34 Tips and Tricks to Be the Best Pirate in Windrose – Beginner and Advanced Guide

Windrose is a pirate survival-crafting game with tons of depth. If you haven’t played a survival-crafting game before, it can be a little daunting to learn all the mechanics.

It isn’t easy, but you’ll learn more quickly with some of the best tips to help you on your journey, all found here in this guide.

Best Tips and Tricks to Know When Playing Windrose

• Looting chests doesn’t pause the game. When looting chests and even your post-mortem cache, you can still get hit by enemies.
• Always look for Piastre and Guinea. These are currencies found early on and used heavily later. See a green or rarer highlight at the seas? Pick it up.
• Look for the quality-of-life buttons in item management. You can sort your inventory, storage chests, and ship inventory with a click of a button.
• Can’t find a chest or a treasure in an area? Try looking for a hidden ladder going down, some debris you can mine, some vines you can destroy, or even using a shovel to dig through the ground.
• Also, don’t waste time picking up loot while sailing on a boat. Wait until you unlock the Ketch, so you can easily pick them up as long as they are within the radius of the boat.
• Swapping to your melee weapon is faster than reloading.
• You need both bullets and gunpowder to fire a gun. There are slots in your ammo inventory, separate from your backpack.
• Always look at your rested buff when exploring. It regenerates your stamina even faster; it is kind of broken (in a positively powerful way), too.
• You can have two food buffs and an elixir buff active at once.
• Weapons and armor are upgradable. Materials are quite easy to farm early, so fast-track your gear to Item Level 200 early. You can be pickier when ascending weapons or going past item level 6 upgrades, since it’ll now use some rare tools for upgrades.
• Always bring a Fast Travel Bell and Wood when traveling. You never know if there’s going to be a hard encounter, and you want to travel there immediately when you die to save some time.
• Repair Kits only repair outside of combat. Combat Repair Kits allow you to heal during combat, but it is harder to craft.
• You can always reposition your ship by recalling it.
• If you see those “level 2” or “level 3” station requirements, you must unlock new buildings based on their building category. For example, placing the new building has no interactions, like the Sawhorse. It just upgrades the Workbench.
• Trying to build a base, but can’t find any roof corners? You’ll still have to progress and unlock those recipes.
• You can refill the Lamp’s light source at the workbench.
• Always carry stacks of Bandages when exploring. Health potions are great, but Bandages are more resource-efficient.
• You can always craft a workbench anywhere without a bonfire. This allows you to craft useful items like bandages, repair kits, and bullets while exploring.
• Resetting your talents is free. Just go to the talent page and press “Z.” No strings attached. The same goes for your stat or attributes.
• Always look into your tooltip notifications under the minimap. These usually contain important notifications, such as acquiring new Plans & Recipes in the Curios, so you can manually learn new things.
• The Ketch, or any ship outside the simple boat, has a ship cargo inventory where you can store items.
• Remember to fully gear up your ship with cannons, hull modifications, crew equipment, and more.
• You can repair your ship by interacting with the Wharf and pressing on the health icon of a specific ship. It is resource-efficient and instant.
• All loot plundered at the seas using your ship will be inside the ship’s cargo and not your inventory.
• Place markers for spots with easy-to-find resources, like an area with several boar spawns. These don’t have icons on the map, but you can manually make one to remember where to find them.
• Exploring and side quests are highly recommended, even practically mandatory. If you try to breeze through the main quest, you’ll always be severely underlevelled. Explore and finish side quests for experience points.
• Finishing points of interest give you experience points, which is somewhat the main way of leveling up in the game.
• Quests are shared in multiplayer as long as the host has enabled it in the server settings.
• Insignias are important to keep for later on. They are used to increase reputation with all factions in the game. It’ll be an intense grind, so keep looking for these Insignias.
• Looking to stop playing the game to watch or do something else? Leave the game on while setting your ship to sail in a direction so you can start exploring more of the game’s enormous map.
• If you run out of stamina while swimming, you’ll start drowning and start to lose HP.
• You can only have 10 active fast travel points at a time. This is separate from the fixed fast-travel points, like the Tortuga Market.
• Always craft and bring a Homeward Journey. You never know when you need to travel back home instantly.
• If you have to fight more than two ships at a time, try to sail at the center so you can literally use each side of the boat to shoot. If you fight them on one side, each of those ships will fire once at you, and you can only shoot once.