Windrose is a game built by gamers for gamers, especially when it comes to quality-of-life (QoL) features. We have seen some of them in the past across different games, but having them combined sets a new bar for survival crafting games that don’t focus on realism.
Survival crafting games must balance fun with realism, and it often comes down to the quality-of-life (QoL) features. While leaning towards realistic features may contribute to immersion, it may also make the game more tedious. This is where Windrose found the golden balance: it focuses on action and adventure, keeping core features smooth and accessible.
Windrose (previously known as Crosswind) was developed by a team of passionate hardcore gamers who took inspiration from Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, Valheim, and Enshrouded. Having played Black Flag and Enshrouded among the three, I could see the inspiration only a few hours into the playthrough.
Crafting and base building
Like many survival games, Windrose starts with you spawning in the middle of nowhere, gathering materials and building a Bonfire—the heart of your camp. At this stage, gathering resources takes time, and what helps is that there’s no gear durability. In theory, tool durability should make the survival part more immersive, but in reality, it adds a layer of repetitive actions without contributing to the overall experience.
Base management in Windrose is smooth and intuitive. Much like in Palworld, crafting stations within the Bonfire’s range use all the resources in the camp, and not just those in your inventory. The only exception is the items in the stations’ output inventories. However, if you need those items for the same station, you can leave them there instead of transferring them into crates.
Transferring items is also easy thanks to the “Deposit similar” feature, which automatically moves the same items as those already in the storage. For example, if there are Silver Ingots in the chest, using “Deposit similar” transfers all Silver Ingots from your inventory.
In between gathering and crafting, a major part of this swashbuckling adventure is base building. For some, base building can end up being their favorite pastime, but it’s also essential to use stations like the Alchemy Table. If you want to focus on the exploration part more (like I do), building in Windrose is not only simple but also cheap.
One stick wall (around 2×2 meters) costs only two Plant Fiber to build, and you can get plenty of them from one tree. Realistically, it doesn’t make sense. But it doesn’t have to, because it saves plenty of time you would’ve otherwise spent chopping down trees. And if you ever misplace a structure, destroying it refunds 100 percent of the resources.
Exploring the world by ship
After a couple of hours and one repaired ketch, it’s time to explore the seas. The spirit of exploration is the strongest when you discover or visit a location for the first time, and that’s what Windrose allows you to focus on, thanks to fast travel.
You can build up to nine Fast Travel Points, and there are more found around the world. You can use teleport to a Fast Travel Point using another Fast Travel Point or while steering the ship anywhere in the world, giving you complete freedom in how you want to go about exploring. However, even as you fast-travel across the seven seas, you can summon the ship with one click and access its inventory in case you need extra storage.
Sea travel can be long and uneventful—unless you’re fighting enemy patrols. The combat is what you’d expect from a game inspired by Black Flag, and building on the source material, Windrose offers unlimited cannonballs and chain shots (which, while convenient, I found a little weird, considering there are bullets and gunpowder for firearms).
The more I played, the more of these smaller things I found that just made sense for the game. Like being able to place a tent with a respawn point almost anywhere in the world, or remove death markers from the map.
Granted, some QoL features are still missing from the game. It would be nice to spawn on the ship if I die during boarding, or be able to lock gear to avoid accidentally destroying it at the Disassembly Table. But as an early access game that launched only a week ago (and already peaked over 200,000 players), Windrose has set a new standard for what I expect from a survival crafting adventure game.
