Originally posted by Quineloe:

Sailing the sea the boat is intended to take periodic damage because they are not infinite range exploration vessels.

This is not true at all.

The boats are intended to take fall damage for when seas are really stormy, you are likely to be lifted high on top of a wave crest.. and the water drops from beneath you if you go straight into the wave. It teaches you that you have to angle against the wave, cresting with a lateral sway to roll over the large storm crests to avoid fall damage.

It is not 'because boats are supposed to break' after some automatic countdown of structural integrity.

1) Boats only take fall damage or collision damage when there is a player in the boat. You can leave it unattended, and it can bounce off the shore forever and not take damage. <- tested and true.

2) The game has inherent lag. Lag creates mini-collisions for fall damage on a dynamic surface (water). <- tested and true.

3) The smaller boats have smaller surface area, and thus are less likely to register as being 'in contact' with the water. <- untested, so feel free to refute this claim. The test should look at side by side data in a simultaneous trial, looking for frequency of collisions.

So the game lags when the game saves.
It lags when on a hosted server (and you are not the host).
I have not experienced any lag from resource rendering (such as large quantities of spawns, i.e. The Elder particle effects, topped with greydwarf spawners)

When sailing, you will be cresting small waves constantly (water has ripples). When the game lags, the server thinks your boat is briefly not in contact with the water, and so it tells your game file that your boat has fallen. You may not even see the lag, because your system buffers the animations. Still, your game registers this unseen lag as a fall collision with the water's surface, and you see the boat take a hit.

Yep, it's dumb. What can we do?

On a hosted server, there is not currently any work-around. It is an issue with member ping to host server.

On a private server, after the next update you should be able to choose how often the game auto-saves the world. You should therefore be able to turn off autosaves while sailing, as a work-around to this laggy dinghy fall damage.

Yep, that's a good name for a mashup video.

Laggy dinghy fall damage.