I’ve got a bunch of small ideas related to ships that I’ve been thinking about recently (and one that isn’t ship related) so here’s a rapid fire suggestion list with a bunch of them. I’ll add a poll in the first comment to gauge interest (so that I can edit this message later without messing that up)
Cargo Hold
The Cargo Hold is an upgrade to ships that is unlocked after you complete your first cargo hauling quest. By spending some galleons (roughly 20% of the cost of the ship you’re currently using) you unlock that ship’s cargo hold. You are able to put any item that can be placed on top of a ship into the cargo hold for storage, and then open a small UI while standing on your ship which allows you to open the cargo hold and click an item to take out if you want. Players in your party should also be able to add or remove items from the cargo hold, and this can potentially be a setting to allow only co leaders to, or to let anyone do it.
For example, you can load a box of cargo or a sealed chest into your ship’s cargo hold instead of it needing to be on your ship’s hull. If your ship is sunk while items are in its cargo hold, the items will appear on top of it. If a ship is sunk by a player ship which has a cargo hold, that player can give an order to their quartermaster to ask them to have their crew load sealed chests or cargo boxes into their own hold if they have space.
Each ship has different amounts of cargo space, for obvious reasons. Here’s my number suggestions, which are by no means representative of the numbers that would actually appear in game:
Rowboats have no space
Sailboats have 10 space
Caravels have 20
Ketches have 30
Brigs have 50.
Your quartermaster is able to see items in your cargo hold as if they were on top of your ship for the purposes of the commands to repair your ship or unload the cargo and sell it to a shipwright.
Table for Food
This one’s simple. Add a table into the captain’s quarters or otherwise aboard the ship that you can put a large meal or a brew onto. Especially in the Dark Sea, it’s hard to place brews and meals on top of your ship. Having a space which you can place the item onto without it being a flat surface and without worry about the ship being in motion will make people’s lives much easier.
Transparent Sails
The ability to toggle transparency on the sails of the ship you are currently piloting would be nice. I find that especially with the brig having sails as large as they are, it’s hard for me to see things directly in front of me. If I turn the camera to the side, it throws off my sense of what’s right in front of me for things like ramming. A sail transparency toggle would fix this. The toggle only applies to ships that you are either piloting or manning a weapon for.
UIs on Decorative Storage
As the name implies, the gem rack and fish tank should be given their own UIs when interacted with. When doing so, you will be able to see all the items currently placed in the respective storage. For the gem rack, giving the player a unique tidbit about the gemstone in place of the “when crafted into a jewel” line when hovering over the item would be a nice touch. For the fish tank, you would be able to take out specific fish from the tank more easily. This is important, because fish decay timers don’t get paused while in the tank. If you want to replace a specific fish, you might have to destroy multiple to get to it.
Functional Bookshelf
Whenever you obtain a readable book, that book should be added to the bookshelf in your captain’s quarters. From any point then on, you can then interact with the bookshelf to retrieve any book that you’ve received before. The game should keep track of the book the moment it enters your inventory, regardless of if you have the brig or not, to prevent players from screwing themselves out of books because they sold them before they had the brig.
Alternatively, you can add in a tab on the info page which stores all books you obtain, thus removing the need for the bookshelf to have relevance to this and preventing you from selling the books because they wouldn’t be in your inventory.
Ship Despawn Timer
Just a thing I noticed. Currently, whenever your ship starts its 2 minute despawn timer, you are able to cancel it by getting to your ship’s helm. However, this despawn timer also starts even if your spawn point is on your ship. I think it would be better for the despawn timer to get automatically canceled if you respawn on your ship, or if you get within a short distance of your ship (including on its deck).
Additionally, if you have a party member and they take the helm before the ship despawns, the despawn timer should be extended to 5 minutes. This allows that party member to sail your ship to an island or to you, for the purposes of preserving things like sealed chests or cargo on your ship. This can potentially be set to only be possible by co-leaders of the party, and there can be a setting to disable this much like disabling or enabling friendly fire. This setting is specific to the player rather than the party, and will update automatically if the leader changes. This also only applies to the party leader. The party leader can choose to despawn their ship if it’s between the 2-5 minute mark, in case their party member dies while moving the ship.
Edit: Someone brought up the point that sometimes you want your ship to despawn and that this change would make that difficult sometimes. An idea to solve this is to add an anchor to any ship that has a spawn point aboard, and you can drop the anchor to make it so that it doesn’t despawn if your spawn is set on it (and the anchor is raised when you take the helm)
Party Members give Quartermaster Orders
As it says on the tin, allowing your party members to give your quartermasters orders as if it was you speaking to them would be a nice quality of life. This would add two settings to the party menu, one for each quartermaster order. You would be able to set it so that anyone in the party can do it, only co leaders can do it, or no one but you can do it. These settings are specific to the player rather than the party, and only the party leader’s ship is affected by this.
Notably, if a player gives an order to unload your ship on your behalf, the rewards are still given to you as the owner of the ship.
Quartermasters Ignore Cargo
When giving your quartermaster the order to unload your ship, you should be able to specify if you want them to ignore the cargo aboard. This way, they only sell sealed chests. This is important because of cargo now being usable in repairs.
Ship Light Toggles
Extremely simple: when you toggle one light on your ship, it toggles all of them at once. There could be an alternate toggle to toggle the specific lights on or off, but the basic toggle should affect all of them.
Spawn Points Override (the suggestion that isn't ship related)
Currently, you respawn at the closest available spawn point when you die. I suggest that a player should be able to override this and spawn at any location available to them, be it their camp, their story spawn, their factional spawn, or their ship. To prevent this from being abused too heavily as fast travel, the override is given a 30 minute cooldown. Additionally, you cannot use this override to spawn on an island with a player you are currently hunting. You can still spawn normally on an island with a player you’re hunting, but only if that spawn point is the closest to you.
That took a while to type out, dang
Hope you enjoy at least a couple of these, or otherwise think they should be added.
A few extra notes:
I thought about adding a suggestion about a quartermaster order to load cargo into your cargo hold automatically. I decided against that suggestion, but it might work?
If there’s any points that need extra clarification in your opinion, let me know and I’ll edit accordingly.
Edit to add some extras:
Snap Points on Ships
This is a valid criticism, so I’ve got another idea that’d help fulfill a similar purpose- adding snap points onto ships. Essentially, a ship would be covered in these snap points. Holding shift while carrying a placeable object will allow you to snap that object to the nearest snap point when you drop it, instead of having to make the placement yourself. There’s still the option to do it normally too, in case the snap points give less space overall.
Hold Click for Aim Adjust
As it says on the tin. If you hold down click before firing a weapon, it will start the process of firing but still give you a moment to adjust your aim. The fuse timer is extended (doubled) during this aim adjustment. Releasing click will lock your aim in and then cause it to proceed at its normal speed for the remainder of the fuse time. If adjusting the fuse timer is too strange, you could also potentially make the cannonballs do less damage (since you’re adjusting the aim which could throw off some of the gunpowder)
