You can start swimming and diving immediately in Crimson Desert: Charting the Unknown DLC, but you don’t want to miss out on bonus features and new quests, so here’s how to get your first Ship and set sail!
Prerequisites to Unlocking Your First Ship
The Ship and ocean exploration are not tied to the new main story quests from Charting the Unknown DLC. Before you can build a ship, you’ll need to meet two requirements:
- Unlock the Greymane Camp by completing Chapter III of the Main Story.
- Expand the camp by completing the Expanding the Camp Faction Quest, part of the Gathered Will questline.
How to Build Your First Ship
Once you’ve met both requirements, the Greymane Faction Quest Charting the Unknown will become available. It’s through its opening quest, A Call from Beyond the Horizon, that you’ll build your first ship.
The quests starting spot depends on where your Greymane Camp is:
- Pailune if you’ve done the necessary quests (after the main story).
- Howling Hill in Hernand if you kept it in place.
You’ll talk to a trio of Greymanes discussing new ways of making money. One of them suggests building a ship, to which Kliff agrees. This unlocks the Small Shipbuilding Mission.
To complete it, you will have to dispatch 5 comrades and invest the following camp resources:
- 600 stone
- 600 wood
- 1.2K provisions
- 10K camp funds
The mission has a Task Duration of 12 in-game hours. When it finishes, you’ll receive the Small Greymane Ship, waiting for you on the docks of Vellua, ready to set sail and start your maritime adventure.
How to Prepare the Ship for Sailing
When your ship is ready, you can manage it, including to assign a crew on various positions at a Ship Manager. Those are available at every port in Pywel.
Interacting with the Ship Manager NPC, will open up a new UI where you will be able to buy more ships (they are quite expensive if you are in the early game still), manage ship crews, load and unload trade goods.
When you have completed all of the above, go to the ready ship, jump on it and start sailing it across the vast South Sea and East Sea.
How to Pick Up Ship Bounties
During the starting quest, before you get to sail the ship for the first time, you will be sent to the Notice Board at Vellua Port. There, you will be able to pick up your first few Ship Bounties.
The first time you come to Vellua’s Port, you will see the purple note markers on your minimap. At this time, you will not have progressed through the quest and two Greymane NPCs will be standing in front of the Notice Board. You can still pick up the available Bounties. Or wait for the quest to ask you to talk to these guys, after which they will move aside.
Keep coming back to the Notice Board for more as the rest of the Ship Bounties wil just continue to spawn each time you return.
How to Control the Ship
You can accelerate by pressing once or twice the Sprint keybind. To decelerate and stop, press the Evade button keybind. If you hold the Evade button, you will reverse the ship.
With the Aim keybind, you can change the camera position from close (behind you) to far (behind the ship overview). You can also freely rotate the camera around the ship while sailing.
During combat, using the Aim button, allows you to enter firing mode with your cannons.
Your ship can get damaged during combat or under other extreme circumstances. You can keep an eye of the ship’s health bar, which is near the minimap in the bottom left. On the bottom right are your control hints.
