea races” as they vied to be first home with the new season’s cargo. Today, the clippers are regarded as the apogee of ship design during the sailing era. They were distinguished, first, by the rakish bows that gave them their name, which swept forward at an angle of up to 50 degrees and lent the vessels a lean and eager look, and, second, by their narrow beam and lofty sail plans. Below the waterline they boasted radical new lines, with knife-edge stems, narrow foreparts, a long flat run aft to the rudder, and a sharp “rise of floor”— the slope at which the hull angles outward from the central keel to the ship’s sides. The merchant shipbuilders of the time were not yet really engineers; naval architecture remained the province of navies, and civilian designs were based on experience, instinct and rule of thumb. Some clipper builders may have known of the engineer John Scott Russell and his wave-line theory, the first modern mathematical statement of the relationship between hull design and speed, but no two ships built in any yard were truly alike, and often only time could tell which would prove good in the water and which would disappoint. When William Hall, the Aberdonian master shipbuilder who designed the prototype clipper Scottish Maid in 1839, proposed to test his new idea for a sharper bow by sailing a model in a tank, his decision raised eyebrows in the city’s other yards. But Hall’s “Aberdeen bow” added speed without limiting cargo capacity. A ship built along those lines encountered far less resistance to her passage through heavy seas. Instead of progressing in a series of checks and shocks as she encountered wave after wave, eventually burying her stem and forcing her crew to reduce sail for fear of being swamped, a clipper could cut through the swells. The new design soon inspired imitations. The earliest true clipper hulls, however, appear to have evolved independently in the United States and Scotland at about this time. An American merchantman, the Rainbow of 1845, is sometimes described as the first of the clipper breed, and her immediate successor, the Oriental, created a sensation by making the passage from New York to Hong Kong in only 81 days in 1850—a time unmatched for the day. The Oriental was immediately offered a premium of 25 percent above the prevailing freight rates to accept a charter for London. Loaded with almost 1,650 tonnes of tea, she left Whampoa, the tea port north of Hong Kong, on August 27, 1850, and sailed south against the monsoons, reaching the West India Dock in London on December 4–just 99 days later. The older British opium clipper Astarte, which sailed from Whampoa a day later, took a month longer in passage. It took British shipbuilders several years to match the Oriental, but after that they made more innovations to produce ships of the caliber of Ariel and her consorts in the Tea Race of 1866. The flourishing of the China trade crowned centuries of trial and error with masts and sails, and the power that a clipper could draw from a following wind with all sails set was far greater than anything that could be supplied from contemporary steam engines. A typical clipper ship of the late 1860s had three masts, each of which would be fitted (looking from the bottom up) with a lower course sail, double topsails, single or double topgallants, a royal and a skysail. Some masters, anxious to cram on every stitch of canvas, might also unfurl small sails known as moonrakers at the very tip of each mast, and add supplementary staysails and studding sails, as well as fancy racing canvas such as water sails close down along the waterline. A crack ship such as Ariel could easily set thirty or more sails in the most favorable conditions, and any clipper taking part in the tea race might average 11 or 12 knots in reasonable conditions, at a time when the steam fleet made eight or nine knots and would need to coal four or five times on a passage between Britain and China. A clipper designer would also devote much attention to smoothing his ship’s “run,” her bottom at the after end. This practice lessened friction and added speed—but it also had its dangers. Too clean a run could result in an excessively fine form above the waterline and a consequent lack of buoyancy which often led to a ship being pooped—that is, swamped by a following wave. Ariel was one of a number of ships that suffered from this tendency, and when she vanished without trace while on passage in 1872 it was generally assumed that a following sea had struck from behind and washed her helmsman overboard. With no hand on the wheel, the clipper would have swung broadside to the following wave and been struck with such ferocity she would have sunk almost instantly. Nautical men also acknowledged that the finest clipper would be nothing without a captain prepared to drive her hard for every moment of a voyage. The best masters pretty much lived on deck for the three-and-a-half month passage, and the ceaseless efforts made by Dick Robinson of the Fiery Cross were said to be worth an extra half-knot in speed to any ship he captained. Even conservatively built ships were generally loaded so they were trimmed down at the stern, as it was considered that the extra weight helped their sailing qualities. Once all the tea had been stowed away, the crew would still have to work hard to redistribute their cargo so as to ensure the optimum speed; some captains took matters further still. Ariel was noted for keeping on deck an enormous box, twelve feet long, packed with the heaviest metal obtainable. Once at sea, Captain Keay would watch as his men labored to drag the box to and fro until he was satisfied that its position would add still another edge to his performance. As he watched the Fiery Cross pull away in that evening in May 1866, Keay must have realized he would have to call on all of his ship’s fine qualities to win that season’s tea race. His rival, built six years earlier, had proved herself by far the fastest and most successful clipper of the early 1860s, while his own ship was comparatively untried. Although slightly smaller than Ariel, the ship now receding into the dusk of the China Sea boasted elegant lines that made her a good sailer to windward, and her master, Robinson, had fitted her with all manner of gear, including roller-reefing equipment to improve the efficiency of the sails. More important, Robinson was a highly experienced racer who had brought Fiery Cross home to London first in the tea races of 1861, 1862, 1863 and 1865, being beaten in 1864 only by the brand-new Serica. He had been rendered so anxious by the Ariel‘s early departure he had departed the moment his cargo was complete, without his papers and without signing the official bills of lading—thus gaining 12 hours on the Taeping and the Serica and reducing the latter’s master, Captain George Innes, to an apoplectic fury. The four contenders sailed east to round the northern coast of Formosa (now Taiwan), then shaped a course to the south. Occasionally they came close enough for the crew of one ship to see the men of another over the water, setting more sails or trimming their vessel to coax an extra quarter-knot from her, but mostly the rival clippers sailed independently. Fiery Cross made good use of the 14-hour lead she had gained over Ariel at the bar of the Min River, and reached Anjer, at the exit to the China Sea, only 20 days out from Fuzhou. Taeping and Ariel had fallen two days behind, and Serica did not pass the town for another day after that. But the weather in the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope evened matters out somewhat; all four ships made fine time, Ariel logging a single day’s run of 317 miles and Fiery Cross one of 328. By the time the island of St. Helena came over the horizon, Captain Donald MacKinnon’s Taeping held a slender lead of 24 hours over Fiery Cross, with Ariel and Serica one day further behind. Three of the four rivals were composite ships, built of wood over an iron frame, but Serica was lighter, built of wood only, and had finer lines than her half-sister Taeping. Her captain, Innes, was a notorious taskmaster with a volcanic temper, and in the lighter winds around the Equator he caught up with MacKinnon. Ariel was picking up speed too, and all four vessels passed Flores, in the Azores, together on August 29. The Great Tea Race of 1866 At the height of the sailing era, four of the world’s fastest clippers raced home with the season’s precious early cargo of tea Ariel and Taeping at sea during the great Tea Race of 1866. Oil painting by Jack Spurling, 1926 Ariel and Taeping at sea during the great Tea Race of 1866. Oil painting by Jack Spurling, 1926 (Wikicommons) By Mike Dash SMITHSONIAN.COM DECEMBER 15, 2011 Captain John Keay, master of the crack new British clipper ship Ariel, had good reason to feel pleased with himself. He had secured the first cargo of tea to come to market at the great Chinese port of Foochow (modern Fuzhou) in 1866—560 tons of first and second pickings, freighted at the high price of £7 a ton: the very finest leaves available. The cargo had been floated out to him in lighters, packed in more than 12,000 hand-made tea chests, and stowed below decks in the record time of just four days. Now Ariel was weighing anchor at 5 p.m. on the evening of May 28–the first tea clipper to sail for London that season. She was a brand new ship: “A perfect beauty,” Keay recalled, “to every nautical man who saw her; in symmetrical grace and proportion of hull, spars, sails, rigging and finish she satisfied the eye and put all in love with her without exception. Very light airs gave her headway, and I could trust her like a thing alive in all evolutions.” Ariel was indeed the fleetest vessel of her time; flying the astounding total of more than 26,000 square feet of canvas, she could reach speeds of 16 knots, far faster than contemporary steamers. But the advantage that Keay held over the other clippers crowded in the port was minimal, and Ariel was unlucky with her tugs. The paddle steamer Island Queen, hired to take the clipper in tow, lacked the power to carry her across the bar of the Min River against a falling tide. Stranded for the night, Keay and his crack crew were forced to lie at anchor and watch as their rivals completed their own hurried loading and started in pursuit. That evening the rival Fiery Cross came down the river towed by a more powerful tug, edged her way into clear water, and set a course east across the China Sea. Keay was still negotiating the bar next morning when two other clippers, Serica and Taeping, appeared beside him. The Tea Race of 1866—the most exciting in the history of the China trade—was on. The Chinese port of Fuzhou, starting point for the great Tea Races, in about 1860. Tea was one of the very few commodities carried at speed in the heyday of sail. Other cargoes were either too bulky or insufficiently valuable to make it worth risking a whole ship and crew in racing through the typhoons and the shoals of the South China Sea with all sails set, just to be able to dock in the Port of London a few hours or days ahead of the pack. But in the middle of the 19th century, demand for fresh tea was such that the first vessel home from Fuzhou or Shanghai could command a premium of at least 10 percent for her wares, and a clipper ship that cost perhaps £12,000 or £15,000 to build might bring home a cargo worth almost £3,000 on her first voyage. Charles II (1660-1685) granted the monopoly that helped get English trade with China underway. The tea trade dated to the mid-16th century, when the Portuguese established a base at Macao, just west of Hong Kong. But the remoteness of China, and its emperors’ hostility toward Western merchants desperate to trade in silks and spices, meant that the beverage remained almost unknown in Britain until the restoration of Charles II in 1660. When the English East India Company, which had secured a royal monopoly on the trade between England and China, wished to thank the monarch by making him a present of tea, its agents had to scour London to find even two pounds of leaves. For the next century and three quarters, the monopoly gave the Company little incentive to hurry its cargoes home. But it ended in 1834, and the subsequent repeal of the ancient Navigation Acts—which banned the import into Britain of goods not carried in a British ship—spurred the construction of far faster and more capable merchantmen. Another incentive was the growing competition from the United States, whose yards were turning out sailing ships as good as or better than the best that could be built in Britain; still another was the burgeoning trade in opium, grown in India and sold in Canton—one of the few cargoes carried in Western vessels for which there was real demand in China. Since the companies now trading with China were reluctant to drain their treasuries of silver to purchase tea, the opium trade was much encouraged, even though the Qing emperor had declared it illegal in his dominions. Sleek sea greyhounds of the clipper class proved admirably suited to the task of running British drugs up the China coast. The 1850s American clipper Lightning, sailing out of San Francisco, was more than capable of matching the finest British vessels of the day for speed. Image: Wikicommons. Some hundreds of clipper ships were built between 1845 and 1875, mostly in the U.S. and Scotland, and tested against each other in what became highly publicized “tea races” as they vied to be first home with the new season’s cargo. Today, the clippers are regarded as the apogee of ship design during the sailing era. They were distinguished, first, by the rakish bows that gave them their name, which swept forward at an angle of up to 50 degrees and lent the vessels a lean and eager look, and, second, by their narrow beam and lofty sail plans. Below the waterline they boasted radical new lines, with knife-edge stems, narrow foreparts, a long flat run aft to the rudder, and a sharp “rise of floor”— the slope at which the hull angles outward from the central keel to the ship’s sides. Donald MacKinnon, skipper of the Taeping, and one of the finest masters of the clipper era. The merchant shipbuilders of the time were not yet really engineers; naval architecture remained the province of navies, and civilian designs were based on experience, instinct and rule of thumb. Some clipper builders may have known of the engineer John Scott Russell and his wave-line theory, the first modern mathematical statement of the relationship between hull design and speed, but no two ships built in any yard were truly alike, and often only time could tell which would prove good in the water and which would disappoint. When William Hall, the Aberdonian master shipbuilder who designed the prototype clipper Scottish Maid in 1839, proposed to test his new idea for a sharper bow by sailing a model in a tank, his decision raised eyebrows in the city’s other yards. But Hall’s “Aberdeen bow” added speed without limiting cargo capacity. A ship built along those lines encountered far less resistance to her passage through heavy seas. Instead of progressing in a series of checks and shocks as she encountered wave after wave, eventually burying her stem and forcing her crew to reduce sail for fear of being swamped, a clipper could cut through the swells. The new design soon inspired imitations. The earliest true clipper hulls, however, appear to have evolved independently in the United States and Scotland at about this time. An American merchantman, the Rainbow of 1845, is sometimes described as the first of the clipper breed, and her immediate successor, the Oriental, created a sensation by making the passage from New York to Hong Kong in only 81 days in 1850—a time unmatched for the day. The Oriental was immediately offered a premium of 25 percent above the prevailing freight rates to accept a charter for London. Loaded with almost 1,650 tonnes of tea, she left Whampoa, the tea port north of Hong Kong, on August 27, 1850, and sailed south against the monsoons, reaching the West India Dock in London on December 4–just 99 days later. The older British opium clipper Astarte, which sailed from Whampoa a day later, took a month longer in passage. It took British shipbuilders several years to match the Oriental, but after that they made more innovations to produce ships of the caliber of Ariel and her consorts in the Tea Race of 1866. Loading tea at the Chinese port of Canton. Image: Wikicommons. The flourishing of the China trade crowned centuries of trial and error with masts and sails, and the power that a clipper could draw from a following wind with all sails set was far greater than anything that could be supplied from contemporary steam engines. A typical clipper ship of the late 1860s had three masts, each of which would be fitted (looking from the bottom up) with a lower course sail, double topsails, single or double topgallants, a royal and a skysail. Some masters, anxious to cram on every stitch of canvas, might also unfurl small sails known as moonrakers at the very tip of each mast, and add supplementary staysails and studding sails, as well as fancy racing canvas such as water sails close down along the waterline. A crack ship such as Ariel could easily set thirty or more sails in the most favorable conditions, and any clipper taking part in the tea race might average 11 or 12 knots in reasonable conditions, at a time when the steam fleet made eight or nine knots and would need to coal four or five times on a passage between Britain and China. A clipper under full sail. A clipper designer would also devote much attention to smoothing his ship’s “run,” her bottom at the after end. This practice lessened friction and added speed—but it also had its dangers. Too clean a run could result in an excessively fine form above the waterline and a consequent lack of buoyancy which often led to a ship being pooped—that is, swamped by a following wave. Ariel was one of a number of ships that suffered from this tendency, and when she vanished without trace while on passage in 1872 it was generally assumed that a following sea had struck from behind and washed her helmsman overboard. With no hand on the wheel, the clipper would have swung broadside to the following wave and been struck with such ferocity she would have sunk almost instantly. Nautical men also acknowledged that the finest clipper would be nothing without a captain prepared to drive her hard for every moment of a voyage. The best masters pretty much lived on deck for the three-and-a-half month passage, and the ceaseless efforts made by Dick Robinson of the Fiery Cross were said to be worth an extra half-knot in speed to any ship he captained. Even conservatively built ships were generally loaded so they were trimmed down at the stern, as it was considered that the extra weight helped their sailing qualities. Once all the tea had been stowed away, the crew would still have to work hard to redistribute their cargo so as to ensure the optimum speed; some captains took matters further still. Ariel was noted for keeping on deck an enormous box, twelve feet long, packed with the heaviest metal obtainable. Once at sea, Captain Keay would watch as his men labored to drag the box to and fro until he was satisfied that its position would add still another edge to his performance. As he watched the Fiery Cross pull away in that evening in May 1866, Keay must have realized he would have to call on all of his ship’s fine qualities to win that season’s tea race. His rival, built six years earlier, had proved herself by far the fastest and most successful clipper of the early 1860s, while his own ship was comparatively untried. Although slightly smaller than Ariel, the ship now receding into the dusk of the China Sea boasted elegant lines that made her a good sailer to windward, and her master, Robinson, had fitted her with all manner of gear, including roller-reefing equipment to improve the efficiency of the sails. More important, Robinson was a highly experienced racer who had brought Fiery Cross home to London first in the tea races of 1861, 1862, 1863 and 1865, being beaten in 1864 only by the brand-new Serica. He had been rendered so anxious by the Ariel‘s early departure he had departed the moment his cargo was complete, without his papers and without signing the official bills of lading—thus gaining 12 hours on the Taeping and the Serica and reducing the latter’s master, Captain George Innes, to an apoplectic fury. Anjer in Java, one of the waystations on the clipper route–though the fast ships sailed non-stop from China home to London, San Francisco or New York. The four contenders sailed east to round the northern coast of Formosa (now Taiwan), then shaped a course to the south. Occasionally they came close enough for the crew of one ship to see the men of another over the water, setting more sails or trimming their vessel to coax an extra quarter-knot from her, but mostly the rival clippers sailed independently. Fiery Cross made good use of the 14-hour lead she had gained over Ariel at the bar of the Min River, and reached Anjer, at the exit to the China Sea, only 20 days out from Fuzhou. Taeping and Ariel had fallen two days behind, and Serica did not pass the town for another day after that. But the weather in the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope evened matters out somewhat; all four ships made fine time, Ariel logging a single day’s run of 317 miles and Fiery Cross one of 328. By the time the island of St. Helena came over the horizon, Captain Donald MacKinnon’s Taeping held a slender lead of 24 hours over Fiery Cross, with Ariel and Serica one day further behind. Three of the four rivals were composite ships, built of wood over an iron frame, but Serica was lighter, built of wood only, and had finer lines than her half-sister Taeping. Her captain, Innes, was a notorious taskmaster with a volcanic temper, and in the lighter winds around the Equator he caught up with MacKinnon. Ariel was picking up speed too, and all four vessels passed Flores, in the Azores, together on August 29. Taeping (left) and Ariel race neck-and-neck up the English Channel, three months out of China. The wind remained fair, blowing from the southeast, as the racers headed for the English Channel. Gradually they strung out into a line, luck or determination slightly favoring Ariel and Taeping over Fiery Cross and Serica. Still together after 97 days at sea, the two leaders ran up the Channel in sight of each other, both logging 14 knots for most of the day as they made for Deal and the Tea Race’s unofficial finish. At eight on the morning of September 6, Ariel was spotted signaling her number by watchers on the shore, and not ten minutes later Taeping hove into view to claim second place. Serica was less than two hours behind, with Fiery Cross an unlucky and (to Robinson) humiliating 36 hours further back. Even then, the racers seem to have been reluctant to abandon their chase. With Keay unable to afford the latest tug, Taeping nipped into the London docks 25 minutes ahead of Ariel. He and MacKinnon agreed to split the premium of 10 shillings per ton awarded to the first ship home each season. The Tea Race of 1866 caused an enormous stir in the sporting and nautical circles of Britain. Ariel and Taeping had left Fuzhou together and arrived home on the other side of the globe still together, Ariel‘s winning time being seven thousandths of one percent faster than her rival’s. The Tea Race was never so close again in its 30-year history. Sources Leeds Mercury 13 June 1866; Glasgow Herald 7+12 September 1866; George Campbell. China Tea Clippers. London: Adlard Coles, 1974; Howard Chapelle. The Search for Speed Under Sail. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1968; Arthur H. Clark. The Clipper Ship Era. An Epitome of Famous American and British Clipper Ships, Their Owners, Builders, Commanders and Crews 1843-1869. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1911; Basil Lubbock. The China Clippers. Glasgow: James Brown, 1919. See it at the Smithsonian for your self! https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-great-tea-race-of-1866-8209465/

one of the more frustrating things if you choose an island to settle down... if you can not find metal nodes or if they are on top of the mountain... if the tames you want "early bear" or "late elephant" are xx grids away... most of the time i just try to find an island where the most heavy resources are easy to get... oil or similiar light stuff can be shipped... can you still put tames in freeport with your gold? the sad thing is you could still kill the tames in a freeport...

I also have a schooner. Initially I had all side medium cannons, 1 large front and 3 large back but I noticed that rear cannons aiming, for me sailing solo is a little bit more difficult than front and AI does not do a good job. I had side skirts from half stairs so most of the damage during side by side battle is concentrated on these. I since redesigned this to roll only 3 front cannons in addition to side cannons and removed any unneeded weight. Problem with schooner and large cannons is that you have to come back to port every 2-3 battles either because you need to stock on heavy cannonballs or on repair resources. Medium cannons give you more room to defend. Also side cannons help you when fighting with more than one SOTD and are much more forgiving. The biggest problem with front large for me now is often SOTD will ram you when you try to shoot it and that damage to planks is heavy. I'm going to build another schooner with BP planks and cannons and the design will be armored on front and side. Also I'll roll with large handling sail instead of speed sail because speed is not that important during battle and with that design you'll always be slower due to resources and cannonballs needed. I did usually fight 3-4 SOTDs before returning to land and could take 2 sub lvl 9 or one up to lvl 20 withouth

The game is still in EA, time to fix this. Suggestions: - Make Alpha beasts some group quest/challenge beast to overcome, these Alpha beasts do not attack unless aggroed first. - Tame health, armor, and resistance are tuned down so that any player with a rifle has a solid chance to one-shot them. While we are at it, - Tames should provide limited support for farming, the elephant could help farm wood, a bear can help farm honey and pigs can find truffles, lions can hunt game. I really see no tame being able to help farm stone or metals faster, it should be limited support. This makes taming useful, with farming some materials, but not crucial or important. Elephants/RHINO and other heavy tames should be too heavy to transport by ship/boat and most animals need animal pens to transport them. Let's divert well away from animals as anything more important, than limited support roles. The only animals that pulls a cart are oxes / horses and rideable animals could be Horses, Camels and maybe Elephants, certainly not wolves or lions....

Concerning the Survivalism skill "Hand Harvesting Yield" enhances my returns from foraging with my bare hands as the skill specifically states but does this also increase harvesting rates while using hand-held tools? Concerning the Archery skill: "Strong Arm" is this skill working correctly? I have tried both with 0 points invested and with the maximum points into the highest tier and my archery shots still seem to produce the same damage results. Does anyone know if this skill is working or not? If it is, why isn't it enhancing my bow shots? Concerning the Medicine skill tree, where do we find the ingredients to craft a Medkit? I have not been successful in using this particular tree at all. There is no information about this skill tree at all and the ingredients required to craft a medkit seem to remain a mystery to everyone that I have spoken with. Concerning the Beastmastery skill: "Stealth" is this skill working correctly? I have tried both with 0 points invested and with the maximum points into the highest tier and predators seem to agro me exactly the same (From the same line of sight distance). Does anyone know if this skill is working or not? If it is, then what is the point if predators agro you from the same distance? Concerning the Music and Dance tree. The skill descriptions and lack of information about this entire skill line make this tree a complete mystery. I am not sure what the added benefits are. I see things such as: "Effective Radius", "Error Tolerance", and "Buff Duration" but there are no descriptions about what kinds of buffs there are available that these skills will modify. Is there a list available somewhere to show us what all the possible buffs, their effects, and their intended usages are? I am assuming that this skill tree is intended to provide magical buffs similar to traditional bards from many other MMO's. (Suggestion for Grapeshot) Concerning shields, could you consider adding a skill for reducing the shield's weight? The shields are extremely too heavy. You have to consider that your gear, weapons, and armor will increase your total weight, rendering shields too heavy to be viable. (Suggestion for Grapeshot) Concerning Brass knuckles, since hand to hand combat uses both fists in rapid succession, the durability drops extremely too fast during just one brawl. Additionally, their damage output is not really on par with the other weapon types to even be considered as a viable combat option. Could you consider increasing the brass knuckle's durability and increasing their damage some more? (Suggestion for Grapeshot) There does not seem to be any skill to increase character movement speed. Do you have plans or will you consider implementing a skill to increase character movement speed by chance? Maybe it could fall under the Survivalism tree or Music and Dance tree as a Bard-Song-Effect?

The "Armor Articulation" skill does not actually increase your character movement speed, it just negates part of the movement penalty that is experienced while donning armor. It may be realistic for shields to be heavy but in this kind of game we need to be able to grind materials and combat encounters may arise unexpectantly, so the heavy shields will become useless. The current meta never has anyone using shields as a result. This makes the entire skill-line featuring shields wasted and that is truly sad. So, I suggest a happy balance of some sort.

Some decent questions and suggestions here. As far as shields go though, they should be heavy and unwieldy. I found a basic blueprint for a wooden shield that is pretty close to as good as a metal one, with much less weight. I was disappointed when the weight for plate was fixed and made heavy, but I like the realism that it brought. I really have to consider what armor I am carrying when adventuring instead of just overloading myself with everything. I like the idea of a movement buff. We kind of get that if you wear plate and take the articulation skills.

Ok now i set up an idea for the sinking and repair mechanic of ships that could turn out pretty cool Basic assumptions: (you can skip this and go directly to the suggestion below if not interested in the details) The game is too easy both building a ship and especially sinking a ship but you cant have one without the other, so to bring the building and survival part more to the initial release version we need ships to be harder to sink. Not just by misuse of mechanics as weight but also in direct combat. While it is realistic that a tiny hole will sink a ship if no one repairs it because offline etc. it does kill any gameplay big time. It should be comparably difficult to building a ship to sink said ship. For example in real battles even after hundreds of cannon balls ships wrecks often keep floating thou everything above the waterline was destroyed. Since you need to put a lot on ships like many planks and stuff but you only need to damage or destroy one plank there is no gameplay balance and no way to save ships by running from the enemy until they give up from wasting too much time for no reason. Also you can store several copies of your ship inside the ship by having hundreds of spare planks to instant repair during combat which often results in enemy ships simply not able to carry enough cannon balls to counter it in active battle, its also a mechanic that the following suggestion will replace with a more rewarding system. Suggestion: (All ideas need to be applied together to work correctly, given numbers are not set in stone and need to be tested and balanced) Planks Planks need to take more damage they are destroyed far too easy by any means. Planks should be able to take a lot more shots including all sources be it from player weapons or SoD. Considering a wooden wall taking 80 wood having 8.000 hp it wouldnt be wrong if a large plank taking 1500 wood would have 150.000 hp. So atleast bit more hp on planks would make a lot of sense. Ship Health / Resistance The ship health will no longer resemble the amount of water the ship has taken in but the ships condition (The sum of all planks HP). The ships condition grants a resistance buff to planks and reduces when damage to planks is taken. Resistance Buff / Sturdiness Planks have a damage resistance with the following formula: Ship HP% - Plank HP% + Sturdiness Bonus - Example: Ships Condition at 100%, Plank at 100%, Sturdiness 0% = Resistance 0% - Example: Ships Condition at 90%, Plank at 10%, Sturdiness 0% = Resistance 80% - Example: Ships Condition at 10%, Plank at 100%, Sturdiness 10% = Resistance -80% - Example: Ships Condition at 80%, Plank at 40%, Sturdiness 10% = Resistance 50% Ship Weight / Water Weight If a ship takes in water the water will be added to the weight. Also the weight will have more influence how fast a ship can turn, accelerate and move. Draught / Load Draft The weight of the ship no matter if it is from resources, cannons or water will make the ship go deeper and raise the water line. Obviously the ship will sink when the waterline raises above the bulwark. Water Leaks The ship can only take in water from leaks below the water line. If a plank is partially below the water line the inflow of water will be slower. Bulkhead You should be able to build bulkheads that divide the ship into sections and prevent water inflow from the front section to reach the mid or aft sections. Also a fully closed deck will prevent water from reaching the upper deck. To have water inflow on the mid deck the waterline need to be high enough to reach said deck and leaks need to be present on the planks. Repairing Planks Planks can no longer be destroyed. If a plank reaches 0 HP it will be turned into a burst plank. A burst plank will take 3 successful hits with the repair hammer to start repairing again and will take a reasonable amount of resources with every try. Only fully repaired planks can be replaced with a new plank or demolished. Burst planks will make a damaged ship look a lot better and act like a missing plank in case of shots going through them and water leaking in but dont allow a new plank to be placed for easy repair. Visible Damage If bulkheads and decks stopping water inflow planks can have more conditions to make combat look better and easily tell the their condition: <50% light visible damage and tiny water leak <25% visible damage and small water leak <10% heavy visible damage and medium water leak 0% visible burst plank with large water leak Ship Sails Besides that you should be able to add different sails to the same mast, like a handling sail and a speed sail on one mast. Once a mast gets destroyed it gets replaced with a broken mast that has like a 10 minute cooldown before it can be repaired. Same if a sail gets completely ripped it will have a 5 minute cooldown before it can be repaired again to allow boarding actions. The same applies as to planks and it takes 3 successful repair hammer hits to start repairing once the cooldown is over and you cannot demolish or replace a sail/mast until it is fully repaired. Wind Sails do take damage from strong winds, starting at 50% of the max wind strength they will have a tiny wear effect and at 100% it will be quit noticeable. Cyclones of course deal a lot damage to sails but less to planks so you can lower sails if you cannot avoid them. Cannon Balls Since battles last longer now they should be a bit cheaper and reasonably lighter to carry enough. Avoiding abuse of the weight mechanic On anchored ships the weight that a player can add to a ship is limited to two times his carry weight. Should the ship lift the anchor the full weight is applied. On PVE you can remove sleeping players if you own the ship, they will be moved to the end of the emergency ladder if selecting to remove some overweight sleeper that tries to stall your ship indefinitely. The result: Battles now take much longer, removing instant destruction of planks as well as instant repairing of planks. You can concentrate more on the fighting than the repairing of ships now. At the same time repairing is limited by needing resources that add to the ship weight and dont allow hundreds of premade planks to be used. Planks will not break so easily and the overall ship condition influences how sturdy the planks are. Also the burst planks will make damaged ships look a lot better and the inflow of water not feel so awkward. That a ship cannot take in water above the waterline, means that it not always has to sink, it can literally be shot to pieces and more often plundered or taken over than just sunk, unless of course the last defenders decide to let it sink Ships having a weight that influences the water line makes the inflow of water and the outfitting of the ship more challenging and manageable at the same time. A heavily loaded ship is now easier to sink than a lightweight ship that can take in more water and has a lower water line. Also heavily loaded or outfittet ships will be slower from having more draught. A lightweight trading ship can now more easily run from heavy battleships or legion of the damned, sinking a fleeing foe that wants to avoid battle is now a task rather than a one shot click. Also a trader might want to throw their wares into the sea to flee some bloodthirsty pirate and stuff like this to give more option beside sinking and loosing ships.

I actually was suggesting something similar in another thread. I was thinking components you can buy like the ships figureheads. A heavy anchor and a deep sea anchor (you can only have one equipped). The heavy anchor could only be equipped on schooners and up and would allow you to anchor in the medium blue water around islands as well as shallow water. The deep sea anchor could only be equipped on galleons, would allow you to anchor anywhere but would not protect against SotD. This allows the medium/large ships to anchor further out from shore while still needing to be close to an island while the largest ship class have the option of that or being able to anchor anywhere at the risk of bring vulnerable to attack if you leave them there.

The more I have to be the fleet supply for my company, the more I REALLY wish my company mates could just load up a pair of heavy dinghy's (possibly using Bears or other heavy mover mounts), I retract them onto the ship, get them where they're going, and then drop them for unloading. 15 trips up and down off the ship to load and unload is a giant PITA.

I agree that extreme weather should be less common and they should have lots of types of weather between them. Drizzle, light rain, heavy rain, torrential rain, Thunderstorm, Severe Thunderstorm (Waterspouts), Tropical depression, Tropical Storm, Hurricane. Flurries, snow, blizzard. Light fog, fog, heavy fog, low fog, high fog. Dust Storm, lightning storm (no rain). The heat wave and cold blast happen way to often, they also use a ridiculous amount of extra food especially during rain and cold blasts and water during heat blasts. If I am wearing fur armor which is made from animal fur... which is good and keeping water from penetrating and trapping heat in. How the hell am I 100% wet and freezing to death just walking around in the rain. Also rain falls through some overhanging rocks where it shouldn't on some islands. I have tried using tons of fortitude and also wearing the appropriate weather event related armor and also using the temp bonus in armor and I am STILL affected by the extreme weather. Also would like to see seasons at some point every X in game days. This could allow southern and northern climates to have a summer, spring, winter, fall with seasonal changes in the temperatures and the equatorial islands to maintain a year round tropical season. Could allow growing of warmer foods etc in the extreme climates in the summers. Also agree the weather extremes temperature values need to be gone over. 145C or -125C on the island is maybe a little bit much.

So.. I've been following this situation and have kept silent about my hate for this stone structure change.. But at this point it is painfully clear that the devs hate making money and having repeat customers.. Pretty sure alot of people picked this game up due to their love hate they had with ark.. I myself love/hate that game and their devs... Why would I hate the devs and their game yet still fork over the money it takes to give them another chance at not being complete asshats... Well because like I stated I did love ark as much as I hated it... Great game brought down by shitty yet great devs who don't care about their customers at all.. Only a complete idiot with their heads so far up their asses would see this board and the devastation their update has had on their player base.. And then ignore it!!!! Seriously wtf is wrong with this picture? And then to top it off instead of doing what people were asking they drop the big fuck you hammer down and just drop the cost slightly of what people were upset about.. Arrogance much devs? Yeah.. That's gonna make them happy and not quit giving us money.......... Now I'm no lawyer or even very savy with law.. But I'm pretty sure class action lawsuits have been filed against and won over other devs for doing far less of a shit job that grapeshot aka wildcard has done with how it handles their customers and their games.. Game isn't living up to the promise of what the devs claimed? That my friends is called false advertisement which last time i checked is something that can get you sued.. Don't believe me? Check your history on devs who have had class actions brought up against them for selling such shit games and then doing nothing to make it right with the paying customers..That's right once someone pays they are your customer and as such most smart business actually value those people willing to support their product by shelling out money for it..I would say at this point they probably will get sued sooner or later for being such asshats who obviously think they know everything and listen to nothing their customers say unless it somehow fucks everyone over by making an already grind heavy challenging game more grind heavy... At this point i wonder if we could sue them for wasting our time seeing as time is the most valuable thing anyone has to offer simply because it is something you can never get back... And then lets not forget our money.. But in all this is our own faults for thinking even with a rebranding of devs from wildcard to grapeshot they had actually learned something from all that bs that was ark updates.. But they didn't, still guilty of thinking they know everything still guilty of not listening to their paying customers and still guilty of thinking if they keep breaking everything and pissing off their customers that they'll somehow still be able to publish and make games even though they keep burning the fucking majority of their players too the point they quit.. How long do you think people will keep supporting you devs with your very very poor track record with your customers... Here's my prediction for this company. They'll fade away like sooooooo many before them and the sad thing is they aren't nearly as great as some of those companies were.. Not saying they are the worst and ark was a good game for the most part and so is atlas.. It's simple economicsthough really you want people to pay you money for your product and continue to do so for future products? Yes? Who wouldn't?! Well the secret to that is to sell them what they actually want not what you want..That's called customer satisfaction which you guys are blind if you can't see how you lack satisfied customers at this point......

Hey, I know a lot of people who would like to play on the PVP server but without being in a large company the potential for losing everything constantly pushes us to the PVE servers. I think it would be a great idea to have a mixed server so you get the best of both worlds. My idea is to have it so Lawless servers are just that Lawless - PVP heavy and considering the islands are heavy in resources they would be worth fighting over. the other aspect is allowing Company war to enable alliance PVP between them. This way if a company steals your land or you want theirs you can declare war and fight for it. there is obviously some speculations like the other company has a specific timeframe to accept/refuse war or it's automatic if they dispute their claims for a set timeframe. this allows the Bounty system to be used as well.

My current issue with the game is the meta building in this game. It might appeal to some people but I love old sailing ships, love every other aspect of the game as it is except for the meta building of ships. Here's some suggestions. Ship Weight Balancing and Center of Gravity Introduce weight balancing to ships. Heavy items need to be placed low and towards the center as close to the ship's center of gravity as possible. This will stop building behemoths and canons hanging off the sides of ships up high. Cause the further a heavier item is away from the ship's center of gravity the more it'll cause a ship to list during turns and increase the potential for capsizing. It'll also stop canon stacking on one side of the ship also cause canons will need to be balanced evenly for weight distribution. Increase Wooden Structure Weight This'll make it harder to build armoured tortoises from placing too making wooden structures on the ships. Increased Canon Placement Box This'll stop canon stacking next to each other to within a certain distance so you need to spread your canons out across the deck. Increased Damage to Exposed Canon and Players from Canon Fire It'll stop top loading canons and stacking them right next to each other, and make people utilize the gun ports more. Currently, there is no reason to use gun ports. Or with meta building we don't use gun ports any more. Skeleton Hull Construction Introduce different ship sections during skeleton hull construction. For, mid and aft that can be placed with a combination of hull types. Eg, heavy hulls can take more damage but are heavier and slow the ship down versus lighter hulls that might allow traversing over shallower waters, increased speed but can take less punishment. So you can really specialise ships based on hulls and plank placement. Introduce Larger Sails Particularly for Galleons, cause Galleons right now look ridiculous with 6 masts, 4 masts should be the ideal amount.

Official = large scale mmo Private = small scale 30+ players Costs are too high to go to private cheats heavy in official, no wipe, too many exploits already used. Numbers declined heavy, because of these reasons not including lag, and buggy game play. We have not heard of official wiping of servers yet. So where are we at as backers for this project?

I find some people's opinions that a 50 gun port galleon shouldn't be able to carry 50 cannons on it without going significantly into leveling weight (meant for merchants) to be pretty funny. The argument is basically a ship of war shouldn't be able to war properly without taking merchanting upgrades. At least with weight sail upgrades you'd have more choices - sleek fast warships that chase, heavy warships that hold, sleek fast merchant ships and heavy merchant ships. Rather then everyone having the same layout of 1 broadside, other side blank, all speed and maybe a handling.

Dude youre arguing semantics with me. Obviously youre not alone in an MMO. That doesnt mean you cant play solo. Lets not split hairs, please? No one is forcing anyone to join a company. There are risks involved with joining up with other people. There are also benefits. Thus is life. The problem is with an MMO is the easier you make things for a single player the more dominant larger tribes become. This game is heavy heavy skill base and luck based. Luck in the sense that i sure hope I dont cross this server wall, crash, and load the ship into a SoD. Im just going to say this. Im 100% for a condusive conversation involving productive ideas. But solo players need to take into consideration that certain small changes to mechnics can cause HUGE adverse effects.. just be patient guys and lets help Grapeshot make a great game. Atlas has alot of potential!

Well it is a pirate game, and gold is part of a pirates life. I actually like the gold coin system.. I just think it is a BIT heavy... I mean each coin is like .5 kg which, that is heavy as hell.

This is huge... and think agreeding to almost everything, almost. 1. Animals are realy overspawning, or... that's dependand a bit also on the islands, for example living on a island that have 3 wolves per minute spawn, was realy considering yesterday to spec into pukle gun and put crew on them just to be safe finally... The damage is not that bad since they made armor actualy work, however, their attack speed, movement speed, trash AI and super abilities make them pain and unfun to play on top of the radiculous overspawn, not saying that want 50 horses in one place bcs passives also overspawn... but com'on, atleast let us cut a tree without being bitten, mauled, thrown, munched or whatever all the time. They also made guns suck which means we always take damage from anything that is faster than player, a wolf, lion, tiger, those things will take half hp alone before killing them unless having a carine which is the only remaining gun which can one-shot a low lvl predator, something with 20+ lvl will survive even a carbine. (Btw, if being "that" masochistic, maybe come to our island, would gladly have something/someone who destroys those wolves, tbh this game makes us slowly hate any animals bcs of how infuirating they are in here) 2. Yeah, also would love the whales and SoDs to go away from the borders, have yet to die from such encounter but already took damage bcs of spawning right next to them. This is one of and a main reason why not using our solo made schooner, we bet we just gonna teleport next to a red SoD or inside one or on top of a whale and all this work going down. We get attached to things easly, we consider that ship our second home if that would be even possible (unfortunely not) so wilt not touch our Eternal Night untill those things atleast stop camping the borders. SoDs also make walls, there is too many of them, they should be made more rare but stronger, for example a 1-3 low lvl, 1-2 medium and 0-1 high lvl SoDs roaming a grid, that's all, right now, there is so many that if want to fight one, there's surely 5 more nearby and if wnt to get arround them prepare to go in direction that is against plans and waste half hour to 1 hour just to go thro this ocean maze. Storms and rains are a cool idea to separate them, also though today about what if not all rains were full of tornados..., tbh they are annoying, not bcs of dmg or number bcs that's possible to navigate thro them most of the time but bcs they are constantly thrown into our face, we passed all of them?, well, have another 5+ in front, enjoy. Whales yeah, the one-shotting is so stupid, that's like being too slow means just suicide and respawn at home just to not waste time bcs there is no way to survive whale if it agroes and is faster. Was hit only once by whale, by some magic didn't take any damage (it was 1 week after launch tho) so there's that, atleast give us a chance to escape insteed of being either 0% or 100% prepared for encounter. Planks have tiny hp, agree they have laughable durability and make for a 10+ cannons per ship boring combat, however in suggestion that have made days ago put not 2x more hp but even up to 5x, it might however to slightly radiculous knowing galleon planks have 12k hp but well, atleast the battle would be worth of a tale. The 5x idea was with increase, not decreasein ships prices in mind so it would be balanced out with quality insteed of quantity, don't wanna rebuild ships after few battles or an ambush, wanna a swimming citatel. Also proposed there different kinds of planks as light which would be designed to move faster at the cost of less hp and heavy plated which would be... very heavy causing ship to be slow but have slightly more hp and big damage resistance. Those types of planks together with the standard ones we have now would create a variety in ship building. Not having problem with the carry weight, especialy that they increased it but yeah, the galleon should be a floating city housing 50-100 players possibly. 3. Since the nerf to guns not using guns ever, blunderbuss is in the chest, pistols are used only to kill vultures or annoying sharks/manta rays that after agroing doesn' want to get off from our shipyard and very rarely to sometimes snipe a lion from long range since bow have a fall off, otherwise using our trusty bow which is better in every single aspect than any gun, except slightly less burst dmg, it does like 30% less burst dmg or something, but we can shoot it 10 times in time the pistol reloads. Also agree having more different types of weapons would be fun to play with. Agree that there could be more ship options to choose from, right now it kinda feels empty.

hello everyone, I am writing this post to reflect on some important topics. the developers would like to take the players' lives overboard. the idea is very nice but the essential elements are missing: - the weight of the objects to be reviewed (eggs, fibers, straw, cannon balls, oven) are essential objects for the repair of the boat and for the defense too heavy to be transported in large quantities. the new oven added weighs 400 kilos. - dimensions of objects: tannery, wooden table, forge, loom. in particular, the loom requires a very high ceiling to be able to place it even in a schooner. these 3 objects must be resized giving the possibility to those who want to make a small boat to be able to insert them inside. to review the width / height dimension. the Smithy has that annoying anvil that takes up a lot of space inside the boat. -the crew must repair all the structures and not just the plank of the ship

Who played Morrowind? Remember how that game worked leveling up? The more you fired a bow, the more the skill progressed. The more you ran, and jumped, the more your athleticism increased. The more you cast spells, the more that skill increased. I would like to see something similar. The more you shoot bows, the more skills unlock...strong arm...steady aim...armor piercing...and add quicker reloads, without a silly Atari 1600 style mini game. The more you carry heavy loads, the more your ability to carry heavy weight increases. The more you ride, animals, the more you unlock, so you start out riding level one, and progress up to higher tiers. Crafting tools and weapons? You start out making stone, and progress up to better and better stuff, and as you get even better, it takes less and less materials to do so. Wouldn't a master craftsman waste less materials? Anyway, smash the like if you would like to see something like this, and leave a comment. I am curious to see what the rest of you Pirates think.