It doesn’t take long after washing up on the shores of Windrose to realise that pirate life isn’t all sea shanties and buried treasure. Between boars that can drop you in a single hit, intense naval battles, and a massive world that takes time to navigate, the game offers a huge amount of content – but finding your rhythm can be challenging.
If you’re struggling to get going these essential tips, smart workarounds, and a few OP strats will help you go from castaway to feared captain in no time.
The map in Windrose is enormous, so fast travel quickly becomes essential.
Your first priority should be placing a Fast Travel Point at your main base as you’ll return here often for quests, crafting, and inventory management, so having a reliable anchor point is crucial.
Whenever you venture out, always carry a Fast Travel Bell. Once you land on a new island, build a Tent so you can respawn there, and then create a Fast Travel Point straight away. After that, you can clear the island and get a ton of XP. 
You will want to travel back and forth to offload the lot and complete additional quests. Once you have cleared the island, you can dismantle the Fast Travel Point and recover your materials. Since you can only have up to 10 active points at once, it’s worth being selective about permanent locations.
Forgetting your Fast Travel Bell can be really frustrating and time-consuming if you manually journey back to your base, or if you intend to craft all the materials to create another one from scratch. Luckily, if you find yourself on a new island with no bell, there are a few things you can do instead:
This instantly returns you to your tent on the island. You can find these potions in treasure locations like pirate dens, or craft them using:
Naval combat is one of the most exciting mechanisms in the game. It’s great fun, but it does take some practice to master. Here are some things you can do to make it all a little bit easier!
Firstly, targeting the stern or the rear of the ship deals significantly more damage, as this is essentially a headshot versus ships. I can be a bit harder to hit, but it’s worth it to maximise the damage from your cannons.
Secondly, as ships are constantly moving, you need to lead your shots to land them. Do not aim directly at the ship, but aim slightly ahead so they hit the ship as they continue moving forward.
Ships on the high seas are not stationary entities (and neither are you!). Making sure you adjust for movement is crucial for landing cannon fire and not wasting those large cooldowns.
Check out our Navel Guide for Windrose Here!
Now, let’s move on to combat on the high seas. With so many targets to choose from in a fleet, who do you focus on?
Your main focus should be gunships or other combat boats first. They’re weaker and easier to kill compared to hauler ships or main ships, but they deal consistent damage and are annoying to face.
Keep an eye out for the “ready to be boarded” icon when you’re shooting these ships. Once that pops up, the ship is disabled, and this is your chance to hop on the ship and take loot. But, when this is a gunship, don’t bother.
Destroying any ships with non-loot treasure chests is a good idea so you can focus on getting loot from better options
While it may sound counterintuitive, when fighting against fleets, you should not be afraid to sail down the middle of them.
Once you fire your starboard side, there will be a long cooldown, so you can switch to your port side and fire that side too. This strategy allows you to hit multiple targets in quick succession, making targets die faster and therefore cutting down your combat time quite significantly.
You might be thinking that this leaves you open to getting hit from both sides – there’s definitely an element of truth to that, but the alternative is not much better. Seeing as there is no friendly fire in Windrose, enemy ships can still shoot you through their allies, making the ‘smart’ move of staying on the outskirts unproductive.
Now, let’s move back to living on the land.
Combat in Windrose is very unforgiving, and everything you do costs stamina: attacking, dodging, sprinting, everything drains it. However, there is a lifesaver which many players overlook – Blocking. Blocking is tied to your Posture Shields, and not your stamina.
Even if your stamina is depleted, you can still block incoming attacks as long as you have shields remaining. Look at the shield icons at the bottom of the screen. This makes blocking a critical survival tool when you’re exhausted.
Food is very useful in Windrose to keep your health topped up and stopped you instantly dying to pesky fauna and pirates. One of the best food ingredients, however, is the mighty Banana.
They’re a vital resource to keep your Stamina topped up and allow you to stay in the fight for longer. One of the best early-game foods is Coconut Milk with Bananas, which boosts endurance (your stamina stat). Bananas aren’t found on your starting island, but they’re common in nearby jungle areas.
Food is not the only way to manage your energy; you also need the Rested Buff. The Rested Buff significantly improves stamina regeneration, but it disappears when you die, so if you find yourself on a premature date with the grim reaper it’s imperative to refresh it before heading back into the fray.
It only takes a few minutes to refresh your stamina. One of the ways of doing it is to fast-travelling to your base and waiting a few seconds before teleporting back Alternatively, you can just board your ship, as it shares your base’s comfort level, which pops back the rested buff very quickly.
Hunting crabs that are found along the jungle shores can provide you with the very rare but very valuable Crab Shell, which can be used to craft a trophy that permanently increases your base’s comfort level.
It may take a long time to find it, but it’s certainly worth it. Due to the low drop rate and no other method of farming these, it’s a good idea to collect crabs whenever you see them. Don’t bother with the large undead crabs, though, as they don’t drop these shells.
As you get XP and gain levels, you’ll be dumping points into your stats. A lot of players stress over making the perfect build, but here is a massive tip: you can reset your stat points at any time.
You may already know that, so here’s the real tip: actually do it! Change up your stats to adjust to the strategy and/or situation at hand
This flexibility lets you optimise your character for whatever task you’re tackling.
It might sound rather simple, but to save yourself hours of grinding, kill every single Boar you see.
Boars are your primary source of Rough Hide, which is used in crafting all pieces of armour and weapons, building ship pieces and then upgrading all of those things. Seriously, to fully upgrade your loadout early on you’ll need hundreds of this stuff.
Boars are the easiest way of getting Rough Hides. They’re easier to kill than Wolves or Goats and it also means you won’t have to spend valuable Pisatre on the vendor contracts to buy it later on.
As a bonus, Boars also drop meat, which can be cooked, and they occasionally drop Boar Heads, which can be sold for silver or turned into trophies.
Windrose can be quite challenging, but it also rewards you for being strategic. By following everything we have suggested in this guide today, you’ll see yourself having a much easier time in Windrose moving forward!
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