Sailing around in a small boat, and occasionally sinking it because you were too lazy to get up and kill the Kraken trying to tear it apart, is a big part of the fun of exploring (or just commuting between quests) in The Witcher 3. If you’ve ever thought that Geralt needed a boat that could safely store all the drowned heads in his saddlebags, though, a new mod will give you the chance to pilot a full-sized boat.
Yes, this is another pet project made possible by the game’s REDkit modding tool, and it’s far from the first sailing-based project, with another mod returning back in July to restore boat racing to the game.
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TrickArrant’s “Sail Big Ship” not only has one of the best “deserving” names on Nexus Mods, it also lets Gerry from Rivia board a drivable version of those massive frigates that appear as static objects in the base game docked in ports in places like Novigrad. You just have to let your immersion down a bit because, in the words of its creator, it’s “pretty bad.”
Seriously though, there’s a whole section in the description called “Jank Summary” that’s longer than the instructions. The latter basically tell you to head to Novigrad or Kaer Trolde harbor, because there are special drivable tall ships anchored there right now. You need to jump onto the main deck and then walk over to the steering wheel, and as you can see in the video below, you can steer the tall ship by having Geralt sit in the air in front of the ship, as the mod basically overlays its tall ships on the default rowboats.
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As such, there are a lot of quirks to watch out for, not least the fact that you can swim past the sides of the ship, since only the deck has collision. Incidentally, if you fall into the water, you actually get back to the ship this way, by swimming past the sides of the large ship until you find the small rowboat inside, then climbing up to teleport back to the deck of the frigate. Think of it like a portal, even though Geralt hates them. Due to the same quirks, you’ll also find that the large ship will clip things, and enemies will fly in when they attack.
“The ship mechanics took a lot more work than I thought they would while trying to make this model, so I finally got it to a point where it’s usable, but it’s certainly far from perfect,” TrickArrant wrote. “But seriously, I think it’s a fun little model that you can assemble, fiddle with for 10-20 minutes, and then probably throw away.”
If you’re on a PS5 and fancy playing 10-20 minutes in The Witcher 3, you obviously can’t use this mode, but the game is at least part of the PS Plus lineup this month, so this might save you some money.
