The only thing that made me sad in Windrose

Windrose is a new pirate themed survival game that features land and sea adventure with survival and building mechanics. Windrose 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 in uncovering the main story. Players can sandbox away while unlocking recipes for building, equipment, and ships. The game can be played solo or coop. The building feels excellent with no limit to bonfires or camps, with a complement of a dynamic weather system. 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 within my expectation as it is a pirate game. Players instead need to build their other ship. Not to mention unlock the schematics for more powerful ships. 

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 the missing 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. Ship capture may also lead to an exploit if players somehow started capturing and pooling 100 ships this early.

Or what if players had capped many ships but then the devs implemented a ship crew management later on. They'd either have a overgrown army that they need to feed or a skeleton crew with 100 ships. 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 deploying new content, balance updates, and new ships. Additionally, I can also see a richer gameplay feature where your second ship follows 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 the interceptor fired 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.