Sailing around in a little boat and occasionally sinking because you couldn’t be bothered to get up and kill the sirens trying to break it apart is a key part of what makes exploration – or just commuting between missions – in The Witcher 3 a blast. Though, if you’ve ever thought Geralt could do with a vessel that could safely store all the drowner heads he keeps in his saddle bags, a new mod will let you have a go at sailing a full-size ship.
Yep, this is another one of those pet projects that the game’s REDkit modding tools have made possible, and far from the first maritime-based one, with another mod having restored the game’s cut boat races back in July.
TrickArrant’s ‘Sail Big Ship‘ not only boasts one of the best ‘does what it says on the tin’ names on Nexus Mods, it lets Gerry from the Rivia climb aboard pilotable versions of those big frigates that sit in the harbours of places like Novigrad as static objects in the base game. You’ll just have to park your immersion at the door a bit, since, in its own creator’s words, it boasts “quite a bit of jank”.
Seriously, though, there’s an entire section of the description entitled “Summary of the Jank”, and it’s longer than the instructions for use. The latter basically tells you to head to either Novigrad or Kaer Trolde harbours, because there are special pilotable big ships sitting in them now. You’ll need to hop onto the main deck, then head up to the wheel and boom, as you can see demonstrated in the video below, you can sail the big ship by having Geralt sit on the air in front of it, because this mod basically looks to layer its big ships over the default rowboat.
As such, there are plenty of quirks to watch out for, not least that you can swim through the sides of the boat, because only the deck has colision. That’s actually how you get back on board if you fall in the water by the way, swim through the sides of the big boat until you find the little rowboat inside, then climb aboard that to be teleported back onto the frigate’s deck. Just think of it as being like a portal, even though Geralt hates them. Because of this same quirk, you’ll also find the big boat clips through stuff and has enemies fly inside in when they attack.
“The boat mechanics fought me a lot more than I thought they would when trying to make this, so I finally got it to a point where it is usable, but it is certainly far from perfected,” TrickArrant wrote, “But really, I consider this a fun little throwaway mod that you install, mess around with for 10-20 minutes, and then probably get rid of.”
If you’re on PS5 and fancy messing around for 10-20 minutes in The Witcher 3, you obviously won’t be able to use this mod, but the game is at least part of this month’s PS Plus lineup, so that might save you some cash.