Everwind Multiplayer Guide: Fixing Tethering, Unlocking Lobbies, And Skill Roles
Flying a massive steampunk fortress with your friends is an incredible experience right up until the game decides you walked too far away and rubberbands you straight into a wall.
There is a very specific kind of chaos that comes from putting four idiots on a floating wooden raft and telling them to survive. Everwind nails the cooperative survival feeling perfectly when everything actually works. You have one person steering the ship, another frantically cooking meat by the furnace, and two more standing on the deck firing arrows at a passing island. It is glorious. It is also an early access indie game relying on peer to peer networking. That means you are going to hit some frustrating technical walls very quickly.
I have spent hours testing the multiplayer with my usual group, and we had to learn some harsh lessons about how the game handles cooperative play. If you are planning to build a crew, you need to understand exactly how the lobby system and the tethering mechanics function.
You Have To Earn The Right To Play Together
You cannot just boot up the game for the first time, bypass the opening, and immediately invite your friends into a shared lobby. The game forces you to prove you understand the basic mechanics first.
The Mandatory Tutorial Run
Before the "Join a Friend" option even appears on your main menu, you have to complete the single player tutorial. You must spawn in, gather the basic starting materials, claim your first wrecked airship, and actually take off into the sky. Once your ship is airborne and the game hands you the introductory Steam achievement, you are officially cleared for multiplayer. It is basically a mandatory driver's license for your airship so you do not drag your friends down by constantly asking how to craft a wooden stick.
Setting Up The Lobby
Once everyone has their license to fly, pick one person to be the dedicated host. Because the game relies entirely on a peer to peer connection until the dedicated servers arrive in 2026, the player with the absolute best and most stable internet connection needs to be the one hosting the world to mitigate lag.
To get the lobby running, the host needs to hit play, either create a brand new world or load up their existing tutorial save, and open the game menu. Select the online tab, click open lobby, and generate a scrambled lobby code. Hand that code out to your group. When your friends use the "Join a Friend" button to enter the code, do not rush off the moment someone connects. Wait for everyone to fully load in on the deck before you start moving the ship or engaging enemies. The early access loading process can be slightly unstable, and leaving a friend behind while their screen is still black is a great way to get yelled at.
The Teleporting To Host Nightmare
If you have played any indie survival game recently, you are probably familiar with tethering. Everwind uses a chunk loading system tied directly to the host player, and it is incredibly aggressive.
The Invisible Leash
The game simply will not let you wander off on your own. Depending on what is happening in the environment, the tether range seems to fluctuate wildly between 300 and 700 meters. If you step outside that invisible bubble, your game will briefly pause, your screen will go black, and you will get hit with a "teleporting to host" message. It is easily the most jarring part of the multiplayer experience right now. My friends and I tried to split up to loot a large island faster, and the game vetoed that strategy by teleporting my buddy mid jump. He fell off a cliff. We laughed, but the joke gets old fast when you are trying to make actual progress.
The Death Orb Strategy
Until the dedicated servers roll out, you have to play as a tight unit. Do not treat Everwind like a game where everyone builds their own house on different sides of the map. You need to stay near the ship and clear islands together. The developers have confirmed on the forums that letting everyone build their own separate ships is still a work in progress, so do not even try it right now. Build one massive flying fortress and keep everyone on board.
There is a massive tactical advantage to staying glued to each other anyway. When you inevitably get crushed by a high level enemy, your loot drops in a death orb. If your group is sticking close together, they are right there to secure the area and guard your stuff while you respawn. If you are wandering alone on the edge of the chunk border and die, recovering that orb before the tethering yanks you away again becomes an absolute nightmare.
The Harsh Reality Of Character Saves
There is a lot of conflicting information floating around online about how character progression works in this game. Let me set the record straight so you do not lose your mind.
Your character and your inventory are permanently tied to the world save. If you spend twenty hours building up a god tier Warrior in your own solo game, you cannot take that character into your friend's lobby. You will load in completely naked with zero skill points. I learned this the hard way after farming for a solid hour in my own game just to show off a new sword, only to spawn into my friend's ship with nothing but a wooden stick.
Because progression is locked to the save file, you really need to commit to one shared world. If your host logs off for the night, that world goes with them. You can play your own solo save in the meantime, but nothing you earn will carry over to the group sessions. If you want to know what else to avoid doing in your first few hours together, read my list of things I wish I knew before starting.
Dividing The Labor On Deck
Survival in a shared world means you have to share the workload. Traveling between the massive floating islands takes real time, and standing around staring at the clouds is a massive waste of a good crew.
Everyone will be riding the exact same airship, which means your storage chests are going to fill up with random dirt, stone, and plant fibers almost immediately. When you are sailing between destinations, divide and conquer. Have one person entirely focused on steering and navigating the skies. Assign someone else to be the designated quartermaster to organize the chaotic storage chests. Another player should be running the furnaces to process raw materials, while the last person cooks meals to stack health regeneration buffs for the next island.
More hands make the tedious homesteading tasks fly by. If your designated pilot is struggling to keep the ship moving because they keep ignoring the generator requirements, point them toward my Airship Engineering 101 guide so your entire group does not end up plummeting out of the sky.
Specializing The Skill Trees
If all four of you try to level up the exact same combat tree, you are going to run out of crafting materials incredibly fast. Everwind forces you to spend five skill points per tier just to unlock the next level of abilities. The level cap is real, and trying to be a jack of all trades means you will miss out on the highest tier perks.
In a group setting, you need to assign roles. Have one person dump all their points into the Engineer tree. This person becomes the backbone of the party, handling the vital ship upgrades and crafting the best tools so the rest of you do not have to waste points on utility nodes.
For combat, split the difference. Have one person go all in on the Warrior tree so they can tank the heavier hits from mobs with physical damage and heavy armor. The other players should absolutely focus on the Arcanist tree for elemental spell books, runes, and crowd control. When everyone specializes, the grind feels significantly shorter, and your group becomes a highly effective death squad that actually compliments each other in a fight. You can find a complete breakdown of what each skill tree actually does and how the level cap works in my Combat and Skills guide.
