There is this soft, beautiful melody that plays at the character select screen that, at least for me, set the tone of the game going in for me. Upon your first revival you find yourself in a chamber softly lit with no immediately obvious exit. Here you get introduced to Worlds Adrift's most important device - the grapple - with this you can attach to surfaces and reel yourself in, lower yourself safely in to caves, swing and wall run and, once you've mastered it you can move very quickly through the floating islands.
Once out of the Revival Chamber you can begin learning the ropes, which without guidance can be a bit daunting. I struggled for a while with gathering materials and figuring out what to do with them. Considering that I was originally going to write a 'First Few Hours' piece things were looking a bit rough. However, I ended up playing for almost eight hours straight and in those eight hours I learned a lot so get ready for some rapid fire tips!
Next up you want to gather a lot of wood, so press 1 to bring up your gather tool and do some deforesting all while not letting a cut-down tree fall on your head - you will die!
Metal also needs gathering and this you get from pale stones that have cracks in them. Chip away at the outer layer to reveal metallic nuggets, you may also see elongated things with glow bits. These are sky core shards - press E to pick them up. Now you have materials to build your first boat and hopefully enough acquired knowledge to unlock ship building. You do this in your inventory screen (Tab) under the knowledge tab.
Once done you can build a shipyard and a crafting station, but before you do this explore the island because other players sometimes leave their old stations behind and these keep the last thing someone made on record, so by looking around you may find technology you don't know how to build yet and setting up a shipyard next to these will help you get ahead of the curve.
Congratulations you have a barebones airboat capable of taking you places. I realise that I make this sound like a frantic rush, but it isn't. As I said at the beginning the music set the tone for me and I learned all the above things while quietly exploring and taking in the stark splendour. It was meditative and outside of the random and hilarious deaths there is a feeling of serenity to the starting islands.
Now on to my favourite accidental death machine - the crafting station. If you stand too close while building something there is a very good chance the item you are making will fall on your head and kill you. Sometimes when you take these crafted objects off of the table they will sink into the ground. Do not try to rescue them because can and will reappear and kill you. When you put your mast down be sure that it isn't falling over towards you, because it will kill you!
Bossa has a very thorough road map set out for the game which is encouraging and fuels my excitement for Worlds Adrift's future. There is a lot to discover here and I am far from seeing everything to offer. This includes fully exploring the in-depth Island Creator toolset which allows players to craft their own islands that may be included in the live game.
At the time of writing I have sunk around twenty hours into Worlds Adrift and I can see myself sinking at least twenty more. It is obviously a long way off being finished. There are bugs and performance issues, but when used correctly Early Access helps developers smooth out the issues and build compelling systems to include in their games. If you have a
I know I'll be returning to Worlds Adrift many times over the coming months.