Everwind Guide: Things I Wish I Knew Before Taking Flight
Everwind drops you into a sky full of gorgeous floating islands and then immediately lets you make catastrophic mistakes if you aren't paying attention.
The tutorial tower is a neat little safety net that teaches you how to swing a stick and place a basic block. Then you step outside, the training wheels disintegrate, and you are left staring at a pile of steampunk junk while hostile wildlife waits for you to slip up. The sandbox freedom is genuinely intoxicating, but the absolute lack of handholding means you will probably do something incredibly stupid within your first hour.
I certainly did, and my idiot friends managed to invent entirely new ways to ruin a playthrough. I respect a game that trusts my intelligence, but I draw the line at letting me accidentally delete my respawn point while trying to place a decorative rug. To save you the headache of completely restarting your save file, here are the hard truths the game glosses over.
The Cockpit Is Holy Ground
Your airship is your mobile base, your storage locker, and your only way to navigate the map. Naturally, you will want to upgrade it, expand the deck, and maybe make it look like a floating fortress instead of a wooden raft with a balloon taped to it.
During this remodeling phase, you might be tempted to move your cockpit to a better spot. Do not do this while airborne.
The cockpit acts as your primary spawn point and your teleport anchor. If you remove it to place it somewhere else, and you accidentally fall off the ship during those five seconds, you are completely screwed. You cannot teleport back to a ship that has no steering wheel. You will respawn on the ground, stare up at your beautiful floating base drifting aimlessly in the clouds, and realize all your best gear is trapped up there forever. Build around the cockpit or wait until you are securely parked on solid ground before doing any major renovations. If you are struggling with the actual mechanics of getting off the ground, check out my Airship Engineering 101 guide so you do not accidentally build a brick that refuses to fly.
Water Is Your Best Friend
Combat in Everwind is punishing early on. Your stamina drains fast, your weapons break, and enemies hit with terrifying precision. You will inevitably bite off more than you can chew and find yourself sprinting away from a mob of angry skeletons with a sliver of health left.
When this happens, head for the nearest deep puddle.
For whatever reason, the enemies in this game have zero aquatic mobility. They will chase you endlessly on land, but the moment you jump into a lake, they stop dead at the shoreline. They will just stand there looking confused while you safely tread water, wait for your stamina to regenerate, and eat a piece of cooked meat to heal up. It is a hilarious quirk of the AI that you absolutely need to exploit before the developers decide to patch it out.
Violence Has Permanent Consequences
Eventually, you will stumble across a peaceful village. You will walk up to a friendly NPC, try to initiate a conversation, and accidentally press the attack button instead of the interact key.
In a normal game, they might yell at you or run away. In Everwind, the entire village immediately registers you as a hostile threat and will try to cave your skull in. To make matters worse, there is currently no apology mechanic, no bounty system to pay off, and no way to reset your reputation with that specific settlement. You hit them once, and you are public enemy number one for the rest of your playthrough. Keep your weapons holstered and double check your keybinds before you try to make friends.
The Pause Menu Is A Trap
This sounds incredibly basic, but it catches everyone off guard. Opening your inventory, reading your compendium, or checking your crafting recipes does not stop time.
If you are digging through your backpack for a healing potion while an enemy is charging you, you will die. The world keeps turning. Weather systems roll in, animals continue their patrol routes, and your character will continue to starve if your hunger meter is low. Treat your inventory like a live backpack. Sort your hotbar before you engage in a fight, and never go AFK while staring at a menu unless you are safely locked inside your floating base.
Do Not Pet The Bears
You will see bears wandering around the starting islands. You will look at your shiny new copper sword and think you can take one. You cannot.
Bears are not standard early game mobs. They are furry tanks with a vendetta against anyone foolish enough to enter their zip code. They will fold you like cheap lawn furniture in two hits, ignore your pathetic attempts at blocking, and send you straight back to the respawn screen. Just walk away. Wait until you have solid armor and an understanding of the combat and skill caps before you even think about seeking revenge.
You Have To Process Your Dirt
When you use your pickaxe to smash a stone wall or a piece of terrain, you get raw resources. Instinct tells you that you can just take that raw rock and place it back down to build a wall.
Everwind requires an extra step that trips up a lot of amateur builders. You cannot place raw materials directly into the world. You have to take that raw stone to a Block Station, process it into a usable building block, and then place it. Do not destroy your existing base structures thinking you can just snap them right back into place. You need the right crafting station running before you can fix your architectural mistakes.
Multiplayer Is Fantastic, But Flawed
Playing with a squad completely changes the dynamic of the game. Having one person steer the ship while someone else cooks food and another person snipes enemies from the deck is a phenomenal experience.
However, the current build relies on a peer-to-peer connection with a strict tethering system. If you wander too far from the host, the game aggressively teleports you back to them. It is jarring, annoying, and can ruin an exploration run if your group splits up. If you are bringing friends along for the ride, make sure you understand how the multiplayer tethering actually works so you can coordinate your movements and avoid screaming at each other over Discord.
Everwind is chaotic, challenging, and occasionally unfair, but that is exactly why the gameplay loop sinks its hooks into you. Accept that you are going to make mistakes, keep your gear repaired, and always double check your spawn point before you try something reckless.
