Last night was a four hour exercise in frustration!
It was me and my other friend who plays a lot, 2 who are still fairly new, and 2 who are brand new. Six total. We wanted to craft a long boat and explore a little, maybe locate Moder and set up a portal.
Things started...poorly. After kitting everyone up in what we had (some wood armor, but mostly iron and bronze), we built the long boat and set off. 100 yards off shore from our Plains base, we lag out and beach our ship right next to the swamp. Okay, that's fine, the swamp isn't so bad, but it takes us a while to dig out the ship and one of our guys lags out and is killed by the swamp baddies.
He respawns in the Plains base, but is killed multiple times by deathsquitoes (he's one of the two fairly new players) before we can pick him up again. We get to his body by the swamp, but no one can access his tombstone. He AND our other fairly new player are killed again before we see off and we collectively decide to just continue sailing ndd build the portal when we land down the coast and he'll just warp in.
Except we realize he had all the materials for the portal and we don't have any extra.
We also figure out the lag seemed to be caused by one of our guys streaming the game.
Still, we move onward and spot a Fuling camp on the coast with three bonfires, which we know we can break down into three surtling cores. Keep in mind it's now just me and my experienced friend + 2 brand new guys, who we're babysitting. We land further down the shore, set the 2 babies on a giant rock and just hope they stay safe from Fuling patrols and squitoes, and start slowly kiting and eliminating the 12+ fulings and 2 berserkers. Except with maybe 4 fulings left, we both die.
So all of us except the 2 brand new guys respawned at the Plains base with almost no gear (because we gave it to all the new guys), trying to carefully clear out a path to shore, which is now swarming with deathsquitoes.
Meanwhile, the 2 brand new players are actually able to commandeer the long boat and sail all the way back to us at the base...only for the boat to be destroyed by a lox.
Which is fine, because by then we've cleared a path with our one bow and wood arrows, and swim out to collect the long boat materials at the bottom of the inlet.
Then, we all gather at a safe place on shore, I rebuild the long boat, we jump in, and IT FUCKING DISAPPEARS.
Just straight vanishes. A few minutes later, one player says he can actually see the boat inside our base(???) for a moment before it disappears.
Hours later, we manage to build the smaller boat (not the raft) and sail BACK to where we died (we were also able to pick up our friends tombstone after all logging out and back in), rearmed, and made our portal base there. Avoided a sea serpent on the way there, too, which was of course the first time we (almost) encountered one. That kind of night.
Very frustrating, but we also understand it's in Early Access and tried to not take it too seriously. Maybe I'm just saying that because we managed to pick all our stuff back up, though :D
