Disapering Raft and Teleporting

[Spearmint]

So i had a glitch where my raft disappered and then when i tried to live on an island by making a few crop plats and that i got teleported into the middle of nowhere

[Anonymous Helper]

Did you anchor your raft? World only rendered certain radius around your raft. If you jump on an island and let your raft drift away, the island you're standing on will despawn when your raft has drifted far away enough from it. If you want to explore islands you need to anchor your raft in place.

[toryoom]

Having had this issue happen myself when I first started playing the game, I strongly feel like the devs need to find another way of solving this.

At present, it's a jarring and unintuitive experience having the world just de-spawn out from under you because (unbeknownst to you) the game was coded to revolve around the raft as the center world-spawn point.

Classically speaking, players would not have any reason to expect a modern game to work like this, going in. Developmentally speaking, it just feels sloppy (even after better understanding the mechanics they were going for). Such de-spawn is not expected or communicated at all, and that's why it feels like a glitch when it suddenly happens without warning.

Since the game throws you into things so quickly, players don't always recognize the extreme importance of getting an anchor crafted ASAP. There should be some alternative ways of ensuring you don't lose your raft forever and end up in this predicament. Simply adding the ability to cut down trees and craft a new raft square--along with some updated code to ensure the specific island a player was standing on when their original raft drifted out of range didn't de-spawn--would be a sufficient, natural-feeling way to 'soft reset' the player's experience in these cases. It could also be as simple as allowing players some means to beach a raft that is small enough.

But either way, we absolutely need some kind of messaging alerts to properly educate the player more directly about the danger of this, and what's happening when it happens.

We need a more sensible way of transitioning the game when this happens. Islands shouldn't just disappear out from under the player without warning because their raft got too far away. There should be a less sloppy way of representing that you basically "lost" the game (or at least all your raft progress) in these moments.