AMA with the Sailing J-Mod team - We are here to answer questions on the Sailing progress update Blog today, May 29th, from 2:30PM to 4 PM BST!

What a comparison! Thanks for the question. :)

When you're sailing a small boat, we think it feels appropriate but we definitely see the concern when we look at large boats in comparison to the scale of the existing game world. During refinement, we looked at scaling up the world and moving landmasses.

When we investigated further, we felt it was apparent that we were trying to apply a real-life scale to a world that isn't trying to be at scale.

We have mansions larger than mountains, we have entire kingdoms you can travel between, on foot, within a minute or two, trying to enforce this sense of a realistic scale with Sailing just felt very against the grain for this game.

In light of this feedback, we've instead looked to focus our efforts on trying to control the size of the boat and try to tailor that to the environments at sea, for example, the areas around Crandor, Catherby, Port Sarim might be shallow waters which favour smaller boats whereas the open and deep seas of the world will be more suited to large and colossal boats.

There are currently three sizes of boats: small, large and colossal. With the large and colossal boats, scale seems worse to players and that's something we're keen to hear more feedback on when we run the closed tech alpha. It's worth noting that boats will be restricted so you can't sail them in smaller, narrower spaces.

We're looking into whether we can make boats even smaller to help with particularly narrow places. For example, the dev team is looking at changing the size of 'large' boats to be 'colossal; (largest size you'd be able to get). We're very keen to hear what players think about scale and size of boats when you get to play the Open tech alpha! :D

Hey, currently in the tech alpha:

• A boat will continue to operate as expected without the captain present on the boat for 5 minutes, this includes using facilities and moving the boat (if the player has been given navigator permissions by the captain)
• After 5 minutes, the boat will be considered disabled, this means none of the facilities will be able to be used, the boat cannot move and the boat will stay there until all of the players leave.
• If the captain logs in within these 5 minutes they will be returned to the boat, regardless of where the boat has now moved to
• If the captain logs in after these 5 minutes, they will be spawned on a new copy of that boat at the location they logged out, anyone else on the old boat will not be present.
• If the captain logs in to a different world, they will be spawned on a new copy of their boat regardless and will be unable to return to their old one.

So to your specific questions

1. Yes the boat will still function and move, as described above
2. Yes, you will end up wherever the boat is, if you log in within 5 minutes
3. If you are on a friends boat and Disconnect, you will appear on an island we've temporarily dubbed "Limbo island", this will allow you to return to your friends boat, if it's on the same world, hop to that world if you are on the wrong world, or return back to shore where you boarded the boat from.
4. If you world hop, your boat will be generated on the new world, any players on your boat will be left on the old one and will be able to use it for up to 5 minutes.

Note, the 5 minutes is currently placeholder and definitely subject to review, we're definitely trying to consider outlying player behavior such as preventing players from spawning multiple copies of their boat on multiple different worlds as a boat to "rent".

Hi there! :)

Great question. We published a blog during refinement on Sailing gameplay (Adding A New Skill: Sailing Core Gameplay (runescape.com)), which includes 'secondary gameplay' activities. Secondary activities involve existing skills and Sailing, so you'd be getting XP in two skills. The amount of XP though is yet to be determined and the activities themselves would need to be polled separately.

We've also talked about islands and the content found there in this blog (Adding A New Skill: Sailing Reward Space (runescape.com)). If you take a look at that blog you'll see some ideas for gathering resources. We mentioned briefly in our progress update blog some top-level islands that we have designed, and whilst the team has been exploring these further, we're not ready to share more details on them until we've covered Milestone 1 - 3 (Navigation, Primary Gameplay & Ship Customization).

We can't wait to talk about this with you all!

Hey,

First up, we're not looking to change any existing sailing requirements but we are open to these quests awarding some sailing XP upon completion (and available as a claimable lamp for those who completed them before Sailing's launch). We'd still want to set reasonable minimum levels to these so players don't just spend the first 10 minutes claiming lamps and going from, for example, level 1 to level 30 without engaging with Sailing initially.

For new quests in the future, I'd assume that we will lean into using the players boat where we can, but I'd imagine that will be quite subject to the developers design intent for that quest and also player feedback/validation. For example, if you're being rowed by an NPC along a river to a back entrance where you sneak into a castle it might not necessarily matter that you have access to a boat to sail the seas but if it's a quest like Bone Voyage, perhaps it makes sense to sail yourself, or perhaps the narrative of the quest is simply that you are tasked with helping an NPC sail to a specific place and perhaps it's important, narratively, that they do that work instead of you!

We wouldn't look to touch existing shortcuts and notably, we're trying to make sure that Sailing knowledge/expertise is kept to the seas of Gielinor and not to the rivers, there's a lot of cool quirky interactions we'd like to leave intact and most of those shortcuts wouldn't actually remain shortcuts if you had to do that work yourself.

We're not looking to change fishing trawler currently, but we're aware of player sentiment regarding it, it's both nostalgic, quirky but also somewhat clunky. That said, the content itself is less about the player sailing the ship and more about being a lacky repairing the ship while Murphy does all the work and while we could update his ship to be a world entity and sail across the actual sea, it might make more sense to be kept away from interference from other players and their own boats. Anyway, that's just our take, very interested to hear what players would like us to do for Trawler specifically although naturally those opinions might be more informed after players get their hands on Sailing in our tech alphas/betas!

Rewards from fighting griffins will be coming in a future blog. Keep your eyes peeled, there are plentiful rewards!

World first events/prizes would definitely be cool, but we'd be cautious of introducing external incentives beyond just natural exploration especially if they would influence player behavior/activities in-game but simple ones like celebrating the first player to specific skill milestones or first player to uncover a specific item could be quite cool.

Thanks for the kind words, we're also hoping for a smooth development/launch too!

This is a great question! There are lots ties to the Eastern Lands in-game already, and it's reasonable to assume that at some point we will expand over there, but we're not planning to go there with Sailing for launch. In order to do the content justice, it would need significant time spent on it as it's probably as big as Varlamore in scope. We want to focus on making Sailing good for the existing game world initially for launch and then look at expanding in future.

Hey, I answered a similar question here https://www.reddit.com/r/2007scape/comments/1d3a4gh/comment/l66gddw/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=web3x&utm_name=web3xcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button

but I appreciate you're being a bit more specific, so I'll try to answer as best as I can!

With regards to existing content, we're not looking to overhaul existing quest completion methods in the game world but we are interested in changing the framing of some quests and dialogue in them to account for the fact that Sailing exists.

A good example of quest integration is DS1 where the isle of Crandor is this massive big mystery but realistically we all know you can see it 20 tiles off the coast of Rimmington so we'll instead look to tweak that narratively to indicate that it's a dangerous island to approach with a treacherous reef surrounding it and the map that you piece together isn't a map to the location of Crandor but instead have it detail the safe route to Crandor.

We also love the idea that player boats who sail too close to Crandor (before completing DS1) will be repelled by Elvarg shooting fireballs in the general direction of the boat, we don't know mechanically what this means yet, is it just flavour? or will the fireballs hitting the you be impactful?

Open to feedback on all of this as always when it comes to changing/tweaking existing content in-game. Although naturally during Milestone 1 we've been more focused on the tech side of things and we definitely intend to look at integration later on in development in Milestone 4.

We won't be replacing the charter ship system, it's quite good as a fast travel system and thematically we like that they are taking the safe routes whereas Sailing allows the player to go anywhere at sea regardless of whether or not it's safe or not and discover that which the charter ships and other NPC sailors choose not to!

Lastly, as u/DivineInsanityReveng pointed out, we did mention during refinement that we would look into the Cabin Fever and Bone Voyage mechanics in the quest, as we've progressed further through Sailing's tech development we now have concerns about whether or not our Sailing tech will be feasible in a quest setting without a significant quest overhaul to a very nostalgic quest (in Cabin Fever's case at least).

We're still aware of the desire to make Sailing consistent across questing content in the game and we definitely don't like the clunky Bone Voyage interface but at this point it's hard for us to know what we can commit to for Sailing's launch.

We're currently going to allow irons to sail with other players but with restrictions, those restrictions are currently unclear but we are aware of a sentiment with iron accounts needing to be responsible for their own account progression and we're looking to uphold that.

Currently anyone can join anyone's boat as long as it's at a port but we definitely want you to have more control than that for launch, such as only allowing friends, having join requests or just being able to kick people from your boat.

Yes, if we add retroactive Sailing XP we'd want to make sure the level was appropriate for that XP reward instead of everyone starting Sailing on launch day at, for example, level 30.

;)

Thematically we've opted for the definition that your skill in Sailing is indicative of your capability to operate a Ship and it's facilities.

We really didn't want players to just gain XP passively, that feels like something that wouldn't feel like a skill, whereas using a tool to do a job very much so does, in this case, the ship and it's facilities are a tool and you're increasing your knowledge/expertise of these while using them.

We're aware of the sentiment of interacting with Sails too frequently perhaps getting a bit too tedious but that's where we have multiple avenues to affect this throughout the skill progression, for example: - Higher level sails could need trimmed less often, or be more effective when trimmed. - NPC crewmates (or other players joining your ship) could take on that tedium for you so you can navigate yourself.

By making a new boat on a new world you'd have invalidated your access to return to one on the original world