The only thing that made me sad in Windrose

Windrose is a new pirate themed survival and builder game that features land and sea adventure with survival and building mechanics. It is the newest Pocketpair published game developed by Kraken Express. And it is off to a great start with over 1 million sales plus over 200k peak player counts. Pocketpair may have another great game under its management. 

There are a lot of satisfying play elements in Windrose such as the adventure from uncovering the main story. Or players can sandbox away while unlocking recipes for building, equipment, and ships. Coop exists but the game does not feel lonely with solo. The building is excellent and complemented with a dynamic weather system. Resources also respawn. Players can build limitless bonfires and camps. Not to mention the cunning land and ship battles in a pirate themed game.

Although there is one thing that saddened me especially due to my eagerness with ship battles. Disappointing, really. Players can board enemy ships but cannot capture ships (yet). Instead, boarding points toward collecting loot and coins. There is no ship capture in Windrose - at least the current build does not allow for ship capture yet.

Capturing ships was my expectation as it is a pirate game. Players instead need to build the other ship. Or unlock newer ships as they progress in the game.

Once washed up ashore and now I have two sister ships anchored in my base. 

Players start with the Ketch series ships and I will rename my second ship as Banana Ketchup.

I sensed that no ship capture may be a game design decision as we're playing the first early access build, and developers are dealing with save conflicts involving Steam cloud saves. It may also lead to an exploit if players somehow started capturing and pooling 100 ships with a skeleton crew.

Or what if players had capped many ships but then implemented a ship crew management later on. They'd either have an army or a skeleton crew after the update. The game would look broken. 

I think ship capture will be added later on as a future content. Including photo mode. The developers need to consolidate or gather feedback from their early access build first, before implementing new content, balance updates, and new ships. Additionally, I can also see a related deeper gameplay feature if you have two or more ships having the second ship follow your flagship; and ship battles with your allied ship against the enemy. They need to add more coding for AI maneuvers and so on. 

Although friendly ships already exist in the game which impressed me after I joined a ship battle between the Smugglers and Blackbeard pirates. As I passed the enemy, the friendly Smugglers Interceptor cruised on my port side and chased after the Blackbeard hauler some distance at my stern. And then I heard the interceptor fire its cannons. As if the friendly ship didn't want to shoot while I was in the line of fire.

Watching my first Stock Ketchup from my Brethren Ketchup.

For now, I'm seeing requests in the Steam forums to be able to capture enemy ships. They can definitely put a cap limit on the ships in your roster. Honestly it doesn't really make sense to not be able to capture enemy ships since Blackbeard has its own fleet. Ship management and building other ships already exist in the game. So we would have to wait.