Choose My Adventure: Navigating a custom airship and the rising challenges of Lost Skies

So yeah, I went hard into Lost Skies again. And it’s all my fault because the voting public almost immediately decided on what should happen next, and I took that as the firing of a starting gun to rush into this sandbox without reservation.

As I noted last week, Lost Skies almost immediately entranced me with its setting, mechanics, and sense of discovery and exploration. This week, I started to push the boundaries of what I could do thanks to the building of my own custom airship.

The polls nearly instantly affirmed that I should use the custom blueprint that I had put together, and since I spent a bit of time gathering up materials enough to build it, that’s precisely what I did. Putting the whole thing together was pretty simple overall – as simple as building most bases in other survivalboxes has been – and the glut of wood and metal that I had gathered up meant that I nearly instantly had my ship crafted and ready.

Unfortunately, the engines that were originally donated by my mystery benefactor last week were among the things that got disassembled in the process, but that was fine because I kind of wanted to experience airship flight from the very jump. That involved building at least one square sale that captures tailwinds and at least one side sail to capture side winds. I had considered putting the side wind sails on the sides of my craft just to make it look neat, but I wasn’t sure if that was going to work, so I elected to take the boring route and put it at the stern of my ship.

Thus was built the Goldiyacht. I unmoored from the shipyard and started to take my maiden flight.

At this point I was met with a couple of mixed emotions. As my craft started to lazily sail away from the starting island, this haunting song that tied together sadness and determination started to play. As it turns out, this was repurposed by Bossa Studios from its previous sandbox Worlds Adrift, but since this was the first time I’d ever heard it, it was an astonishing flourish that really set the tone for the adventures to come.

I was also met with the frankly odd control scheme involved with airship flight. The UI was once again pretty minimalist, but this time it started off as a bit of a detriment as the visual indicators of what was happening to my ship weren’t quite so clear. After some time, however, I started to work out just what was being conveyed as well as how the button prompts on the side worked. I’m not sure if it’s because of the Goldiyacht’s size or the fact that the thing is wind powered or both, but it is a ponderous thing to steer.

It also appears to just be constantly attempting a sick wheelie while in flight; I’m not sure whether that’s a result of the third-person camera behaving oddly or poor ship design. I’m going to call it a bit of character.

For a few hours there, I started to just aim the nose of my ship somewhere, get near an island, and then park it to explore what was in the environment. This appears to be the full crux of Lost Skies’ gameplay, and I do not hate it, though things were beginning to get a little tougher. The sniper turrets that I encountered absolutely hurt. A drone spawner was placed in such a way that it was hard to shoot its core when its doors opened. This was made harder by the fact that I had run out of bandages for a long while and I didn’t really mark where the starting island was located. There is no map in Lost Skies, and I foolishly wasn’t paying attention to the compass.

Eventually, I finally succumbed to my first death in the game, which was frustrating but not a dealbreaker as I had supposed, particularly since I ended up dying near my airship anyway, so finding my bag of dropped stuff was a dawdle. Still, the fact that I was basically removed from any way to progress my character or craft new things was beginning to wear me down. The only way to actually unlock better recipes is by being at the computer of a crashed ark, and I was adrift without any indication of where I had come from.

Eventually I managed to find what I thought was my starting island but ended up being a new island that also had a crashed ark, which was lucky considering that was also what I needed to move the narrative forward. Buoyed by the fact that I had finally found a new home island, I started to put down important infrastructure and – far more crucially – noted what direction I was going so I could navigate back.

Over the course of crafting and building and exploring, I was gathering up loads of new materials and a whole bunch of new recipes for things like foods, weapons, and ship items, but it wasn’t immediately clear just how I was supposed to learn these recipes. At some point during my journey, I died and dropped all of my recipes on the ground, but I wasn’t immediately fussed because nothing I was doing worked.

Well, as it turns out, that was one of the things I had to unlock at the ark computer: a research table that allowed me to process recipes and learn them. So suddenly I had a way to learn new things… but I had forgotten that there was still a bundle of recipes away from my FOB. Over 4,000 meters away, to be precise.

Corpse runs suck, but corpse runs done with an extremely slow airship suck even harder. Luckily, none of my stuff disintegrated, and I was able to retrieve things without any problems, but I also learned a pretty valuable lesson.

All of this adventuring and mishap started to kind of dilute my initial enjoyment of Lost Skies, especially as certain mechanics and material needs came to the fore. The corpse run thing was top of the charts of awful events, but there was also the fact that things like silica could only be found at the bottom of floating islands and conductive organs could only be harvested by cutting up flying mantas. Let me tell you, friends, these enemies are the worst things to fight; they flutter around errantly, stopping only to open fire on you, which also happens to be the point when they’re most reliably damaged. These things giga-suck.

Unfortunately, all of this adventure was done solo. Despite leaving my game open, nobody decided to join in and roam around my world. So I suppose I’ll keep things locked to friends only for the time being. It sucks, but it is what it is.

Still, in spite of all of the hardship and annoyance, I’m still pushing on and feeling little victories all the while. I’ve crafted some new weapons. I’ve gotten very good at piloting my airship (my being a space trucker as well as a Navy brat really helped my case there). My ship now has guns attached to it. And more importantly, the guidance of the opening steps is kind of easing off to let me make my own path.

This rather neatly leads in to the first poll. I’m basically asking what cardinal direction I should aim my chonky ship at to explore. Now that I feel like I’ve gotten a better handle on things, I’m looking to try to expand my horizons.

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The second poll is, without a doubt, the most important one of this series. Choose wisely. This is vital.

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Polls will close at 1:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, May 16th. And once again I have to sit and watch and wait until the voting resolves in an obvious direction. I’m really enjoying myself but I need to respect this stopping point. For now.

Welcome to Choose My Adventure, the column in which you join Chris each week as he journeys through mystical lands on fantastic adventures – and you get to decide his fate. Which is good because he can often be a pretty indecisive person unless he’s ordering a burger.