Sailing in a compact boat and occasionally sinking because you didn’t feel like getting up and killing the sirens that tried to wreck it is a key part of what makes exploring – or just commuting between missions – so much fun in The Witcher 3. But if you ever thought Geralt could utilize a ship that could safely store all the drowned heads he keeps in his saddlebags, a modern mod lets you try sailing a full-sized ship.
Yep, this is another one of my favorite projects made possible by the REDkit modding tools, and it’s certainly not the first nautical-themed project, as back in July another mod brought back the removed boat races from the game.
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“TrickArrant”Sail on a gigantic ship‘ not only boasts one of the best ‘does what it says on the tin’ names on Nexus Mods, but it also lets Gerry of Rivia climb aboard pilotable versions of those huge frigates that sit in the harbors of places like Novigrad as immobile objects in the base game. You’ll just have to put immersion aside for a bit, because as its creator said, it boasts “a lot of jank.”
Seriously, there’s an entire section of the description titled “Jan’s Summary,” and it’s longer than the instructions for utilize. The latter basically tells you to head to either Novigrad Harbor or Kaer Trolde, because that’s where the special controllable gigantic ships are now. You have to jump up to the main deck, then head to the steering wheel, and boom, as you can see in the video below, you can control a gigantic ship by having Geralt sit in the air in front of it, because this mod is basically about stacking gigantic ships on the default rowboat.
As such, there are a number of oddities to watch out for, not the least of which is that you can swim through the sides of the boat, since only the deck has collision. This is actually how you get back on board, if you fall into the water, swim through the sides of the vast boat until you find a compact rowboat in the middle, then step on it to be teleported back to the deck of the frigate. Think of it as a portal, even though Geralt hates them. Due to this same oddity, you will also find that the vast boat cuts through things and has enemies flying in when they attack.
“The boat mechanics fought me a lot harder than I thought they would when trying to do this, so I finally got it to the point where it’s usable, but it’s certainly far from perfect,” TrickArrant wrote, “But I really just think of it as a fun, throwaway mod that you install, play around with for 10-20 minutes, and then probably get rid of.”
If you have a PS5 and fancy playing 10-20 minutes of The Witcher 3 then you obviously won’t be able to take advantage of this mod, but the game is at least part of this month’s PS Plus lineup, so you might be able to save some cash.
