As you can see here, idk what happened here but, my world and caves were merge into one and I got this caves.

I got ocean, wormholes, shadow setpiece, lightnings and frog rain, even sunlight in all caves I guess (ruins are visible...), etc.
I didn't even bother exploring the rest of it.
Ruins spawned really close, what a shame but, I can't play this way. Cheese.

Mods: Global Position, Show Me, Wormhole Marks.
Both Worlds: Plant Desease: None.

So, how can I delete my ruins and get new ones? I'm really fine with my normal world and I beat every single boss I could and got the ridiculous Desert Goggles, come on, I don't want that pain again.

Any grammar mistake, sorry. I speak Spanish.

I haven't fought the Crab King yet but I plan to and everyone I encountered, friends, acquintences or youtubers that have fought with it recommend socketting 8 purple gems and one pearl. However one look at this table in the wiki tells me to instead make a different combination to avoid buffing him too much. Specifically placing just one gem of colors: Red, Purple, Yellow, Orange and Green seem to not change his stats at all if I'm interpreting the table correctly. As such, even assuming that people are right with "Number of Geysers" being his most manageable aspect to buff, logic says that you should Socket: 1 Red, 1 Yellow, 1 Orange, 1 Green, Pearl's Pearl and 4 Purple Gems.

In fact, for most gems, there doesn't seem much of a difference between levels 2 and 3 either. Thus by gambling a little bit with other stats, you can further decrease the geyser amount. For instance, the table says that if I socket 2 and 3 red gems, it'll only add 3000 health to his base 2000 HP. Thus, if 3000 more health won't be a big deal for you, the combination 3 Red, 3 Purple, 1 Yellow, 1 Orange, 1 Green (Especially in instances where Pearl's Pearl isn't available anymore). If you don't want to deal with the 3K health boost, you can theoratically add, 2 more Yellow or 2 more Green gems in place of the additional 2 red ones but I can't really comment on the difficulty that comes with decreasing its freeze timer by 1 second or increasing the imposing claws by 1.

As such, I really cannot understand the tunnel vision behind the 8 Purple 1 Pearl strategy. Either this table is wrong or people (or me) are missing something important. I'll try the fight with 1 Red, 1 Yellow, 1 Orange, 1 Green, and 5 Purple Gems unless there's a catch that I'm missing here.

Side question: Why is the table going up to 11 gem count if you can only place 9 gems? Again, am I missimg something here or were hackers able to drill 2 more holes into the Crab Kimg just to see what happens?

First of all this is a tier list based on "Overall Multiplayer Quality" of the characters and my overall experience playing these characters. Got it? Ok.


Also, fyi, I've played every single character for at least a full year to get a feeling of how they work and what they can do.

Now to explain the tiers!

(S+) 
These are characters who are the best of the best, they may or may not have downsides.
Conditions:
-A character is remarkably easy to pick up for what they do.
-Very impactful perks.
-Highly beneficial to the team and/or themselves.
-Overall VERY well rounded in every aspect with little to no benefits.
-Extremely good rewards with little to no risk.

(S)
These are characters who are just, always good, they're never bad choices.
The thing that differentiates them from S+ is that S tier characters are just "Always good with no downsides". They are characters with GOOD team perks with no downside, or they can be characters that boost their team in one way or another. tl;dr impactful characters with no downsides, while S+ are just, Gods.
Conditions:
-No impactful downsides.
-Impactful perks.
-No risk at all for the rewards they provide.
-No weaknesses.

(A+)
A+ characters are those who have a specific niche that they steamroll with, a certain thing they do that no other character can do as well as they can without ridiculous amounts of prep, resources or effort.
Conditions:
-Powerful "niche" roles
-Good perks
-Minimal downsides
 

(A)
These characters are the perfect representation of "Good.", just good. You can always pick 'em without having to worry about much. Just good.

(B)
These characters are kinda just, replacable, yeah. They're just replacable. Sure, they're good, but if paired up with a character that is a better version of them you'll somewhat feel... Pointless?
Conditions: 
-Not enough impactful perks to make them worth taking over other characters.
-Replacable

(C)
Knockoff versions of other characters, yes you may pick them, but there's no purpose to them when they're literally just, worse versions of previous characters.
The thing that differentiates them from B rank characters is that, these are literally just unnecessary when paired up certain other characters. Yes they could make other characters better, but it's redundant. C tier characters could have somewhat of a very SMALL niche, these guys do not.
Conditions:
-No pick worthy perks

(D)
D tier characters are just pointless. No more explanation needed. You never need them for anything, but they aren't a hinderance.

(F)
Characters that directly or indirectly hinder your team's progress.

Now that we have the ranks out of the way, let's talk about the characters!

(Wortox)
Wortox, in my opinion, is the best character in the game and these are the reasons why:
-Requires less food intake than a lot of other characters.
To explain, you do NOT need crockpot foods as Wortox. You can easily plant several flowers in your base and live off of the souls you gain from butterflies. Sanity shouldn't be an issue if you actually kill the nightmares. 1 soul = 18 hunger and -5 sanity.
-Can heal his allies.
Self explanatory, 1 soul = 20 HP. Now this scales with the number of allies near him. Maximum HP that a single soul can heal is 20 and the lowest being 13.
13 is NOT a small amount of HP when you can literally spam it.
-A good boss killer
Wortox is IMO the safest boss killer in the game, especially with fuelweaver. One of his perks is that he gets a free lazy explorer, meaning he can teleport to any spot on the screen for 1 soul, meaning that you do not need to kite bosses, you can just teleport to the exact spot you're standing on to dodge an attack. And he has decent HP sooo, he's pretty good.
-Great explorer/Ruins rusher
His built in lazy explorer is amazing for exploring the world as well as rushing ruins, it's extremely easy not to die on this character.

This character is best paired up with:
-Wormwood - Living logs, and Wormwood's downside of not being able to heal with food.
-Wendy - Sisturn grants Wortox great sanity regen.
-Willow - Bernie can be useful for sanity issues.

(Warly)
I don't think I need to really explain this one all that much. Warly can make very powerful recipes that boost all of his allies when they consume them. From damage reduction to being able to chop faster, he's just an amazing support character.

Yes he does get hungry faster, but he also has more hunger to compensate, and he also can't eat the same dishes over and over again. But see, the only downside with that is fighting, and Warly really doesn't need to fight IMO, depending on the amount of people of course. If you have more people on the server you can easily have Warly just preparing dishes for you.

This character is best paired up with:
-Wormwood - Can make Grim Galette to heal Wormwood.
-Wolfgang - Can boost Wolfgang's damage EVEN MORE.
-Wortox - Due to Wortox not needing to eat crockpot dishes, Warly can eat them.

But yeah, not much else I have to say about Warly.

(Wormwood)
ANother character that I don't have a lot to say about. He keeps his team fed by farming 3 screens of crops before the first winter, has amazing traps that absolutely demolish hound waves, and yeah.

He can spam farm stuff like dragonfruit, pumpkins and potatoes which is really good, as well as some veggies that you'd need for Warly's spices.

His downside is just, not even a downside in multiplayer since you can just have other people doing the fighting while you farm up the food for your team.

His traps do require coordination between everyone, meaning everyone needs to war his armour to avoid dying to the traps.

This character is best paired up with:
-Wortox - Can heal him.
-Warly - Grim galette
-Wicker - Can grow his crops instantly
-Wolfgang - Wormwood can feed him
-WX-78- Can rush ruins for Wormwood to obtain more fridges.

(Wickerbottom)

Does this one even warrant a paragraph? Maybe. Wickerbottom can farm up ridiculous amounts of food for her team, can set up boss killing traps, farm krampus with birds... She is just a very potent character with no downsides.

But I'll go over her books:

-Applied horticulture: Can farm up a lot of berries, grass and twigs for her team. (Veggies if she has Wormwood or farms)
-Birds of the world: By creating a little caged arena far away from her camp she can summon birds inside it and then put them to sleep with Sleepytime stories to repeatedly kill them until she spawns krampus, leading into a krampus sack farm.
-Sleepytime stories: Can be used during the dragonfly fight to keep her from enraging. It puts enemies to sleep.
-The end is night: Pretty much has 1 and only 1 use. Overcharging WX-78.
-On Tentacles: A very, very cool book in my opinion, it has a lot of different uses, the most basic use is setting up for bee queen, surrounding the big beehive in tentacles in order to let the tentacles kill her. You can also have a pseudo hound wave trap with these, but that's a little bit riskier. It's a book that summons 3 tentacles for you.

This character is best paired up with:
-Wolfgang - Can provide a lot of food for him.
-WX-78- Can keep him overcharged.
-Wormwood- Can instantly grow his crops.
-Maxwell- Uses her books for her.

(Wurt)
Oh boy, the little merm lady, what can I say, her survival skills are unmatched, in my opinion the best SOLO survivor in the game, but this is a multiplayer tier list soo. Wurt is a purely late game character, early on she should focus on survival, setting up basic necessities as well as gathering resources for her merm structures, since her perks require chunky amounts of resources that's somewhat tedious to obtain.

She's a character who provides her team with a lot of "damage", and by that I mean boss damage. Her merms can be utilized in many ways that could let you take down enemies:

-Bee Queen setup: Her merms are much more powerful than bunnies and they're also tankier, much faster too.
-Anti hound wave setup: She can make her disguises for her allies so they could all huddle up with her merms for protection.

Her main downside is that her perks are VERY expensive, but that's why you have teammates for, to help you gather those resources.

She also saves a lot of food since she can just eat Durians that Wicker, Worwoom or herself farm up. One durian is 60 hunger, which makes for an AMAZING food source. She can eat only that and leave the rest of the foods to her allies.

This character is a weird S rank and that's mostly because of her design, she revolves heavily around creating a merm army that she can use to DESTROY almost ANY boss in the game(try the merms with ancient guardian), as well as saving up on food by eating only durians.

There's not really any character she particularly works "best" with, she's a solo standing character that indirectly boosts her team's safety AND damage by a mile, but I guess:

-Wickerbottom- Wurt can spam farm tentacle spots for her through Merm king, and Wicker can grow her durians for her.
-Wormwood- Can farm durians for her.

Also she's nice when it comes to collecting tedious resources, such as fish, kelp and tentacle spots.

(Wolfgang)
Does a lot of damage, clears out bosses like they're spiders, LITERALLY nothing else I can mention about Wolfgang.
His entire playstyle is killing things and then using their food drops to kill more things. The reason he is in S rank is that he can destroy bosses for his allies SO FAST that it's unreal, he boosts his team by obtaining amazing loot for them, if he decides to share it ofc.

This character is best paired up with:

-Wickerbottom- Farms up food for him.
-WOrmwood- Farms up food for him.
-WX-78- Farms gears for him(for WX).
-Wigfrid- Can use her helmets and farms up meat for her.
-Maxwell- Farms nightmare fuel for him(For maxwell).

(Wendy)
Oh Wendy, she's just, an amazing support character who boosts her team's damage by 10% for 2 seconds every time Abigail attacks an enemy, or rather, the enemy takes 10% more damage for 2 seconds, but yeah. But "won't abigail die to bosses instantly", you may ask, she won't, because Wendy can make a tons of different elixirs for her, one of them being "Spectral Cure-All" which heals 20HP every second up to 600 HP for Abigail, and that's pretty great especially since Abigail doesn't need to stay alive for that long in a boss fight if you have a bit more people.
Abigail also destroys hound waves, she can take on (around) 15 hounds on her own without any potions.

Abigail is also an EXCELLENT way to farm meat and other resources:

-Abigail + Spectral Cure-All or Revenant Restorative + Distilled Vengeance against groups of pigment (yes, she can kill groups of pigmen now), hounds, bunnymen, merms(a little bit trickier) and even Vargs, she can solo kill 2 Vargs in the night with this setup.

I recommend always having a Revenant Restorative on you, it heals 3 HP (or 2, I am trusting the Wiki, even though I think it's a total of 2 per sec) every second, so it's a nice little boost for when you're fighting spiders or hounds, or even for using after a close battle, it's cheap and nice, you can never have too many of these.

Wendy also doesn't really have any character she does best with, so the only thing I'll say is:
-Wigfrid and Wolfgang- It outweighs Wendy's lower damage due to the fact that they have higher damage.

(Woodie)
Woodie is another simple one, kinda. He's a character with multiple uses that let him cover more ground:

-Goose: Let's him explore the map a lot more efficiently.
-Beaver: Gathers A LOT of wood very quickly.
-Moose: A decent fighter, use Moose when you don't need better gear and don't want to waste durability of items.

Not much I can say about Woodie either, he has a lot of options to what he can do, but in his core he's a very simple character.

Now the reason he's in A+ instead of A is that he's "The Jack of all trades but the king of none" kind of character, but to next level.
Also his beard gives 45 winter insulation which is also nice, but the main that helps him hold his place as an A+ character is his ridiculous versatility in terms of what he can do.

His main downside is his hunger drain after transforming back into Woodie, he loses all of his hunger so watch out for that.

This character is best paired up with:

-Wendy- Farms monster meat for him.
-Webber- Farms monster meat for him.

(Willow)
Oh Willow, everybody's favourite character to blame for random fires they're Wicker started by not knowing how her book works, but yeah, Willow.
Willow is a very basic survival character, she loses and gains 10% sanity from all sources besides direct sanity drains (monster meat, green caps).
The main reason you pick Willow in a group is for Bernie, and is bernie a powerful tool...
Bernie:
-Can farm nightmare fuel INFINITELY, when he kills a nightmare Willow does NOT gain sanity, meaning that as long as you have sewing kits or tape you can go on forever.
-He is great at fighting bosses due to having 2000HP and 50 single target damage. He's especially good during bosses that drain sanity.
-He can be useful with hound waves, AS LONG as your team actually attacks the hounds, remember, Bernie is a DEFENSIVE tool, not an OFFENSIVE one.

Willow's lighter is also a decent tool EARLY GAME for cooking foods for other characters for that extra hunger or sanity.

Some personal tips for Willow:
-Make night lights, they're a great source of sanity and refueling them is INCREDIBLY cheap for Willow, they're also decent light sources and insanity farms for other players.
-KELP FLOWER CROWNS, I cannot stress this enough, they're a great sanity loss tool if you wanna slowly lose sanity to get bernie.
-Eating glommer's goop during fights as healing items is amazing, you gain health and you get Bernie.

Willow doesn't work especially well with anyone, she's a support survivalist who brings damage, protection and solo survival potential to the team.

(Wigfrid)
Same as Wolfgang, not much I can say. She kills things and builds armour for others, that's pretty much it. She's a stat character more than anything else, just that she can also protect her team with helmets. Honestly, there's not much else I can say, all of these A and below characters are fairly simple.

She works well with everyone but especially well with Wurt due to Wurt only eating veggies.

(WX-78)
Oh boy, this one's gotta get people angry, I don't think WX-78 is S tier anymore, he brings nothing to the table, but the reason he's not D tier like Wilson is that WX can explore during winter extremely well, and he can help take bosses down, so that's pretty much it.

This character is best paired up with:
-Wickerbottom- Overcharge.

(Winona)
This character's only purpose is to craft catapults, and that's it.
Catapults can be used to help take down giants that are stationary(Bee Queen, Ancient Fuelweaver, Dragonfly...) though they're fairly expensive so you're best off using Merms IMO.

Yes Merms are also expensive, but they don't require to be refueled with gems every couple of days.

This character is best paired up with:
-Willow- Can make tapes that fully repair Bernie.

(Webber)
This poor character always had a minor dilemma of either being replaced by Wendy or making Wendy more useful, but now it's just, his only purpose is easily farming monster meat, which Wendy/Abigail do a million times better, the only benefit he brings to the table is being able to create spider nests early on, and that's it.

Right now he suffers from the long lost "Woodie Effect" where there's a character that outclasses him by doing the same thing, just that with Webber it's 2 characters:

-Abigail and Wendy- If you have Wendy you don't need Webber, unless you just want a million silk since Wendy can easily go to the desert and farm up hounds like they're nothing. Also late game you can obtain spider nests extremely easily.
-Wormwood- Food is not an issue anymore since Wormwood got released, so monster meat farming isn't that big of a deal when pumpkins give 40 hunger.
Webber is NOT useless, just rather obsolete nowadays.

This character works best with:
-Wendy- Farming spiders.

(Maxwell)
Oh boy, Maxwell is trash. There is no scenario (besides you liking Maxwell more) in which you'd choose Maxwell over Woodie, there's just no scenario.
Maxwell comes with 75HP, and high maintenance puppets (they summon treeguards while Beaver doesn't).

You can argue that he can infinitely farm nightmare fuel, but Bernie does it better.

But yeah, he used to replace Woodie, but now the tides have turned.

This character is best paired up with:
-Wickerbottom- Can use her books due to his sanity regen.

(Wilson)
Wilson is a basic survival character directed towards helping newer players surviving their first winter. He has no beneficial perks for his team besides his beard.
He has no downsides either.

This character is best paired up with:
-Willow- Bernie requires beard hair to be crafted which Wilson can provide.

(Wes)
This character was created to be a hindering challenge for the player, which is cool in DS but not in DST where teamwork plays a great part in survival.
No purpose to play this character other than to be a hindrance to your team's progress.

This character is best paired up with:
-Wormwood- Massive food production.
-Wicker- Massive food production.
 

And that's it for my tier list! Hope you guys found this interesting! Leave your comments about this so we could discuss differentiating opinions about who is a noob and who is a pro.

This may seem unfair, as the LEDENDARY POTATO CUP it the most powerful object in existence, but I have an idea!

First, you need to kill Fuelweaver with only your fists

Then you must kill Ancient Guardian while wearing only a grass suit

The Ancient Guardian will then drop THE POTATO KEY! Which you then need to insert it into the Gateway, Then kill the Ancient Potatoweaver! Which is Fuelweaver with Misery Toadstool health.

Then, the Potatoweaver will drop 1 Potato Gem. You will need to do all this over again until you have 8 potato gems.

You then need to Go to the crab king, and insert the 8 potato gems into it and fight a maxed out crab king.

Crab King will drop a potato bird, which you need to poison like a cannary, and drop it next to MISERY TOADSTOOLS cap, which will turn him into Potatostool

You the need to kill Potatostool (Misery toadstool but with 4 extra digits of health and is intakill) to get the Potato cup FRAGMENT

You then need to do ALL this 11 MORE TIMES then you must put the 12 potato fragments into a Scaled Chest

And then, on a full moon, the chest will turn into the POTATO CHEST, and inside it, will be the LEGENDARY POTATO CUP!!!!!

It has no durability, and you can drink from it for an all stat boost and place it on your head to have all mobs be neutral to you, (Even Webber can befriend pigs) and have players bow down to you.

You did it, you beat the game

At least until I make the rest of the LEGENDARY POTATO DISHWARE and the LEGENDARY POTATO THRONE

Ever feel that you had a question about DST but felt it didn't deserve it's own thread? Well then ask it here.

A thread like this existed before but I'm afraid it fell deep into the archive, so here is a new one. You can post funny, odd and terrible pictures that you made while playing DST.

Here are some from my collection:

Love this one because it looks like as if the third bunny from the right (not counting the bunny behind the hut) is throwing the small bunny.

My dear Wolfgang managed to trap himself while being sane and of course I mocked him by taking a screenshot and weeks later finding myself trapped in this too while being sane.

Wigfrid is able to fish in carpet. Who would have guessed.

Nome is an absolute legend

Look at this and You'll see why

(Also the offer for you to create how you get the TIMELESS POTATO SPOON is still up)

I recently started a world and in that world I found this

Here bee queen and dfly are about a screen apart, is there any way I can pit them against each other?

Wurt, Warly, and Wormwood still need Survivor skins.

Just saying. 

Hypothetically speaking, how much hunger drain would you be able to handle before you just couldnt take the heat? twice the hunger drain? 4x? 8x? I'd like to know. 

I think I'd be able to handle something like 5 or 6 times hunger drain in a singleplayer world before I'd just drop dead. 

I posted this on a less popular section of the forums on accident

Okay so do the old methods not work anymore? Neither modifying the saveindex nor using TheWorld.topology works anymore as far as I can tell. Does anyone know how to modify world settings post-world creation in the latest update?

Because I'm curious about the importance of the Mourire pamphlet, I'm also curious about the people in the photograph. Was Wendy part of the seance?

Have you ever been blessed by the drop system? Have you ever started the game with the Daily Gift being an Elegant tier gift and wanted to show it off somewhere? Feel free to post it here.

I'll start first.

All of the characters are getting reworks. Since that entails not only lore (except Woodie ), but also exclusive powers and constructions, I imagine Maxwell and Wilson will be getting them as well. I've seen a few people talk about this in other threads, but I'm curious to see what people want from it.

Me, personally, I don't want him changed drastically, as he is a good starting character. I think his reworks should effect late game as opposed to being easily activated abilities. I saw ideas for exclusive meat effigies, or resurrection stuff, which would correspond well to his Forge powers. I like the idea of something magical as well.

Considering he, like Maxwell, was also a Shadow King, I wonder if he might gain mild magical abilities. It could have something to do with insanity monsters (maybe he could have exclusive items that allow him to create shadow monsters that will fight for him, but attack him if he goes insane, so it's a double-edged sword. Something like that should be hidden behind several magic labs, though, to make it unlikely for new players to be able to access). As for the lore... maybe it doesn't have to be about his past, but instead it can concern Charlie taking an interest in him now since he and Maxwell are different?

Just speculation. What are your guys' ideas?

What is your favorite and least favorite skin for each character?

Hi all. The old topic was archived in early 2017, but I thought it'd be a good idea to bring it back. There have been a ton of content since and quite a bit of skins. Personally I really enjoyed the Victorian collection but others were good as well. Well, if you got any cool outfit sets you wish to share - post it here!

I'll start

Colonel Woodie of The Royal Canadian Regiment

Shadow smith Winona

XIX century colonial governor Wilhelm P. Higgsenburgh

Severely beaten yet still dapper Wilson

Yes, we probably gonna get Wigfrid update. But I wondered a bit about of that picture Klei shared on Aug. QoL update (Disappointment one).

She have so much photo of her around home and it's kinda creepy. And also there is so much thing about her job like spears, unicorns. Who would do that? How many pic. of yourself you have at your house? Or how many pic about your job? I have a single shotgun on wall but I'm just a student.

 Even Maxwell's house don't have stuff like that.. He have photo of Charlie and himself and few search stuffs about DS world. (Photos from puzzles).

I don't think and believe she is that narcissistic. Maybe it's a normal thing for you but I think it's a bit strange. Just realize a doctor have a hanged photo taken while surgeon.

I just have a unpopular opinion. That photo is not from her house. It's from a house of her big FAN. I don't know who can be fan but it's possible. We know most of characters know others and have bonded (Like Maxwell is aunt of Wendy or Wolfgang is kind of boss of Maxwell. OR maybe the fan is another person living in house. Like Webber's parents or the creator of WX (Wagstaff). All of these are theory by the way :P 

With the recent Troubled Waters update and the many new perks/obstacles out at sea, I thought I’d re-fresh my ocean survival guide so that everyone can have a mari-time out at sea. For those who’ve seen my previous ocean guide, I’ll have a table of contents for you to navigate, but I encourage you to anchor down and read the entire thing because almost every section will have new material. For those who have never stepped on a boat in their lives, don’t worry; I’ll try to water down some of the basics to bring everyone up to the same sea-level. Without further ado, let’s dive into the guide.

Table of Contents

1. The Basics of Fishing

2. Fishing Tricks and Tips

3. Building the Base Boat

4. Rushing the Base Boat

5. Food Sources

6. Seafood Cuisine

7. Daily Life at Sea

8. Dangers at Sea and the Buffed Abigail Meta

9. Special Boats for the Anti-Pig Characters

10. Credits

1. The Basics of Fishing

This section will cover the bare minimum you need to know about fishing basics for the purposes of this guide. Miscellaneous info will be left out, like unused floats and lures for example. The DST wiki has extremely thorough pages covering these miscellaneous details already.

To start off, let’s talk about the basic equipment you need:

-

Unlike the normal fishing rod, this sea fishing rod specifically allows you to fish at sea with infinite durability. When you equip it, you will see 2 extra slots above your fishing rod:  is where you can equip “floats” that increase the accuracy and max distance of your rod when you throw your line out to the water with your mouse, and  is where you can equip “lures”/bait that generally increase the chances of the fish biting your hook. Requires 1  and 6  in the  tab

-

This is your ocean crafting station, which can be found in your  tab. This structure is required for creating the lures and floats covered below. It requires: 1  which you can find by exploring the coast and then building a disposable boat to pick up, 1  which you can obtain from hammering skeleton spawns or bones commonly found in any desert biome, and 1 

-

This is the float we will be using. Floats are items that allow you to throw your fishing line farther and with more accuracy; this float is cheap and good enough for your entire voyage. Costs 1 

These are the lures we will be using. Lures are basically infinite-durability bait with the special property of increasing the chance of a fish bite if you reel once before the fish touches it; costs 2 and 1 of the respective colored mushroom 

-

This is bait used very occasionally for specific fish that the lures mentioned above can’t catch.

Contrary to how pond fishing works, ocean fishing involves targeting shadows of fish in the water and tossing your line as close to them as possible hoping they’ll bite your hook.

Once you’ve hooked your fish, the fish will struggle to escape, and you will need to right-click to reel the fish in. Your character will have 3 animations during this struggle (I included a second rotated picture for each animation):

If your character is the top or bottom picture, you need to keep reeling your fishing rod, but if it’s the bottom, then you’re not reeling fast enough. Not reeling fast enough will loosen your line, and the fish will escape.

If your character is the middle, you need to STOP reeling, or your line will snap; unlike the loose line from the bottom picture where you lose nothing but the fish, making your line too tight will snap the line and make you lose the FLOAT and LURE that was attached.

I recommend right-click reeling at a rhythm of about once every half-second so you don’t over-reel when the fish starts pulling and likewise aren’t reeling slow enough for the fish to get away. Remember that lures (unlike bait) give you an attractiveness bonus when you reel before the bite (basically convincing the fish that the lure is alive), so it’s standard to reel at least once after your line hits the water. Here is what a standard successful catch looks like.

When you successfully catch your fish, you should pick it up and place it in the tin fishing bin on your boat. Fish stored here will never die, making it absolutely vital for long-term food storage.

2. Fishing Tips and Tricks

The standard, simple fishing technique like what you see above is great and all, but out at sea where food is more come-and-go than mass-produced and schools of fish continue to swim away while you’re struggling with a fish of your own, any tricks you can use to even slightly speed up your catch will net you significantly more fish from a school and save you a ton of time for sailing, especially if you have extra mouths to feed. This section will go over those tricks.

Shortening Reeling Distance

The farther the fish is away from your boat when you hook it, the longer the struggling phase will last. You can shorten this MASSIVELY and save tens of seconds per catch by getting the fish’s attention with your lure and then reeling the lure closer to your boat without letting the fish bite it.

Additionally, if you bring the fish all the way to the edge of your boat, there’s a chance depending on the lure’s position on that edge for you to skip the entire struggle phase and pull the fish immediately out of the water.

Spread Out

Having a crew of friends on your voyage is great, but more often than not, your friends will end up getting in your way if all of you are throwing your lines in the same general area; this is because the moment one fish gets hooked, nearby fish in a decently small radius will briefly swim away in fear. Needless to say, these scared fish won’t bike on your hook during the fearful-swimming animation. In order to get around this problem, all you have to do is disperse; go for fish that are as far away from your friend’s fish as possible, or if the whole school is frightened, target the farthest scared fish after it’s calmed down so you get the hook before the fish gets scared again from swimming toward the hooked fish.

Multi-Reel Baiting

As mentioned earlier, lures have the special property of increasing bite chances if you reel before the fish touches the hook, but the bonus rapidly fades over time. What’s also convenient is that every time the fish fails to bite, it will swim away for a split second and swim back for another bite, and the chance of the next bite attempt happening INCREASES based on the attractiveness of the lure at the time. What this means is that keeping your lure attractiveness up as long as possible is an incentive, and because the reeling bonus of lures decreases quickly after a reel, you can time your reels right before every fish bite attempt in order to maximize the chance of a fish bite.

I ONLY recommend using this method if you’re going for fish during snow or rain when attractiveness gets cut in half; in pretty much every other situation, spoon lures have enough attractiveness for you to use the shorten-distance trick.

Refreshing the Line

I’ve seen many of my fishing partners either leave their line in the water even after all the fish in the water have moved on or give up altogether. It’s true that your fish will go for your hook a certain number of times before giving up and swimming away; this doesn’t mean that YOU have to give up, though. All you need to do is briefly move your character to cancel fishing mode and then re-cast your fishing line back out; the fish that just gave up will come swimming back like it’s an entirely new lure.

3. Building the Base Boat

This section will cover how to build the base boat that will be used throughout this guide and detail the mechanics of boat building you can use to build ANY base boat you want.

To start off, the biggest obstacle you will face when building a base boat is fitting all the needed structures on that boat; to do this, you will need to place structures down in the proper ORDER. The reason this is the case is because even though structures generally take up a similar amount of space, certain structures are more easily BLOCKED than others when you try to place them on the boat. Like with the previous guide, I’ve divided these structures into “tiers” to help you with the order in which to place the structures, with Tier I being the first structures you should place. Here is a list of structures and what tiers they belong to; pictures next to the respective tier are there to show the difference in placement mechanics based on how close you’re able to place that structure to the crock pot (with the exception of Tier I).

Tier I: sails (only structures in the game that take up no space; you can put ANYTHING on top of sails)

Tier II: crock pot, both fire pits, drying racks, scaled furnace, tackle receptacle, alch engine, science machine, pig house, bunnyman hutch, lightning rod, flingomatic, farm plot, think tank, cartographer desk, bird cage, signs, potter’s wheel, scale-o-matic, wardrobe, thermal measurer, rainometer, lazy deserter, moon dial, shadow manipulator, prestihatitator, tent/siesta, salt lick, and sisturn (can fit a maximum of 7 of these on boat if placed properly)

Tier III: steering wheel and anchor

Tier IV: ice/salt box, pinchin winch, ocuvigil, fire pump, tin fishing bin

Tier V: wooden chests, spider dens, and lureplant bulbs

You can build the boat with or without the geometric placement mod. Using the geo placement mod lets you be consistent with building the exact same boat every time, but not using the mod gives you a more room for error when placing down type II structures. Here are two GIFs of me constructing the base boat with and without the geo placement mod respectively.

4. Rushing the Base Boat

Needless to say, this base boat is EXPENSIVE. That said, it is very possible to solo rush this boat (let alone with a friend) and be out at sea before Winter hits if you jump into the world with a general plan. It would take forever for me to explain through text in detail, so instead, I have a recording of one of my boat base rushes on a public server in the link down below with textual commentary scattered throughout the video. For the sake of showing that this is something ANYONE, even console players, can do, I turned off all mods. Time stamps for noteworthy parts of the run are in the video description if you want to skip around. PLEASE TURN ON SUBTITLES for commentary.

5. Food Sources

There’s a variety of food out at sea, even more so with the Troubled Waters update. This section will detail the food sources you will run into at sea and group them in order of what you should prioritize.

-

These 3 fish are your absolute best food source at sea, and if you spot them, you should drop whatever you’re doing to catch these. All 3 of these yield big fish meat, which is extremely valuable as I will explain in the next section, and while the first two fish are quick and easy to catch, the ice bream – while difficult – gives 2 extra ice for much-needed, non-spoilable filler food.

-

By itself, a single barnacle is an underwhelming ingredient. However, this is one of the best food sources to run into out at sea because there’s a ton of them in one area, and harvesting them is extremely quick. Barnacles spawn on Sea Weeds, and Sea Weeds spawn as a set piece. You need a to safely harvest them at NIGHT while they’re asleep, unless you are or have a Wormwood teammate.

Harvesting them improperly, whether it’s because you’re doing it in daytime or forgot your razor, isn’t fun.

Also, using the fire pit as a light source in this area is not a good idea because of the spittlefish that will extinguish it; I highly recommend using either the lantern or the deck illuminator here.

Sea weeds are generally spaced apart so that you can often navigate through the setpiece. Expect to get about 12-ish barnacles in one Autumn night; much more if it’s Winter or early Spring, or if you don't mess up sailing at night. Having a crew to help you navigate with short bursts of speed like shown below definitely helps due to the higher speed. It also helps to map out the area so you can see what sea weeds to row towards.

- 

Related to the fish at the top, these shoals have a ton of easy-to-catch deep bass that won’t swim beyond the shoal itself. This food source would easily be #1 if not for the Malbatross that has a chance of spawning when you visit the shoal and a smaller chance of spawning when you hook a deep bass from the shoal. This boss should be avoided as much as possible unless you want the faster sail because even though it’s neutral when spawned, it occasionally does a gliding attack that can destroy your sails. Not only that, but continuing to fish for deep bass after it spawns will anger the Malbatross, putting your boat in even more danger than it already is.

The way to play things safely without putting your main boat at risk is to make a simple “fishing station” boat with an anchor, a fire pit, and 1 or 2 fishing bins. You can park your main boat nearby and use this boat to row into the middle of the shoal so that if the Malbatross does spawn, no sails can ever be destroyed, and you can leave immediately with whatever fish you caught as the Malbatross is spawning in.

-  

These are the easiest and quickest of the small fish to catch. They are significantly valuable for their fish morsels.

-  

These are the slightly longer-to-catch small fish that are still very much worth fishing for their fish morsels.

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These are very handy on-the-go filler ingredients/sources of manure (discussed later) you can harvest while the boat is moving. I don’t recommend actively going off path just to pick them though unless you happen to find a bunch clumped together or are just that desperate for food.
 

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Skittersquids and cookie cutters drop monster meat, which is a valuable “supplemental” ingredient, which will be explained in the next section. Gnarwails drop 4 fish meat. Skittersquids additionally drop light bulbs roughly every 3 kills for extra light fuel, and cookie cutters drop their shells which are required for the Crabby Hermit house. While skittersquids and gnarwails spawn occasionally near schools of fish, cookie cutters can only be found at the salt formations. Just a warning: gnarwails will spring a leak on your boat if the person or thing it’s targeting is on the boat. It is highly recommended to NOT even bother with any of these unless you are or have a Wendy in your crew. If you do have a Wendy in your crew, however, I suggest setting her on aggressive autopilot for the gnarwails and skittersquids.
 

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Even though these are a source of fish meat, catfish take a really long time to catch even with the reel-distance shortening trick covered in Section 2; roughly 48 seconds. Don’t catch these unless you’re low on or completely out of big fish in your fishing bins.
 

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Basically, this fish has the same value of a catfish but is just way harder to catch. Like the black catfish, dandy lionfish are a source of fish meat and take roughly the same amount of lengthy time to catch (roughly 52 seconds). Unlike the black catfish, however, dandy lionfish have a much harder struggle phase. Whereas the catfish will simply pull on your line about 3 times with each pull lasting an eternity, lionfish will FREQUENTLY pull on your line in a multitude of short bursts, making for a struggle phase where you have to pay close attention or risk having your line snapped. Don’t catch these fish, especially if your internet is bad, unless you’re completely out of big fish for fish meat.

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Corn cods give corn, which gives 25 hunger eaten raw. Unfortunately, there aren’t any noteworthy hunger recipes you should use corn for, and spoon lures are half as effective on these fish compared to most other fishes. I don’t recommend catching these unless you’re desperate for food or need some manure for light fuel.
 

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These seasonal fish drop leafy meat, which you can use in the crockpot in a manner similar to monster meat as we’ll discuss in the next section. Unfortunately, these fish require seeds, so unless you happen to have an excessive amount of seeds in your ice box, are desperate for food, or need the Crabby Hermit friendship levels, don’t bother fishing these.
 

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You only need 1 of these for the fire pump, the latter of which gives you the ability to manually pump water onto your boat in case a fire starts, which is a great substitute for the flingomatic. After you manage to catch 1, I don’t recommend catching any more of these ever again because of their lackluster fish morsel reward relative to the cost of a seed needed to catch one of these.

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Don’t bother catching these.

6. Seafood Cuisine

Fishing and harvesting barnacles are great and all, but carrying capacity out at sea is pretty brutal when you’re relying mostly on randomly-spawning schools of fish. Unless you’re totally fine with stopping your boat literally every time you run into a school of fish, you want to be able to squeeze out every ounce of hunger you possibly can from your fresh ingredients. This section will detail the dishes AND recipes that will help you do just that; additionally, it will cover some common seafood dishes you DON’T want to make.

Ingredients

Just to bring everyone up to speed and summarize the point of Section 5, these are your available ingredients out at sea (things that I don’t recommend be used in the crockpot like corn not included)

(rare seasonal) (discourage from pursuing)

(from pig) (discourage from pursuing)

(rare seasonal)

Dishes on the Menu in Order of Priority

Meaty Stew

This is will be your bread and butter, being the most hunger-efficient dish you have access to at sea. Meaty stews require 3 meat value and less than 1.5 fish value in the crock pot to be made, and it gives a whopping 150 hunger. This is what the drying racks are for: extracting the fish value from your fish by turning into . As a bonus, unlike , fish meat takes 1 day to dry.

Here are the viable meaty stew recipes:

- x 2 + x 2

This is the “default” recipe you’ll be using often as it’s the most hunger-efficient recipe that relies entirely on fish. If you do the math, this recipe basically DOUBLES the hunger of every ingredient.

- x 2 + + OR OR

Use this recipe if you’re low or completely out of small fish but have an excess of big fish.

- + + x 2

You will very rarely use this recipe because you should only ever have small jerky if you run out of big fish to dry (i.e. the only thing available for you to dry are small fish).

- If you have and/or , replace 1 in either of the recipes above with 1 of any of these.

Since these meats are less-valued (i.e. rot faster than jerky let alone eternally-fresh big fish AND don’t allow duplicates in the crockpot without hurting you) than jerky, it’s definitely in your best interest to use these up as soon as possible on meaty stews. Remember that >1 =  (monster lasagna; toxic), and >1 =  (leafy meatloaf; low hunger)

Stuffed Fish Heads 

This is the dish you want to make if you have just way too many barnacles going stale in the ice box and a decent supply of small fish in the fishing bins. It requires 1 barnacle plus 3 ingredients that add up to 1 fish value (meaning at least 1 small fish is required), and it gives 75 hunger. Because you want to conserve as many small fish as possible for meaty stews, this is the only recipe you should use:

- + x 3

Meatballs

Everyone’s favorite spicy Italian dish. This basic dish covers pretty much every other niche food situation out at sea; make these if you can’t make fish heads or, more importantly, meaty stews.

Here are the very situational recipes:

- + x 3 OR x 3

- + x 3 OR x 3

Normally, you want to save monster meat for meaty stews, but if this is the ONLY meat you have on your boat and you’re about to starve, you don’t really have any other choice.

- x 4

If you have literally nothing on your boat but small fish, not even filler ingredients, then use this as a last-resort dish to give a small hunger boost to each fish. If you do the math, this recipe basically turns 4 fish morsels into 5 hunger-wise.
 

Seafood Dishes You Should Avoid Making
 

- Fish Tacos

Even though you can make these with corn, a small fish, and 2 twigs, you don’t net any hunger since 25 from corn + 12.5 from small fish = 37.5 hunger. If you need the health, surf n’ turf is a much more powerful alternative that uses more common ingredients.

- Barnacle Linguine

Much like the fish tacos, this recipe gives zero net gain in hunger. The benefit you get from this recipe is the 20 sanity, and as I’ll explain in Section 7, this sanity bonus means absolutely NOTHING.

- Surf n’ Turf

This is a popular recipe for many sailors because of the giant sanity boost at the cost of commonly-found fish. On the contrary, I only recommend making this dish for health if you need healing food for something like the Malbatross or Crab King fight. Otherwise, I suggest never making this dish since, again, sanity from crockpot dishes means nothing compared to the method of sanity management in Section 7.
 

7. Quality of Life at Sea

Unfortunately, hunger isn’t the only thing you have to manage to survive at sea. From sanity to fuel and navigation, neglecting any of these things will make your voyage irritating and can likely land you and your boat in a watery grave. This section will go over the tricks you can use to deal with these issues and make life at sea a lot more relaxing.
 

Hugging Your Pig for Sanity

This mechanic has gone under the radar for so long: if you befriend a pig and stand right next to it, you will get a +25 sanity/min aura benefit. Pigs stay befriended for 25 hunger of meat per day, meaning a small fish = half a day of sanity = 4 minutes of sanity = 100 sanity. This is why I mentioned in the previous section that sanity from food doesn’t matter; no dish can beat 100 sanity at the cost of a measly small fish.

Players on the mainland generally don’t use this mechanic because pigs will run away from you if you get close, and although you can use them at night when they’re sleeping/unable to run away from you as you invade their personal space, many would rather stay on the move or even keep their sanity low to farm shadow creatures. However, none of these reasons apply to living on a small boat where you’re obviously not traveling on foot, AND the collision physics of structures on your boat help you keep the pig trapped so you can get the full sanity aura effect as shown here.

Keep in mind though that the sanity aura isn’t area-of-effect; ONLY the player who befriended the pig gets the aura whereas the rest of the crew doesn’t. In order to “switch players”, the other person has to feed the pig. Make sure you guys take turns and be smart about it; don’t waste a fish on the pig if you have like 150 sanity out of 200, and don’t fight over the pig unless you want to drain your food supply.

Life Giving Amulets for Sanity

For most players, this really isn’t necessary at all, but if you happen to find or make any life giving amulets, bringing them on the boat is a good idea but not for the reason you may think. Almost every amulet in the game gives a +2 sanity/minute aura when you wear it, and unlike most other amulets, life giving amulets don’t degrade while you wear them.

+2 sanity/minute may sound negligible (and for the most part, it certainly is compared to the effort of making a prestihatitator to craft one), but in the long run, it definitely adds up, yielding 16 sanity per day. To put that into perspective, the shortest day possible in the entire game has 150 seconds of daylight and 330 seconds of dusk/night, meaning you will only ever lose a MAX of 27.5 sanity in one day from the -5 sanity/minute dusk-night insanity aura. Your life-giving amulet replenishes over half of that every day.

With that said, life giving amulets DO degrade if you get hit. The way it works is that the moment you get hit, the amulet gets triggered into exchanging your hunger for health over time until you’re 100% health, and each exchange reduces durability. In order to stop this, take off the amulet and fully heal yourself through other methods (e.g. surf n’ turf), AND THEN put the amulet back on.

Conserving Fuel with the Scaled Furnace and Thermal Stone

Fuel out at sea is hard to come by, and realistically, you won’t find enough to keep your fire pits lit every single night. This is where the scaled furnace comes in handy; the scaled furnace is an eternal light and heat source, and although its light radius is extremely small, its heat radius is decent enough for you to produce your own light through orange thermal stones. If you place it near your steering wheel like the boat in Section 3, you can easily keep your thermal stone orange and steer the boat just fine at night using your map without the threat of Charlie; likewise, your crewmates can move around the boat with orange thermal stones no problem. This way, as moderately uncomfortable as it is, you can technically survive forever without ever needing a fire. The following GIF shows the helmsman moving about the boat perfectly fine with a thermal stone that's kept warm by the furnace.

Glommer Goop and Manure

This is pretty straightforward: Glommer’s value aside from minor sanity is that it produces , which has the same fuel value in the fire pit as a plank. Fuel is scarce out at sea, so any renewable fuel source you can bring on your boat helps.

Likewise, as briefly mentioned in Section 5, if you have excess food, you can feed your pig kelp and corn to produce manure, which has the same fuel value as a log.

If you plan on using the scaled furnace conservation method though, all of this is more of a luxury than a necessity.
 

Fuel on the Ocean
 

These will occasionally spawn in your vicinity, and while you shouldn’t go out of your way to pick these, they’re worth picking up if you happen to run into them.
 

Unlike the above, this is something you want to steer your boat towards if you see it. These boat fragments drop a whole if you hammer them. A word of caution though: hammer these manually with your MOUSE. DO NOT use the action key because you’ll most likely end up hammering structures on your boat instead.

These chests drop valuable loot, many of which are massive fuel sources. In order to get these, you have to find their location by opening a bunch of  until the location pops up as an X on your map.
 

These are among the most flammable loot you’ll find in the sunken chests. DO NOT use these as fuel. Instead, what I recommend doing is slowly stockpile a couple of these over the course of your treasure hunt, place a disposable boat in the water, place the kits down, and then hammer the structures. Not only do you get more fuel supplies (the kit itself is only worth the same as a plank, and you get more than planks back from hammering a single anchor); you also get a renewable source of rocks at sea that you can use to make a new hammer.

The Anchor Burst Trick

Controlling your boat is extremely important, and this couldn’t be more true in hazardous waters where sea stacks are everywhere or brine waters where the salt deposits themselves are a physical boat hazard. A way to carefully navigate around these obstacles is to move in short, carefully controlled bursts so that you’re not spending all day moving at a snail’s pace with the anchor down but also not risking your boat taking damage. To do this, all you need to do is lift up your anchor and cancel the lifting animation midway (or however long you want the burst of speed to be) by moving your character. A team version of this was shown in Section 5 in the barnacle-harvesting portion, but for solos, it should look something like this.

Mining the Sea Stacks

As shown in the GIF above, you can mine the sea stacks in order to clear a path for yourself by moving your boat close to the sea stack and anchoring down with 1 sail up so that the boat slowly moves in range of the sea stack. With just 1 sail up, the boat will be slow enough to not take any damage if it touches the sea stack while you’re mining it.

Alternatively, if you or one of your crewmates is a Maxwell, you can have the shadow puppet mine the sea stack for you from a distance.

Coordinating with your Crew

Having an assigned job on the boat makes things insanely more efficient, less stressful, and frankly just more fun for everyone because aside from the camaraderie of legitimately working as a team, sticking to your own job streamlines everything so that you don’t get in the way of each other. It’s not fun when two people try to hit the anchor as the boat’s heading toward a sea stack, and they end up crashing because the dropped anchor got slightly raised by the last person to click on the anchor.

You can divide up the work however you want, but for me, I find that these roles work pretty well:

- Helmsman: This is the ship driver. Their job is to raise the anchor and steer the boat. It’s important that you use your map while you’re driving because it will show sea stacks up ahead that you normally wouldn’t be able to immediately spot on your screen; this way, you can steer around them no problem. Also, using the map allows you to navigate at night regardless of light. Dropping the anchor is fine if you’re doing non-emergency stuff like making a U turn, but otherwise, leave most of the anchor-dropping to the seaman. If you need sanity from pigs, switch places with the seaman temporarily.

- Seaman: This is the gas pedal and emergency breaks of the ship. Their job is to manage the sails, drop the anchor, and keep an eye out for fish. Standing on the edge of the boat in the general direction the boat’s moving is a good idea since you get to spot both sea stacks AND fish this way. At night, however, you have to use the map and prioritize spotting the sea stacks over spotting fish. A side job they have shared with the cook is to pick items on the water like driftwood, kelp, bottles, etc. while the boat is on the move.

- Cook: This is the chef of the ship. Their job is to dry fish, organize cargo, and most importantly, cook food. Along with the seaman, they’re also responsible for picking up items on the water. This is probably the most important role on the ship because how well the cook knows what recipes to use determines whether your crew starves or not. A chef who makes surf n’ turf for hunger, for example, is sabotaging your food supply rather than helping.  

Here’s a small window into what a normal day with a coordinated crew looks like.

8. Dangers at Sea and Abigail

Aside from sea stacks and hazardous food sources like sea weeds, skittersquids, and cookie cutters mentioned in previous sections, there are other things you will encounter during your travels that want you and/or your boat dead, many of which were added in the recent Troubled Waters update. This section will cover those hazards as well as how to properly deal with them.

Rockjaw Sharks and the Buffed Abigail Meta

My previous ocean survival guide had a supplemental guide on using Abigail to circumvent some issues out at sea. You can read the whole thing here: [insert URL]
For those who want a quick tl;dr, however:
- Abigail can be used to kill Malbatross without needing a boomerang
- Abigail can be used to keep cookie cutters away from your boat/outright kill them for monster meat while you mine salt
- Abigail can be used to kill gnarwhails and skittersquids (valuable sources of food and lantern fuel) out in the water without any threat to you or your boat
 

Probably the biggest threat in the ocean right now is the rockjaw. These are dangerous, high-DPS sharks (with a triple AOE attack that does 90 damage total) that have a low chance of spawning whenever a school of fish spawns near you, much like gnarwails. UNLIKE gnarwails, however, these rockjaws DO NOT DESPAWN. If you sail away from them, they’ll be in that area when you come back. The only way to truly get rid of them is to kill them. Unfortunately, there is no way to flawlessly kill a rockjaw by hand; it has an unpredictable attack pattern on your boat. Sometimes it will do 1 triple AOE attack, and other times, it’ll do 2-5 triple AOE attacks.
As of the 8/20/20 update, Rockjaws now despawn, so killing them is no longer mandatory.
 

This is where Abigail's already-overpowered abilities out at sea get even more overpowered. If the rockjaw is fighting in the water, instead of the triple AOE attack, it will attack with just a single bite and then kite. You can use Abigail to kill the rockjaw out in the water to prevent it from ever hurting you and your crew. With that being said, because the rockjaw has so much health (1000) and it swims pretty fast as part of its kiting pattern, unless you start the fight in the afternoon/dusk/early night, Abigail might die. 
 

Wavy Jones

Wavy Jones is the ocean version of the shadow hands, only much more annoying. His head spawns on the edge of the boat, and his hands will generally go for the sails and anchor, and depending on your sanity level, he will also go for your patched leaks (assuming your boat has a repaired leak). As long as you’re sailing at night and have above 50% of your sanity, he isn’t a threat whatsoever, especially if you’re relying on the furnace method for light. 

You can step on his head 3 times to get rid of him. However, because of collision physics with structures on the edge of your boat, you won’t always be able to step on him. If you run into this situation, what you can do instead is anchor down and stand between Wavy Jones and the anchor until morning arrives so that you’re body-blocking the anchor from being raised. As long as the anchor is down, even if Wavy Jones lowers both of your sails, your boat will be slow enough to never spring a leak.

Terrorclaw

This is the ocean version of the terrorbeak, but much more annoying. It will camp on the edge of your boat and swipe at you when you get in range. This thing has a much longer range of attack than the terrorbeak, extending to about the radius of your boat. You can avoid this monster entirely by keeping your sanity up; it only spawns at really low sanity level anyways, similar to the sanity levels required for terrorbeaks. That said, if you want to kill them for whatever reason, all you have to do is bait out their long-ranged swipe attack before hitting it.

Malbatross

This ocean boss spawns at deep bass shoals. Only a quarter of these shoals in the entire map can spawn the boss, but you can keep fishing deep bass at shoals where it hasn’t spawned for a 10% chance of spawning it. You can see these shoals on your map. [Picture of deep bass shoal]

I recommend avoiding this boss for the reasons mentioned in Section 5, but if you want to kill it for the winged mast, see the Abigail Meta thread linked above in the Rockjaw subsection.

Note: crab king is not included in this guide because it’s not a hazard unless you willfully wake him up with gems. If you want to know more about this raid boss, the wiki page does a wonderful job of explaining the mechanics in detail.
 

9. Special Boats for the Anti-Pig Characters

A big part of the survival strategy in this guide revolves around pigs; unfortunately, there are 3 characters in this game whom pigs will attack on sight, meaning that the boat in Section 3 isn’t safe for them. This section will cover some example boats you can use in place of the one in Section 2 specifically for these characters. Just a disclaimer: just because of how inefficient/dangerous these boats are for other characters, I strongly recommend using them solo for the most part.

Wortox

This boat’s pretty straightforward; it’s the same as the Section 3 boat but with the pig house replaced with another drying rack. Wortox’s biggest weakness out at sea here is his abysmal hunger gain from food, and without the pig house or a renewable sleeping method, his sanity is also another issue. The extra drying rack makes it so that you can make meaty stews much more often by drying any kind of fish, big or small. To put the hunger situation into perspective, you need 1 meaty stew per day to survive as Wortox.

For sanity, the “optional” glommer and life-giving amulet in Section 7 are now absolutely MANDATORY. Glommer’s +6 sanity/min alone can offset the daily sanity drain, but you’ll starve to death by standing still doing nothing for that long. The life-giving amulet’s +16 sanity/day offsets the burden significantly so that even for the shortest possible days in the entire game, you just need to use glommer for 2 minutes max.   

Webber

This boat’s pretty easy to explain; just fit as many spider dens as you want and do some spider civil wars out at sea. The monster meat alone will cover all the hunger you’ll ever need, so you don’t even have to fish. The silk can be used to make top hats which give 26.4 sanity/day, which is just 1.1 sanity short of the maximum 27.5 sanity loss, which can be made up by continuing to wear the hat on longer days where you’ll get a net gain in sanity. 3 spider dens should be enough to survive; you can even settle for 2 and use fish to finish off the hunger deficit if you want. Make sure to place the spider dens towards the center of the boat away from the edges; especially when the boat is moving, spiders can accidentally spawn and walk on water if the spider dens are touching the edge. This boat is pretty basic and has a ton of space, so feel free to add any additional structures you want, like lureplants or more chests.  

Bringing (but not necessarily wearing) a life-giving amulet is also encouraged, not so much for the sanity but for the off chance that you die from a failed civil war attempt. Normally, you should be able to kill this small number of spiders yourself with a moderate amount of damage (since the spiders you befriend won’t be attacking you if you fail a fake-attack), and should you take that damage, you have surf n’ turf available for healing alongside the excess spider glands.

Wurt

This is the hardest character to survive with at sea. Wurt’s a vegetarian, so the meat-centered tactics that’ve been covered in this guide so far don’t apply to her. Aside from the obvious value of catching corn cods for 25-hunger raw corn, the obvious choice here is to go with farm plots for the most filling non-meat dish: dragonpies. The great thing about this dish is that the filler can be almost anything as long as it’s not meat; that includes edibles like EGGS and non-edibles like twigs.

You can turn the non-veggie fish that you catch and even something as mass-harvestable as barnacles into eggs. Barnacles are the jackpot for Wurt, so if you see any Sea Weeds, prioritize this over anything else. Likewise, you can let some fish/barnacles rot in the chests to use as fertilizer for your dragonfruit farm. Because you’re going to be using fish for eggs/fertilizer, focus on catching easy fish like deep bass and most small fish rather than tough ones like dandylions and catfish (with the exception of ice breams due to the valuable ice filler). The boat you will see below only has one fishing bin because you can keep eggs fresh for eternity if you cook the egg when it’s stale and feed it to the bird.

Another helpful recipe you can use as a hunger buffer while your dragonfruits are growing or if it's Winter is to make ratatouille with  x 2 +   x 2. 

Farm plots are super unpopular and regularly memed in the community, so many of you might not be familiar with some of the intricate farming and farm-related mechanics; let me briefly explain these mechanics as well as a few lesser-known bird/temperature mechanics related to farming.

Farm plots (specifically the improved ones) can only grow 30 crops before requiring fertilizer to replenish the soil, and it takes 10 minutes daylight for a seed to grow. Rain speeds up the growth rate of the crop by roughly 2x based on an experiment with moderate rain. You can also use fertilizer to speed up the growth of the seed, but it won’t affect the fertility of the farm soil. The only 2 fertilizers you need to know about are guano and rot (spoiled fish/spoiled small fish = rot). Guano speeds up a seed’s growth by 7.5 minutes of light, and rot speeds up growth by 1.25 minutes of light. Guano also replenishes 12 seeds’ worth of fertility in the soil if used on an empty farm, and rot replenishes 2 seeds’ worth of fertility. Seeds will not grow when the temperature is “cold”, but as long as it’s not 0 degrees or below, you can still grow your crops through fertilizer (e.g. the 1st and roughly 2nd day of Winter with some fluctuation depending on daytime/dusk/night). Regarding birds, if you feed a crop to a bird in a bird cage, you will get a seed for that crop back plus a 50% chance of an extra crop seed and a 50% chance of a regular ambiguous seed. Finally, here’s an extremely overlooked mechanic involving birds: if you feed a seed to a bird in a bird cage, a third of the time, you will get guano.

So there are quite a few ways you can apply these mechanics to your advantage to survive on the boat as Wurt. For starters, as you’re feeding dragonfruit to the bird to get more dragonfruit seeds, 50% of the time, you will get a “useless” regular seed that’s actually not so useless if you feed it to the bird for guano. On average, you will get 1 guano for every 6 dragonfruits you feed to the bird through the on-average 3 regular seeds. NEVER use more than 1 guano to grow a crop; 1 guano + 2 rot = a fully grown dragonfruit. That said, if you plan on staying on the boat long-term, be sure to save most of the fertilizer for replenishing the soil.

A major downside to farm plots, however, is that you can’t grow them during Winter and Summer. The only thing you can do is stockpile enough dragonfruits to last you through the season while you buffer the hunger burden with corn cods. Excluding corn cods and kelp, you need roughly 11 dragonpies to survive each season, so stock up on fertilizer and grow a little less than 11 dragonfruits a few days before Winter/Summer hits. Keep 3 dragonfruit seeds in the ice box for after the season is over.

I also highly encourage bringing glommer along for the free glommer goop, which can be used as either fertilizer or light fuel.  

With hunger out of the way, let’s briefly talk about sanity. Sanity is really simple for Wurt. Just keep a fish in your inventory for the same sanity aura as a top hat. Having a life-giving amulet for supplemental sanity is also encouraged.  

I know that was a lot of info just for one niche boat for one specific character, so here’s a tl;dr

- Make a boat centered around dragonpies, and catch corn cods to eat raw corn.
- Quantity > Quality of fish; catch a ton of easy ones (and ice breams) and turn them into eggs to use as dragonpie filler or ratatouille filler. You can also use twigs for filler.
- Kill and let some fish rot in chests for spoiled fish fertilizer, which is the same as rot.
- For every 3 dragonfruits you grow, feed 2 to the bird for dragonfruit seeds, and use the remaining one for food. You can feed the junk regular seeds to the bird for a good chance at guano.
- You can use 1 guano + 2 rot to instantly grow your dragonfruit; try to stockpile fertilizer for a few days before Winter or Summer so you can grow a bunch of dragonfruits to survive that season. Also save at least 3 dragonfruit seeds in the ice box.
- Bring glommer for glommer goop.

10. Credits

- @thegreatmanagement and @X-lem for helping me out in the recorded GIFs

- @Electroely for inventing the multi-reel baiting trick

- The DST wiki for some of the item pictures used throughout this guide, the Farming wiki page that explained the value of each fertilizer, the Bird Cage wiki page that gave the actual % chance of guano drop, the Shadow Monster wiki page that gave the % sanity thresholds of Wavy Jones, and the convenient Sanity wiki page that inspired the sanity ideas in Section 7
 

If there are any questions about what parts were unclear or anything ocean-related, please let me know. Otherwise, that’s all I got; thanks for reading, and I hope this guide helped or encouraged some of you to try basing/surviving on the ocean!

P.S. This guide was completed as of 8/19/20. There is a quality-of-life update happening tomorrow that could possibly make some of this info out of date. Please check the replies and/or possible edit notes below should the quality of life update nullify some of this information.

EDIT 8/20/20: Rockjaws are now de-spawnable as of the Quality of Life update today. All GIFs have been put in Spoiler boxes to prevent lag for some viewers. Also, ratatouille has been added as a dish to help Wurt sailors; suggested by @FuriousChimera.