Hic sunt dracones.

Hic sunt dracones.

Originally posted by Trike:

I cannot guess why sea serpents would be immune to fire arrows.

I'ts in water ?

I cannot guess why sea serpents would be immune to fire arrows.

Originally posted by DarthTanyon:

oddly enough.. even with a beginner bow they literally take maybe.. 10 fire arrows.. I came across one early on... I was still in troll armor.. I panicked thinking I was so dead.. killed it.. and my ship had only suffered like 25% durability loss.. I was completely underwhelmed.. now.. with the spine tap.. LMAO.. 3 shots and it's dead.. they need more.. or bigger ones.. something more challenging for sure. they seem scary and the idea is scary but once you kill one you are like "that's it"?

Don't waste fire arrows on serpents - they're immune to fire. Plain wood arrows would give you better performance (22 pierce versus 11 pierce + 0 fire).

Originally posted by xdSpookuth:

Serpents need to spawn more... need more serpent stew :D

+1

You beached yourself?

Well done! Many of us ended up dead in the water (literally!) first time we met the serpent! So your prolly just ahead on the curve.

Well observed on the carves versatility I actually prefer to explore with a Karve and then use the longboat as heavy transport.

Originally posted by jonnin:

You can kill them with a bow from a karve before they can sink it. Be very careful not to shoot your own ship. Find 10 wood on a shore and you can repair it after if you got hit at all. With practice and sailing with the wind, they rarely get a hit.

I disagree about the longship. Its useful, but the karve is much more nimble. I use both, depending on what I am doing, but the karve more often, the LS only for hauling more stuff in deep water. Most of my exploring the karve gets into rivers or closer to shore and handles shallows better.

Actually the Karve only appears to be more nimble. Its only advantage over the Longship is that it turns faster. (You can nullify this advantage by lowering the Longship's sail when you start a 90 degree or sharper turn and then raising the sail again as soon as you catch the wind on the other side.) The Longship also sails much faster than the Karve especially in light winds.

Tacking with the Longship is always faster than paddling the Longship. The Raft is faster tacking than paddling it if the wind is faster than speed 1. Tacking with the Karve is only faster than paddling with the Karve when the wind is higher than speed 3. At speed 3 its all most identical to paddling speed.

The raft's sailing speed is about 1/2 the speed of the Longship. The Karve is only .02 m/s slower than the Longship when paddling but with any wind speed at all the Longship sails at .8 m/s faster than the Karve at half sail and over 2.4 m/s faster than the Karve at full wind and full sail.

Serpents need to spawn more... need more serpent stew :D

Karve is definitely better if you are sailing in shallow areas, navigating around rocks, dealing with choke points and being far easier to turn around especially in confined areas.

Once I got the longboat I only used the karve once to reach my first dverger fort that was on a small island surrounded by other small islands so using the longboat would've been more cumbersome + I knew of at least 1 Gjall being somewhat nearby so I wanted that extra versatility of the karve in case I had to reposition for an escape if needed.

oddly enough.. even with a beginner bow they literally take maybe.. 10 fire arrows.. I came across one early on... I was still in troll armor.. I panicked thinking I was so dead.. killed it.. and my ship had only suffered like 25% durability loss.. I was completely underwhelmed.. now.. with the spine tap.. LMAO.. 3 shots and it's dead.. they need more.. or bigger ones.. something more challenging for sure. they seem scary and the idea is scary but once you kill one you are like "that's it"?

The bad (or good, if you want to hunt it) news is that it will stay in that area until you kill it.

You need to lose the karve anyway as soon as you can build a longship. Longships are a much better ships.

You can kill them with a bow from a karve before they can sink it. Be very careful not to shoot your own ship. Find 10 wood on a shore and you can repair it after if you got hit at all. With practice and sailing with the wind, they rarely get a hit.

I disagree about the longship. Its useful, but the karve is much more nimble. I use both, depending on what I am doing, but the karve more often, the LS only for hauling more stuff in deep water. Most of my exploring the karve gets into rivers or closer to shore and handles shallows better.

Karve floats over shallow waters, much better than the raft. Even when there's rocks just below the surface it just glides over them. Superior for rivers since it's more agile than the raft and the speed makes it ideal for short ocean voyages.

Everyone has their preferences, and certainly the karve is better for navigating rivers if that's what you want to do, but it's useless for hauling anything, which is my primary use for a ship. If I want to explore a coastline or river, I just get out and run.

I don't think the draft of the karve is much, if any shorter than the longship, although the longship is wider, of course. The benefit of the longship in near-shore, possibly rocky situations is that you don't have to care. The longship will take a huge amount of damage. The only issue is possibly getting stuck, but that can happen in either ship, and I think the longship has more power to pull you through.

Could be worse. Our first play through my friend and i had to raft to the first boss and had our first encounter with a serpent just about half way across.

Ah, good times.