Question #5

Will players be able to attack monsters from their boats with ranged or mage in addition to using cannons that are on the ship?

Mod Elena

It's an interesting topic, and I'm not sure whether we can definitively say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ right now. My inclination is to say probably not because immediately my mind jumps to: What are all the ways you can abuse that? Can I sit on my ship next to a monster on land and just safe-spot it that way? Doesn't sound ideal.

That said, there will be plenty of opportunities for you to train in traditional combat via Sailing. That could be on your ship - if you're boarded by a pirate, for example. Maybe we have a sea monster attack; imagine a Kraken tentacle on your ship that you need to attack. Or whether you go off your ship; onto a different ship, onto the sea monster that you're fighting, or onto an island to do stuff, there will be plenty of opportunities to do that as well. I think maybe it's easier if we just separate those two. That's my early thinking, at least. How do you feel, Husky?

Mod Husky

It's interesting because we definitely spoke about traditional combat on a ship. As you mentioned, we were like, “Oh, a pirate has boarded my ship. Of course, I can cast spells, shoot them or attack them with my Scimitar”. My gut thought was actually to allow it. But I'd never thought about safe spotting from land. So maybe it's just if you're on a ship, you can only attack entities at sea.

I know that when we were talking about how to make cannons feel more impactful, we were thinking - early thoughts, not confirmed - what if cannons were dealing damage in the x10 factor, where sea creatures have like 10s of 1000s of health, and you're dealing like hundreds of damage to them; to make it feel more epic and on a larger scale? At that point, if you were shooting or using magic, maybe all the cannon facilities are taken on board, and you have your entire crew, but they're at least helping pepper the creature with 10s and 20s and 30s. Perhaps that could be a cool way to do it.

I'm cautious about mentioning the whole multiplying by 10 damage. I know that's what RuneScape did with Constitution. But I feel like that's separate when we're just talking about the grand scale of a sea creature being massive because I think the idea that these creatures are larger than life is a fun and exciting part of Sailing me. When you think about all these creatures that live out in the depths of the sea, that's a big identity of what makes the sea so thrilling and exciting for a lot of players. All of these are things that we would inevitably want to talk to players about though - post lock-in, maybe during beta, to see how things feel.

It might just feel really janky to shoot mage things over your ship, or it could be really fine. It's hard to know where they're doing it, especially because the ship could be moving. What happens if you're auto-casting in Mage and then you move away? How does that work if I'm no longer in range? So you'd kind of just dance across the boats trying to get in the range - like when you're trying to shoot a black demon at the back of the cage in the dungeon near Watchtower?

These are just early thoughts because we haven't really spoken about it too much - you're getting the unfiltered dev initial thoughts.

Mod Ayiza

A quick summary of the first part - I won't try and summarise Husky's comment about what combat scaling could look like if it was ever to be a thing (remember, that's an if, not a when). For now, in regards to attacking monsters from boats as ranged/mage, it's probably not going to be happening. However, if you were looking to get traditional combat experience whilst doing Sailing, you will have options such as other NPCs, maybe even players boarding your boat, that you would then have to attack with traditional attack styles granting XP in the normal way, or going off to places that you can only access via Sailing. But in terms of ship combat, we're going to stick to just being Sailing-related experience, most likely. Who knows, though?! There's still a whole lot of work for us to do. We haven't developed it yet. So that could change, and we will keep you updated.

Mod Husky

There's definitely scope for different sorts of secondary activities to work slightly differently from each other in terms of how rewards are given out. But generally speaking, I would be against players getting free XP for doing nothing. If you're just on the ship, but someone else is doing the fishing, should you get the XP? The grey area argument is that someone had to be moving the ship. We were talking about dropping the net and following it for this specific facility. So where is that actual fishing XP drop coming in from?

Let's talk theoretically: There's a facility that someone's operating and that has given them XP because that's how we're defining this Sailing for gameplay. To me, it would make sense that if you wanted multiple players to do that, you would need to build multiple of those facilities, and they would all take one each; or maybe we open up facilities so multiple people can use them at once, in some cases like this. But generally, I wouldn't want people to get XP by just standing on the boat and doing nothing - that would be something I would be against doing.

Question #7

If we're hunting Slayer monsters at sea, does everyone on the boat get Slayer experience? Will some form of Slayer Partnering come back?

Mod Elena

I imagine that would be similar to what Husky explained now. We could look into ways multiple people on the ship could participate. But if you're just standing on the ship, you shouldn't get a contribution for it. If you're helping, sure! If you're doing nothing, no.

Mod Husky

It sounds like an entire system needs to be developed, thought out and designed - separate for this piece of content that we haven't gotten to yet because we know the content itself sounds really fun. But maybe this is the idea of the finer details when you fleshed them out, put them into a design blog later and decided if you guys want this activity in the game.

I definitely saw some concern that if we were offering sea monster hunting, then it's a combined Sailing & Hunter & Slayer activity, but it's giving Slayer XP, it's grindable, and it's not on task. The fact that a Slayer Master didn't assign you it breaks the Slayer’s core gameplay loop.

So we could have a world where you're assigned to kill these creatures, and that requires a Slayer level. Theoretically, you could also do that as a group - that could be one design. Alternatively, we could say it just requires a Slayer level to have the knowledge to slay the creature - Slayer is the requirement, but not the XP you're getting from the activity. That could be another route we go down.

This just highlights that a lot of the activities themselves would need their own specific blogs that are fleshed out and worked through with the community to reach a design that they're happy with. But we have ideas for how things could work.

Question #8

Will the bosses that come with this new skill have a Slayer requirement? Will those bosses be Slayer task only, like Kraken, for instance?

Mod Husky

If we introduced a new Slayer boss, I'd expect a Slayer boss to have a Slayer requirement and to be a Slayer task only. This question doesn't read to me as a sea monster hunting for what it's worth. This reads as an expansion of Slayer content that exists out at sea, so I'd expect it to follow Slayer rules. There is certainly room in the reward space to introduce a new Slayer boss that you can only kill on task while at sea if the players want it.

Mod Elena

I think there's also space to introduce bosses that aren't tied to Slayer as well. It could just be one that's plopped down on an island somewhere. You go fight them, and you don't need anything other than getting there.

Mod Husky

Absolutely.

Mod Ayiza

To be honest, we'd be missing a trick if bosses were coming out of Sailing, and they all were Slayer-only bosses. There has to be some variety; otherwise, I wouldn't like it.

Mod Elena

Just because YOUR Slayer level…

Mod Ayiza

No, I've got good Slayer on both of my accounts! I've got like 88 on the Ironman and 95 on the main. I can do the content!

Mod Elena

Alright, that’s respectable.

Mod Ayiza

I think it would be a bit boring, especially if you were locked into having to have a Slayer task just to be able to do content. I like being able to dip into bosses. Imagine that there are three new bosses, and you've got to get lucky and get a Slayer task for each one of them. One of them could be a Slayer one; the others can be generic.

Mod Husky

Someone in the chat's completely right as well: Sailing is the vessel to get to some content. That's what we've been iterating throughout this design process - once you reach that content, it doesn't necessarily have to be Sailing content anymore. Once you're on an island, you could be considered doing traditional content - like a quest, a gathering skill, a production skill, a Slayer task, or a mini-game. Those could be cool; I needed to utilise my new skill in Sailing to reach that content.

There was a journey involved in that process as well - having to build the ship to gain access to it, dealing with the things that crop up along the way etc.; but once you're there, that is not necessarily Sailing content. It could be, there could be a Sailing mini-game you reach at sea! But it's not set in stone that needs to be either way. It would be very tailored to “Here's a piece of content that we'd like to be at sea, and here are the details. It's either Sailing content, or it's not Sailing content”, and players would vote as to whether they want that piece of content specifically.

Question #9

If a Magical Ship in a Bottle is added, can we get a display to place it within our POHs?

Mod Elena

It could be a nice way to store ships when you don't want to sail them - have a little shelf and put a couple of ships up there.

Mod Husky

For those who maybe didn't read it, the Ship in a Bottle was the idea for ‘’How could we make a ship storable in an inventory?’’. People who have seen the Ship in a Bottle will probably think of Pirates the Caribbean - it's definitely a trope that has existed with sea content generally. So the idea is you uncork your ship, and boom, it's there! Now I can sail on it! It’s such a cool, thematic way to store a ship in a single inventory slot.

We also talked about cool ways, like whatever creature you kill randomly drops a Ship in a Bottle! It has this mystery of ‘’What level what ship is this? Is it damaged, or do I need to repair it?’’ Or maybe you pickpocket a Ship in a Bottle from an NPC, and this time the mystery is ‘’What ship did I steal from this elf?’’ These are random ideas because we could have the ship as an Inventory Slot!

Mod Ayiza

Can I leave people on my ship just before I put it into the bottle and then be like a Pokémon master but not of Pokémon?

Mod Elena

With your crewmates or other players?

Mod Ayiza

Imagine capturing a top pager where we’re like, “Well… my pet now.” Just summon a guy in high gear, and let’s do some content.

Mod Husky

Players recruiting Nieve onto their crew? Then putting Nieve in a Ship in a Bottle, and now they own Nieve?

Mod Ayiza

We could cater towards those that wanted Taming! Throw a few NPCs or pets on your ship and capture them in a bottle; now, you've suddenly got a pet in your bag that you can take wherever you want!

Mod Elena

Is that how you get the ship out again? You just throw it and break the bottle?

Mod Ayiza

Yeah, just throw it. You’re just like, “Go, Oak Battleship. I choose you!”

Question #10

If we have the "Ship in a Bottle" item form, would we be able to board anywhere, or would it be limited to ports?

Mod Husky

Have you ever tried to ride your bike indoors in Pokémon?

Mod Elena

It’s not the time nor place for this.

Mod Husky

What would happen if you're mid-fighting the Wardens in the middle of Tombs of Amascut and you have a Ship in a Bottle and say, “ I'm just going to uncork my ship right now!” I don't know what players expect to happen. Does the Warden just get crushed? We would need you to do it on a port!

Mod Ayiza

You are saying it would pretty much have to be limited to ports; I presume the main reason for the Ship in a Bottle is to be able to store a ship in your inventory or be able to get them as drops, as opposed to being able to just suddenly board your ship in the middle of the Al Kharid Desert.

Mod Husky

Yeah! Say there's a shop that sells you your starter ship or a bunch of starter ships to get you on your way. It's a cool way to do shop stock. It's like, ‘’Cool, there is a basic ship, a basic small ship, a basic large ship,’’ for example. So you go, “Okay, I'm gonna start off, I want a new large ship; I'm gonna start off with a basic large ship.” Then you know exactly what you're getting. It starts off with a bunch of basic facilities, and then you choose what you want to remove, add, upgrade, etc.

Having a Ship in a Bottle really fills so many purposes, from a very practical standpoint for the player, but also really cool, in-depth world-building. Because already I'm thinking, this is where we were talking about why you might need a magic level to do it.

How does this work? Are you now glassblowing a new thing from glass and then enchanting the glass to be able to do this? Is it then a wizard that helps shrink your ship to put it into a bottle? What if that's now a spell scroll that another player can use, or maybe they have the magic level to do it themselves? Or maybe some people at ports can provide the service for you. Then you start getting into these cool lore-building things that attach themselves to Sailing just by having this cool idea of a Ship in a Bottle. We talk about many ideas like this in the Lore Integration blog we're currently working on. But yeah, you can attach a lot of cool mathematics to it.

Question #11

Some of the rewards, like the 'Magical Ship in a Bottle' - while cool - seem odd to just be immediately available to players and would fit more naturally (in my opinion) as a Quest reward. Is the team open to taking some of the more outlandish rewards (certain crewmembers, Ship-in-bottle, maybe Mako's Sail) and adding them later as Quest rewards?

Mod Elena

We must still decide where things come from and when in our journey. If Sailing passes the Lock-in Poll, that is one of the first things we'll do - We'll sit down and plan out what you unlock when and really try to map out that journey.

I think it's a big Quality of Life early on to move your ship to port. Say that you're out Sailing, then you teleport out, and now your ship is just stuck there. What happens to that? We need some sort of retrieval service or a teleport to essentially bring your ship back to Port.

The Ship in a Bottle could do that! When you teleport out, the ship automatically goes back into the bottle. If we don't give the Ship in a Bottle early on, we need good alternative things, but then the Ship in a Bottle would give additional Quality of Life.

Mod Husky

The idea that you have this network of all these problems that you experienced early on, or maybe slight inconveniences that become solved over time - that's just gameplay. That's the fundamental unravelling of the web of interconnected content and getting rewards from things.

We have to decide what's appropriate - we obviously don't want things to be absolutely unwieldy from the get-go just for the sake of having them as unlocked, but at the same time, having player power and unlocking by progressing through the content is fundamental MMO gameplay.

Mod Elena

Ship in a Bottle would be a cool milestone to work towards, though! ‘’I just want Level 50 Sailing so that I can get Ship in a Bottle’’ kind of thing!

Question #12

How do you plan on keeping the new resources valuable as time passes? It is not uncommon for supply/crafting items to crash in price over time. Is there a plan to avoid this problem and maintain this space in sailing for profitable gathering?

Question #13

Can the new (choppable) woods be burned or fletched into Arrow Shafts?

Mod Elena

It’s the same as Husky was saying - these are just very specific rewards that we could or could not do, depending on what players want when we get to this development. I'm not opposed to it. I think it would be good for the game to have more things to tie into other skills genuinely. But I don't think it has to either - there are logs in the game that can't be fletched.

Take Mahogany Logs, for example. You can only make a stock from them; you can’t make traditional things like bows. Therefore, it makes sense that different resources work differently. I would like to make them burnable, but it depends entirely on what the player base wants. Basically, we need to propose where it fits in between the other logs. It's a very detailed development territory.

Mod Husky

Burnable is free. Because we're not worried about the product being burnable, we could set that this new log becomes an amount of Firemaking XP, and if players want to use it for that, they can.

The fletching is the difficult part. Based on the ramble I just had to be desirable to fletch into, we would want whatever you're fletching. Otherwise, what's the point? Arrow Shafts are free in a similar way. Now they give a bunch of Arrow Shafts - we know what Arrow Shafts are for, but that's still tied separately.

I like to look at each log and talk about these things more openly with the community. It doesn't sit well with me that Redwood Logs can't be made into a Short Bow or Plank. A bunch of hardwoods in the game tend to fall into ‘this is used for Construction’. Then you've got softer woods, which are used for Weaponry. Redwoods sit at neither!

Therefore, as a designer, I'd rather say, ‘’Here is a category of logs, and here are the rules they follow’’. I generally would prefer to be consistent. However, sometimes as a developer, you have to break consistency for what is either better for the game or better gameplay. So it's hard to say we need to be consistent to the death of it. But I think you should have a good reason for not doing something outside of just ‘’It would be nice, but we don't have time’’.

Mod Elena

I also like the idea of tying it to things we don't traditionally do - tying it to another skill in a new way! One thing we could do for Firemaking: What if you could use Firemaking to light these new logs on fire, instead of just being a Firemaking training method, it could be used to smoke some of the new fish you can catch! This way, you can get smoked fish, and that's just a new way of cooking.

Question #14

Will there be a design space for unique crew members, where different crew members (that you got as rewards from different content) are more or less useful for different encounters? So long as all the available crew members feel unique and useful, I don't care much about the complexity of the crew system.

Mod Elena

That's a good question. It's something that we're actually not sure where to go with, either. We could see the potential of crewmates having different abilities - some are really good at this one thing, and others are really good at this other thing. Someone may be an expert Cannoneer, but he is really bad at fishing, whilst someone else is really good at fishing. That could be a way to go.

We have a question about this in the survey linked in the blog. Let us know how you feel about it because we're open to the relatively simple crew system. There's beauty in simplicity! I just want to automate stuff; I don't want to think about it. I just want you to fix my sails now and then. Trim the sails - that's it, that's your job.

On the other hand, you find it interesting to figure out who's the best person for this job and level them up as they go along. It makes sense that they would get better at shooting cannons the more they do it. It's entirely up to you - the community - to let us know how you want it to work!

Question #15

How detailed will the polling be? Will it be "Do you want Sailing?" or "Do you want boat races, do you want mining reso, etc?"

Mod Ayiza

In our final blog of Sailing - which will come shortly after we finish up with Lore and Integration - we’ll basically go over our whole summary of all of the stages of Refinement into one condensed blog so that you can see everything that we've worked on (in as much detail as we can fit into that, at least).

There we’ll basically detail exactly how we're going to be approaching Polling going forward in terms of not only the question ‘’Should we add this skill in the first place?’’ but also what potentially would come after that, as well as what level of detail that you should come to expect.

Therefore, regarding questions around Polling, let's wait on those for now. Basically, we’re committing to showing you exactly what we intend to do regarding Polling. For now, the first question will most likely be a simple question of ‘’Should Sailing be added to the game?’’. Then we will go on to further refined questions to nail down the specifics of different features, mechanics, rewards areas, etc. We've still got some work to do on our end. We're still planning and finalising it all, but we will share it with you once we're there!

You can also discuss this update on our official forums, on the 2007Scape subreddit, the Steam forums, or the community-led OSRS Discord in the #gameupdate channel. For more info on the above content, check out the official Old School Wiki.

Mods Abyss, Arcane, Archie, Argo, Ash, Ayiza, Boko, Bruno, Chilly, Crystal, Curse, Daizong, Dylan, Ed, Elena, Errol, Fed, Gecko, Gizmo, Goblin, Grub, Halo, Harold, Hend, Hornet, Husky, Jalo, Jerv, Keyser, Kieren, Kirby, Kurotou, Lenny, Light, Mack, Manked, Markos, Maylea, Meat, Moogle, Morty, Necro, Nox, Nylu, Other, Pumpkin, Redfield, Regent, Rice, Roq, Ry, Sarnie, Shroom, Sigma, Skane, Skylark, Sova, Squid, Starry, Stevew, Surma, Sween, Tide, Titus, Torrance, Tyran, Veda, Vegard, West & Wolfy

The Old School Team.

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