Sailing

[username]

With oceans being (somewhat) added to the game, and "Multi-Block Ships" being a roadmap feature, I wanted to share an idea for a sort of sea-faring feature. 

 

It would be very cool if we could build multi-block ships (or have preset styles that can be built), which have a fixed amount of storage for things like food, tools, and other resources. 

Ideally, oceans would be massive, to the point that it takes a significant amount of time to reach your destination, and you need to bring along enough food to make the trip. This could also be achieved more realistically by "condensing" the journey so that it doesn't actually take so long, but consumes fuel as well as food from the ship's storage at a fixed rate by distance to simulate a long voyage, and thus requires extensive preparation to travel by ship. 

The idea here would be to have the ocean be less of a large body of water that you can just swim or sail across normally (in fact, it should not be possible at all), and it should be more of a gating device that can be traversed later in the game once you can reliably mass-produce high quality food, acquire a ton of fuel, and access high level resources and building materials to produce the ship. 

Sailing the seas should allow players to find new continents with unique resources/dungeons, or even follow maps to find islands with treasures or other unique features. It could start as just islands for the beginning, and then expand to new continents later.

Ocean fishing could also be implemented - sail out to sea and fish, or place crab pots etc., or even drag a net behind your boat. 

 

With more ocean content coming, I think it would be a great time to lay the groundwork for something like this - maybe implementing a general fishing mechanic first, and adding more substance to the ocean itself to allow for things like diving etc. to collect resources. Ship sailing could be a great late-game feature that puts your progress to the test - requiring a lot of food, high level materials (like Iron or Steel) to craft ships, large amounts of linen for sails, and so-on. 

This could also allow some higher-end story/combat stuff to be waiting on the other end of an ocean voyage, someday. 

 

Anyways, those are some ideas I had! There is a lot of potential for things like navigation, pirates, etc. as well. I imagine modders could add a lot to this framework. 

 

What do you folks think?