Best Ways to Board Ships in Windrose

Windrose starts the game with your ship being boarded, which leads to waking up on an island in the remaining shipwreck. While you can't use your initial little rowboat to board enemy ships, you can equip ships starting with the Ketch to be able to board other ships, and you'll need this ability in order to complete the main quests.

Boarding ships requires a bit of crafting so that you have the necessary equipment, but you'll also need to be ready to maneuver your ship in ways that are a bit annoying with how slowly they turn, because you can't just board a ship when you see it.

Prepare Your Ship

First, you need to unlock the Ketch through the tutorial quests, and then build both a Wharf and a Shipwright's Workshop. These are both stations that you'll be told to build as quest objectives for tutorial quests, and you'll also build and equip your ship with 12-Pounders, which you need for boarding as well.

However, the quests don't make you prepare for boarding. You have to do this yourself by using the Shipwright's Workshop to build the Boarding Party Gear. While you'll unlock better versions of this later, the first version is enough to board a ship, and to build it you'll need:

• 7 Copper Ingots
• 7 Rough Hides
• 7 Coarse Fabric

After you build the Boarding Party Gear, use the Wharf to equip it on your ship. While you're in the ship management screen, you want to repair the ship you plan to use for boarding if necessary, because actually boarding an enemy ship is going to require fighting, and you don't want to be the one who ends up shipwrecked.

Boarding a Ship

Now that you're in the open sea, you'll run across enemy ships. They're most often found around the shores of the various islands that make up the Archipelago. Ships will have a level by their name, and the ships that are closer to your level are going to be easier to board than those that are a higher level.

You cannot board an enemy ship that has full health. Instead, you need to use your cannons and bring its health down so it only has roughly a quarter of its max health left. If you aren't used to ship battles, then you'll want to pay attention to the three white lines in the bottom center of your screen. Those lines are the three directions you have cannons facing, and a full line means that direction's cannon is ready to fire.

Use those lines to maneuver your ship so that you point the cannons ready to fight at the enemy ship, and keep doing this until you see a little crossed-swords symbol appear under the ship's name. This symbol means that the ship has been damaged enough to allow boarding.

To board, you need to line up your ship alongside the enemy ship and slow down or stop. When you're close, you'll have the option to begin boarding appear on your screen. The key for boarding can be changed in settings, but if you haven't changed the settings already, then the default key will be the spacebar for keyboard and mouse.

The boarding option removes you from the helm of the ship automatically, and you can move to the edge of your ship to get a prompt that lets you climb onto the enemy ship. As soon as you get on the deck, the enemy sailors attack you. While there can be a lot of sailors, you also get help in combat from your own crew, making the entire battle quicker than you might expect.

Once you defeat the sailors, you return to your own ship and take the option to loot the enemy ship's spoils. As a result, boarding ships is a nice way to get ship supplies and insignias in Windrose.