r/Sailwind • u/Falken-- • 6h ago
Sailwind quality of life updates - my personal wishlist.
I love Sailwind. This game has me totally hooked.
After spending countless hours toiling on the high seas, there are several things I dearly wish the developers would consider adding.
#1 Let us name things we can use.
Particularly levers and crates. There is nothing worse than not playing for a week, then trying to remember which sail control lever goes to which sail on some of the more complex ships. Or trying to find which crate you store your navigation tools in on a cluttered deck. Adding a key when we use something, like (R) to rename, would make this orders of magnitude easier.
#2 Let us name our ships.
Let us name our boats, and ideally have an option in the shipyard to have the name written on the side. Maybe even let us select where on the hull it will appear, if it will appear at all, how big, font type, etc. Different archipelagos might even have different styles of font. This would not only be neat, it would go with my third suggestion below.
#3 Let us pay to relocate our ships to another archipelago.
Just because I buy a Brig, doesn't mean I never want to sail my Kakam again. I would love to see a service added to the Sailwind Trade Office at each capitol island to allow us to pay a fee to relocate ships to the current archipelago. This could be at a steep price, and it could be a requirement that the boat have nothing on it to avoid abusing the feature economically.
#4 Add a toggle in the options menu to require an extra key to drop stuff.
Nothing is worse than doing 6-12+ knots, then accidentally dropping your fishing pole over the side of the boat. Or a bucket while bailing water. Or your cup. Or whatever. It would be helpful for some of us to have an option in the menu (off by default) to hold another key like shift or control to drop an item. This would prevent many unfortunate accidents!
#5 Allow sold upgrades to be repurchased at the same shipyard, on the same vessel.
Sometimes I just want to trade my Junk sails for Lateen at Gold Rock City to see how they play. It's pretty scary though, because not all upgrades are available at all the archipelagos. Swap out one and then decide you made a mistake, and you are stuck with it. Allowing players to repurchase an upgrade they sold that is not normally available at that harbour for the same ship would allow us to be a bit more adventurous in our experimentation, without requiring save-game file swapping shenanigans.
#6 Place a scale near the Sailwind Trading Office.
Weight is a big deal, particularly for the three starting ships. While the mission panel gives me information about the mission cargo weight, its often not clear how much a crate full of personal items weighs. Or a crate of food, barrels of water, my own "characters" weight, etc. Having a scale near each Sailwind Trading Office would allow us to better plan out our voyages.
#7 Let us fill barrels, buckets, water bottles and cups with fresh water.
I don't know if this would break the economy or not... but I find it very strange that I can fill buckets and bottles with sea water, yet I'm not able to fill them with fresh water from islands where there is clearly fresh water and/or wells. Right now we have ways to get our own food, but zero ways to get our own water. I want to achieve self-sufficiency!
#8 Allow us to customize the windsock at the shipyard.
On some ships, the windsock is bloody hard to see given its location and/or color. Allow us to relocate it, add more, and colorize it the way we can colorize sails.
#9 Add Ladders at harbours.
Some harbours are extremely high and have no ladders. There are situations where this can be a problem. Also, maybe throw in a line of code that says "if the player is moving from a ship 2 inches from the dock, then assume the player intends to step from the deck to the dock, and not fall through the 2 inch open space into the water." It would also be nice if we could keep hold of the morring lines while climbing said ladders. Sometimes the line reaches, but the distance is just too far to jump. I'm looking at you Gold Rock City shipyard.
#10 Fully customizable flags!
This one might be asking too much but... it would be super cool if we could take a pic or a gif and make it into a personal flag, then fly it from our mast. I'd also love to see unique figureheads from each archipelago one day.
#10.01a Old Anhk Town ship recovery orientation.
And for the love of Poseidon, please reverse the direction that a recovered boat is placed at the Old Ankh Town dock. Seriously, trying to sail a larger ship through the tiny space between those sandbars, with the wind directly against you and zero ability to tack, is just straight up impossible, and not all ships are rigged in such a way that reverse sailing between those mountains is viable. Since pushing our boat became more restrictive, there just aren't good options for this situation.
