Ships guide - building a flying ship in Shifting Sands

A ship needs only a ship base and a helm to sail on water. Add sand skids to cross land and an anti-gravity engine at the stern, powered by power crystals, to fly. Your first engine comes from Sobek, the Shifting Sands crocodile guardian. Ships exist only on Shifting Sands.

Hull tiers

Hull	Technology	Materials	Parts (official servers)
Thatch Boat	Thatch Boat	50 Thatch, 10 Thick Rope (hand-craftable)	4
Small Wooden Boat	Shipbuilding Technique	200 Hardwood Plank, 40 Hardwood Handle, 20 Leather Rope	30
Falcon-class Airship	Premium Shipbuilding Technique (iron age)	200 Iron Ingot, 200 Hardwood Plank, 40 Metal Plate, 20 Iron Wire, 10 Metal Part	60
Shark-class Flying Ship	Advanced Shipbuilding Technique (steel age)	200 Steel Ingot, 200 Premium Hardwood Plank, 50 Metal Plate, 20 Steel Wire, 10 Precision Part, 5 Steel Mold	100

Hulls are built at the Building Workshop. The dev logs call the top hull the Ray-class Flying Battleship; patch notes and the game data call it the Shark-class Flying Ship. The part limits apply to official servers; Casual Mode removes them.

Default caps: 2 ships per player and 10 per tribe, 1 Ray/Shark-class per player and 2 per tribe. Patch 13 fixed a bug that let one tribe own several Shark-class ships.

Anti-gravity engines

• First engine: in Survival Mode it drops when you defeat Sobek (changed on 12 April so ships fly sooner).
• Sizes: small, medium and large engines, each with load, speed, power and agility variants. Each is crafted from its engine core: small with Bronze Ingot, Rubber and Mineral Oil; medium with Iron Ingot, Rubber and Mineral Oil; large with Mysterious Alloy, Mysterious Fiber and Mysterious Magnet.
• Power: engines burn power crystals, found in dungeons and underground ruins. The engine tooltip shows total energy use against supply; every weapon you mount adds to the draw, and more cargo means slower flight.
• Placement: engines go at the stern.

Handling parts

Part	Effect
Sail	Extra acceleration with the wind
Rudder	Better steering
Sand skid	Lets the ship travel over land
Anti-gravity engine	Flight

Weapons and defence

Weapon	Role
Ballista, arrow tower	Land-base weapons that also mount on ships; early firepower
Cannon	Electromagnetic shells with wide-area damage
Guardian	Automatic energy turret, strong against boarding humanoids
Energy Shield / Protective Field	Blocks almost everything until the generator overloads; since patch 4 it also blocks sandstorms
Rockbreaker Turret	Beam that deals extra damage to hulls and shields
Battleship main cannon	Ray/Shark-class only; very long cooldown

Ground spikes, peg boards and roadblocks cannot be placed on ships (patch 3).

Crew

Crew are tribesmen bound to a ship. Each needs a seat on that ship; bound crew rest only on their own ship’s seats. Laborers can gather from nearby land while the gangplank is down, and craftsmen keep stations running in flight. Weapon racks and outhouses work on board. Assign roles as on land: tribesman jobs.

Linking, docking and blueprints

• Linking: attach smaller ships to larger ones to form a fleet.
• Docking: patch 7 added a ground docking system placed on foundation sides; once docking completes, the engines switch on and enter flight mode. The airship Docking System blueprint is for private servers and is not available on official servers.
• Blueprints: Upload Blueprint in the ship menu saves the ship with its devices and paint; share it on the Steam Workshop. Downloaded blueprints are built with materials unless the setting Ship blueprints consume materials is off.

Death Sandstorm

The world boss of the Death Desert controls boulders and sandstorms and attacks at long range. The developers built it as a fleet fight: bring cannons, Rockbreaker turrets and shields rather than fighting on foot.