Originally posted by Faceplant8:

IMO, the second worse aspect of the karve (behind the lack of storage) is that it has half the HP of the longship. If you're in a situation where you're having to bring your longship in for repairs, you would have been swimming long before if you were in a karve.

The longship may look like and sound like it's getting severely damaged by rocks, but, if you look at the health of the ship after, you'll see that it's hardly taken any damage.

The karve indeed has less health, and needs repairs more often, but it's also more maneuverable and easier to replace. I end up in fewer situations where i might lose my ship with it on average, unless i decide to go serpent hunting a bit stupidly (you can hunt them in a karve, its just higher risk than longship, especially since you can just drag them on the longship deck sometimes and freely wail on them which is not an option with the karve). In the cases I might lose my boat, id rather lose the karve than the longship anyway, bronze nails are much easier to get.

Also part of why the longship is for things like ore transports for me though, i already have those routes established and even if absolutely everything goes wrong i have docks already set up along the way to repair at, so im not very likely to actually lose the ship or the full cargo of ore it's carrying. It protects what i actually want to protect much better, while i want things that are far more expendable for explorations where everything going wrong will almost certainly result in my death and loss of everything on me; potentially for quite a while if im over-extending in that biome hunt, like i was already finding plains and some mistlands edges just trying to find a meadow large enough for bees in my most recent game, ultimately had to just settle for raiding a draugr village to get mead up at all before swamps. Clearly if my character died near a mistlands, before i had actually even hit swamps yet, im not reasonably getting that gear back for a bit...so id rather use stuff i can replace more easily.

Edit: worth mentioning i was not intending to find mistlands that early, i was trying to stick to east-west exploration not north-south, i just seem to have multiple long vertical strips of continents that required me to go pretty far north or south to actually go around them. Including one where i could cut about a half hour sailing (with winds in my favor) off my trips, if i clear the rocks for a longship. i already gotta tokyo drift the karve through this river around the rocks, longship aint making that trip without some clearing.