Salt: Pirate Survival RPG

I moved this from What are you playing now, so I could post followups without gunking up that thread.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/327860/Salt/ --$14.99 currently


I'm still on my survival/crafting kick so I picked up a game called Salt. I guess it's called that because this game is full of islands and pirates; well land based pirates at least. Though there are a variety of ships, I've never seen another soul on the water.

This game has a lot more loot variety than most of the others; not including 7D2D. You have several types of armor, weapons, and accessories. I haven't needed to build a base yet, so I'm not sure if that's a thing.

Unlike the other games, Salt is populated. There are merchants, pirates, inns, etc. However, they are spread out amongst hundreds of islands, so you might not see anyone at all or a small handful depending on the island size and the resources.

Combat is with other humans/ mostly pirates and cultists. There are no wolves, bears, etc. You can swim a long ways too, though even a raft is much faster. I found an abandoned pirate ship, repaired it, and now I ply the waters in style. It seems weird to control a 60' long ship by myself though….

Food has to be scavenged and is always low. Trees bear fruit and deer are plentiful but shy easy so killing one takes patience. It is unlikely that you will make a clean kill with one shot, so you'll be chasing them down. A head/neck shot does massive damage though so you might get lucky. The flee AI for deer is great. You won't guess which way they'll run unless you box them in somewhere.

The map has to be populated by you. It's just a blank sheet of graph paper with longitude and latitude marks. You can find or make a sextant and compass to help with this and you can also WRITE NOTES on it. How nice that someone finally got this. It's so nice to be able to write stuff down. Things like "chest I couldn't open in nw corner of the island at 5E 12N, etc. I don't mind maps that hold your hand but sometimes it is quite fun to do your own. Note that there are several markers ready made for the islands too.

There are lots of chests, buried treasure, ancient ruins, etc. Exploration is HUGE in this game.

While there is no multiplayer just yet, it is in the workings. The author wants some form of multiplayer because they're going to add cannon to the bigger ships and then you'll be able to have ship to ship battles in multiplayer. For us single-player folks the cannon can take out shore-wandering pirates and deer.

A couple of other thoughts:

Your base ends up being a ship that you build or repair. Once you get a large enough ship, you can add beds, storage, paintings, etc. This makes a ton of sense as you will be constantly moving from island to island. So add base building to open world, real-time combat, crafting, minor stats, cartography, looting. The game has one non-random world and unlimited procedural maps too, so add that. It's still early access, even after 3 years. That's a thing in these hybrid games with survival aspects. Hardly any of them are in a release state.

Also, I found different colored ink for my note-keeping. Nice touch. The amount of loot is surprising and they've made even finding logs important and fun. You cannot cut down trees in this game so every log is important. It takes a lot of wood to repair a ship! I've started several games and even though I'm playing on the default map, each game has been vastly different because of the lack of a compass and sextant in the beginning. I always end up getting lost at sea and just picking an island at random. Once I find or build a sextant and compass, I retrace my steps and try to map where I've been. Note: you can place flags around an island to show that you've been there even before getting the navigational tools. I post 3 or 4 of these on each island for a quick reference.

Salt is only 7.49 at Humble Bundle this week if anyone reading this is interested:

https://www.humblebundle.com/store/salt?hmb_source=search_bar

I played quite a bit of an early version of this. Got a sextant, did a lot of mapping, and then another release came along that changed the results of the map seed. All that work for nothing!
I still like the game, and it sounds like things have improved quite as bit (e.g. even the pirates look different - they were mostly faceless blobs in the version I played!), so I'll come back to it eventually.

Yeah, I'm glad they offered a procedural generated option, but the default map is HUGE! I'm guessing around 600 islands if it matches the area I've already explored in content.

Quests are simple yet they've made them easy to turn in despite the size of the game world. You basically have representatives from a bunch of factions that are spread out in the world. So if you get a quest from an innkeeper, any innkeeper can give out the reward on completion. I've run across a fisherman guild, scholars, collectors, innkeepers, hunters, and probably others I haven't met yet.

Rewards are varied too. The collector's guild will give you great items if you complete one of their collections. For instance, there is a special set of pirate dice. Find all 5 and you get a chest armor that will buff the loot quality of your foes. That regular axe becomes a green or a blue or maybe even an orange axe. W00t!

Something else that is very nice. If you just want to cruise around in your ship and not fight, that's pretty easy to do. Follow the coastline of a potential stop and see if you spot any pirates or cultists. There are dozens of unpopulated islands that are completely safe to loot at will. Most of these won't have great treasure, but if you're just looking to hunt deer or gather fruit, you don't have to fight. The fighting is always around but you can skip it whenever you're not in the mood.

This new infatuation comes after completing the will to survive achievement in The Long Dark on interloper difficulty, this goes without saying of course.

What's an achievement?

crpgnut said:

What's an achievement?

Click to expand...

One of the dumbest things created in the hostory of videogames. You wouldn't want to know..

Thanks, arthureloi. I know what they are, of course, but it's not something I ever pay attention to. They seem like something for the younger crowd.

arthureloi said:

One of the dumbest things created in the hostory of videogames. You wouldn't want to know..

Click to expand...

They allow to add or extend content. Highly demanded for products like TLD.
Fitting addition considered the lack of interest shown in gameplay by players these days.

ChienAboyeur said:

They allow to add or extend content. Highly demanded for products like TLD.
Fitting addition considered the lack of interest shown in gameplay by players these days.

Click to expand...

What's a TLD?

The Long Dark. He likes to hijack survival game threads, I guess. I've been dabbling in a bunch of them for the last 6 months, but not The Long Dark itself. I like them to drop in price first. I started with 7 Days to Die, The Forest, Force of Nature, and now Salt. I just needed something to cleanse my RPG palate

crpgnut said:

The Long Dark. He likes to hijack survival game threads, I guess. I've been dabbling in a bunch of them for the last 6 months, but not The Long Dark itself. I like them to drop in price first. I started with 7 Days to Die, The Forest, Force of Nature, and now Salt. I just needed something to cleanse my RPG palate

Click to expand...

I see. I really wanted to try those games as I'm a big fan of the survival genre. Unfortunately, they're in early access and I would rather wait until they release. As for The Long Dark, it's pretty good but I found the weather system and looking for weapons too hard for my taste.

Are there any really good survival games out of early access you'd recommend? I love don't starve, for example.

By the way, you should try Subnautica. It's fantastic. It's been tough waiting for 1.0!

I can second Subnautica. It's beautiful. I got sucked into binging for several days but managed to rip myself away to, you know, get back to adulting and husbanding and fathering.

crpgnut said:

The Long Dark. He likes to hijack survival game threads, I guess. I've been dabbling in a bunch of them for the last 6 months, but not The Long Dark itself.

Click to expand...

So TLD was not played. Before demanding that others prove they played a product, maybe it will be better to start playing it by yourself.

What an arrogance.