Sailwind

This game has evolved from a wonderfull cozy sailing game with difficult situations from time to time to a more and more hardcore survival and secondary sailing game... The game neds Options that allows the player select the mechanics he wants to play. Player must has the option to choose

Used to be a great sailing game 80% of the time is spend on finding food and water 15% of the time is spend on fighting menu bugs 5% of the time is spend on sailing

The develoiper is making some real inconsiderate, not well thought out, dumb decisions that impact quality of life in favour of pursuing realism in a sailing simulator survival game that isn't entirely realistic in the first place. The game is in Early Access so it's to be expected that some ongoing testing so on, etc, etc lady da so on so forth whatever. Listen to your community otherwise why would the community praise and commend, making recommendations to their peers if the game is dog water. Wind doesn't make any sense i swear, it always changes direction unfavourably making it impossible to meet a deadline for a mission because you couldn't even leave port as the wind is blowing against your square rig and your jibs aint doing nothing because no wind, no sail. So you're stuck, you can't throw a line around tree because that aint a thing, you now can't push your boat if you're jumping, in water or if it's slightly too far out of reach because that's unrealistic but you can be it alone padal your boat making no tangible progress. If can't make the wind system work properly, you'd probably disagree that it's working fine as intended I call bs anyways better add back the push function while swimming&\jumping for the sake of simplicity and fun.

Need to give this game a solid thumbs up to counteract the ridiculous people review bombing over the issue of not being able to push your sailboat while swimming in the water. To have a proper sailing simulator that has a decent gameplay loop that actually takes wind direction and strength into account has been awesome. Hats off to the developer. That said, there are bugs and minor issues, but nothing that has stopped me from enjoying being out on the virtual water running shipments. If you are looking for an arcade game where you can sail anywhere in any direction just by opening up the sails, then this game isn't for you. Stop trying to demand the developer to dumb down the experience just because you can't plan your route, keep an eye on the wind, or watch where you're going.

This game has become more and more unfun to play. It used to be a cozy-ish game about sailing around, managing your sails with the wind and focusing on being a merchant. The water, food, and sleep meters were a bit annoying, especially the sleep one, as they just took away from the actual experience of sailing. Now, food, water, and sleep mechanics have all expanded in complexity (fishing is extremely annoying to have to do), the unity engine bugs are all still there, your ship still gets stuck but now you need to buy an oar to awkwardly unfix it. Your ship takes on water and you have to take a bucket to empty it or use a bilge pump, and your ship now takes damage based on physics. The broken weird unity physics..... I wish the dev had gone in a more cozy and atmospheric route for the game because right now it's just even more tedium and friction once again taking the player away from the sailing gameplay.

I can't do it, I just cannot recommend this game First off lets talk about the long game stuff, the newer additions only supplement larger deep rooted problems. The sailing mechanics are... decent enough, I mean the game lacks indications so a person who doesn't know how to trim sails will be lost and probably trim their sails wrong (the info scroll that you start the game with is an image of sails based on wind direction that has since been proven to "teach" bad trim). This is one of the places where the game fails a golden rule of game design, if the player base needs a wiki or an online map then your in game knowledge system and in game maps are lacking. You need to install a mod that tells you, in an non-immersive way, how to trim your sails. The game has a natural progression, sail a small boat until you can afford a larger boat, then sail the larger boat. It's a pretty basic progression system, supplemented with the ability to furnish and even modify the sails and other accessories in the shipyard. All good, right? Well sort of, let's talk about water physics, the boat glitches along the surface of the water, for the larger boats this works out pretty well, the waves don't really effect the ship beyond giving it a natural bob up and down as it cuts through the waves, but for the smaller boats that you start the game in the issues are very apparent. Smaller boats are too small and get kicked around by the waves, sure that makes sense on its surface, but what isn't realistic is how the lack of fluid simulations makes the boats actually work with these waves. The water only applies a force "up or down" on your boat, and it interacts across the length of the boat which gives your ship a relatively realistic "bob" in the water with different parts of the boat moving up and down, again this works great for the larger ships, but for these smaller starter ships it doesn't work at all as your entire boat will simply get pushed entirely out of the water. The lack of fluid simulation means the rudder behaves incorrectly, the rudder only helps turn the boat in the water, again for the larger ships this works mostly fine, but for the smaller ships this has lots of negative and unrealistic side effects, especially when dealing with being stuck in "the irons" (or nose into the wind) the wind will slightly push you backwards when facing the wind, if you use the rudder it will turn you the wrong direction, but you're not actually moving anywhere... why? Well because the moment the ship starts turning the sails will catch it and try to push it forward undoing the reversed turn you just did, this is not really how boats work. In fact lets talk about a feature recently removed that has caused the game to be far less "cozy" and a lot more "hardcore" the ability to get out and push. The game had the ability to "push" the boat if you were outside of it, this was largely made for you to push the boat off of a beach you ran aground on or to push the boat away from a dock, but it also meant that if you did get the boat stuck in the irons you could get out and push, a sort of immersion breaking "punishment" for making a mistake that isn't always your fault. They replaced this feature by adding a tool you can buy (not all starter ships come with one) which is an oar you can use to row the boat, the problem is this solves minor movements, like trying to navigate a dock, but your oar isn't going to get you out of the irons, the wind blowing against your mast will overpower any movements you try with the oar. They also added "kedging" or the act of throwing your anchor and using it to "pull" yourself towards the anchor, but there's two problems with this here, first off it requires ground contact to work which means it's only really useful for... once again navigating close to a dock, the other problem is that you can't actually throw anything so you still have to get out of the boat and swim with the anchor in your hands then drop it on the ground, swim back to the boat and start pulling in the anchor. Being that this whole problem of the waves twisting smaller boats into the wind could have a solution, it's an action called "sculling" where you pull the rudder of a small boat back and fourth "pumping" it and giving you forward momentum, which can then be used to turn a small boat out of the irons. This is more energy efficient than using an oar, especially since once you get that forward momentum the next thing you need to do is then turn the boat out of the irons. This doesn't really solve any of the other problems with the physics not working with the smaller boats, but it does solve some of the frustrations even if the amount of thrust the game would have to give you from sculling might lean a tad on the unrealistic side. (I feel like I should reinforce the point that this is a suggestion and not in the game currently). The survival aspects are largely tedious but necessary, you can't really have a sailing game like this without requiring part of your cargo to be supplies you need to survive the journey. The only real problem is when you do get stuck in a storm that turns a simple half a day's journey into a day or two long trip, this really isn't helped by the fact that the amount of food you need to eat per day is relatively high. The only "time skip" mechanic is sleep, and a lot of foods help you control that ("downers" like rum making you sleepy and "uppers" like tea and coffee making you need less sleep can help you manage how long you'll sleep for allowing you to use sleep to effectively skip time). It doesn't make sense to have things like sprinting, rowing and swimming use _more_ water when you're already on an accelerated thirst meter. Remember when I said the new additions only exacerbate existing issues? Well hull damage is definitely one of the new additions that only serves to highlight the physics issues, getting "stuck" in a dock is pretty common and moving too fast when you "hit" something, like the dock you're stuck inside of, you get hull damage, you can use oakum to temporarily plug the holes but you now have a leaky boat that will over time leak more and more water. This addition is where the recent negative reviews largely stem from, the damage wouldn't be an issue on its own (the oakum wearing off after half a day could stand for some tweaking) if it wasn't for the fact that simply being tied to the dock could damage your boat. The overall problems with this game is that instead of focus on either fixing issues or adding content, the dev has spent time patching out the solutions the community was using to overcome those issues. Every step of the way things have been added that cause the existing issues to get and feel worse, the progression requires that at least a "third" of the runtime is in boats the physics engine wasn't really designed to handle. There's lots of paths to improving the game, and yet the dev seems fixated on solving "problems" which were being used as solutions for larger more systemic problems. There's not a lot in the way of sailing games quite like this, that's why I continue to suffer through it, but the monopoly on the genre won't last forever as other developers have started to realize that part of the fun of sailing... is the sailing itself. I want the game to improve, but the "yes man" community of people saying "git gud" when faced with these issues has caused the developer to not focus on actually improving the game and instead "fix" all of the things the majority of the audience won't want fixed. Having a boat glitch into the dock and capsize because the wind pushed completely furled sails until the boat was part of the dock and damaged, then having the community cry "skill issue" so the dev won't waste their time fixing such collisions is basically a perfect example of why this game won't improve.

Pros: It's a fun medieval era sailing simulator. If you like sailboats even a little it's worth a try. You can trade cargo port to port, where you put the cargo affects the way the boat balances. Pretty nice sailing atmosphere. The shipyard system is really neat, you can modify all the ships in the game remove extra parts, add/remove masts and sails. Cons: there's no button to go back to menu from being in-game that I could find, just an exit game button. You can't throw the anchor. You cannot bail out a boat with the water bottle. The cup is easily dropped by accident.

The game used to be fun but the insane focus on realism got to a point where it isn't really enjoyable anymore. For me, the part I disliked most was that a lot of the time the wind is against you and it actively changes to always have you in a headwind. There should also be an option to disable stuff like boat damage or not being able to push your boat.

Its a game I want to love. Why does it have to be such a grind? 3 different currencies with a 4th thats used to buy ships. Weather each day is new seed so its hard to plan, You start out in basically a canoe, everything in the market costs 4x what you can make fully loaded, plus you need to eat and drink an absolute crazy amount a day. Like just adjust or even make an easy mode and it would make it so much more enjoyable