The curse is meant to give players near immortality. As of now that's how it is and the only way to break it is to sink said ghost ships for the curse to eventually expire. Cursed players also get hungry faster so food supplies are consumed quicker. Though I understand as it is it may be hard to deal with, there's a few ways to circumvent it for now.

First being the aforementioned ship sinking. Destroy the ship and break the curse, and also if your a server owner, you could increase the cost of the figurehead to make it harder to obtain in the first place. I understand that with increased rates it would be easy to craft it, but the default cost was made for the wide variety of possible rates among different servers. Ships also do not gain immortality and regen. For the ships, it is purely cosmetic.

Secondly players with the curse are killable by damaging them over their maximum hp in a single hit, which would mean stuff like cannonballs and possibly higher quality firearms will be able to deal with them. As mentioned earlier, there is increased hunger, and this affects all tames and crew as well, meaning forcefully removing the curse would have averse effects on them as well. If they become uncursed and have no food they will quickly starve to death.

I will consider this though and possibly adjust the regen rates for hp. There's been a lack of discussion of the ghost ship so its been hard to test with a larger sample size so thanks for this.

We're a PVE server. For crew and animals it means they don't have to feed them at all since the hp regen negates any health lost by starving. We had one player remove food entirely from their ship since they didn't need to worry about starvation with the hp regen.

On a PVP server that may be appropriate to have more of a challenge to opposing players...but for a PVE server it is completely unbalancing. The curse lasts long enough that they can do what they like on islands without consequences like finding treasure or fighting powerstone island mobs without issue.

For now I've asked the people on my server who have bought the figurehead not to use it due to the buff it gives. They are waiting for me to get something modified with the mod. They agree that it is unbalancing.

I'd just like to be able to disable the buff and use the figurehead in a cosmetic fashion. I'll only consider raising the price if you're just going to not give me the option to disable the buff. I want people to be able to use the cool skin, I don't want people to use it as an "I win" button for all non-ship PVE content.

edit: and I just read the patch notes for today. I'll see if that presents a better situation. We also had issues with the Ghost effect lingering around after the figurehead was removed. That may have been the curse effect stacking.

Yeah, even in the reduced state the buff is just too great to make it worth having on the server I admin for.

https://i.imgur.com/qxHDmfD.png

Here's an image of me with the buff applied. You can see my hunger is already depleted...I'm being attacked by a lvl 3 tiger and a bee...and that's as far as the health goes down while I have the buff applied in this situation. It's not as bad as if I were using the infinitestats cheat, but it's pretty damn bad and completely unbalancing for pve gameplay. This is unacceptable.

I'm making the item unobtainable for now, but I would really like it if you could add a config option to allow me to disable the buff on that item so I don't have the disable the item. I love the work you did to make this figurehead possible, but the buff has got to go for our server to use it.

Also, the length of the buff is far too long considering the in game text when it is applied. The in game text says that as long as you are on the ship you will be cursed....but the buff stays on for 15 minutes after you get off the ship. That should be more like 60 seconds at most.

Hmm, the intention for the curse was definitely to make it possible to survive while starving. (You can live off raw and rotten meat) But god mode for pve content definitely isn't. The curse is also supposed to linger longer and longer the more time is spent on the ship, so I do suppose it can get broken especially with how long it lasts now as soon as you hop onto the ship. Originally, an additional planned downside of the curse was the inability to step on land, which would just kill you instantly, but it wasn't an easy thing to figure out so the idea was scrapped. To add to that, it wouldn't be fun to keep dying upon respawning on land. I'm going to look into it to see if i can implement a toggle, or make further adjustments to it.

Currently testing within the devkit a toggle between a PVE and PVP variation of the curse. PVP variation is the same as before in terms of health regen, but PVE has been scaled down dramatically, to 5hp/sec. This should keep it slow enough for players to be endangered by NPCs and wild animals while still maintaining a slight benefit to hp regen(Can still live off rotten/raw food and slow/stop the rate of dying by starvation or other sources). Both still have the rapid hunger debuff, have the starting curse duration reduced to 20 seconds - as it was during internal testing, and increased weakness to cold and hot temperatures.

The adjustments to the buff and ini option have been added, do experiment with it and share your feedback.

Based on the patch notes, that's exactly what I was looking for. I still need to get our server owner to apply the pve config line to switch to that version. Already it's an improvement just due to the reduced duration of the buff. Though It is at 60 seconds for the pvp version right now.

Ok, pve mode enabled. All looks good except that it seems to be stacking again. The time remaining on the buff gets refreshed as long as you are on the boat. It gradually increases the longer you stay on. I think this might be the intended stacking effect though...the longer you stay on the longer it lasts....so you could carry it onto land for a while, but that just saves you from hunger, thirst, and cold/hot....not from getting attacked really. We're ok with this the way it is. Thank you. I appreciate you being willing to work with us to make us happy :)

Originally posted by Thor:

Ok, pve mode enabled. All looks good except that it seems to be stacking again. The time remaining on the buff gets refreshed as long as you are on the boat. It gradually increases the longer you stay on. I think this might be the intended stacking effect though...the longer you stay on the longer it lasts....so you could carry it onto land for a while, but that just saves you from hunger, thirst, and cold/hot....not from getting attacked really. We're ok with this the way it is. Thank you. I appreciate you being willing to work with us to make us happy :)

Yeppers, that is indeed the intended effect for staying longer on a ship. basically the longer you stay on the longer the curse lingers, much like the curses in the POTC films. Glad you enjoy the mod!

So we have an issue:
The effect is not always being applied

This has resulted in two things:
-Players calling it useless because the effect is rarely applied
-Players losing their entire crew after a server restart because the effect isn't applied after a server restart...so they died to starvation. (had to replace the crew of an overly-cannoned galleon yesterday)

Does that happen every time the server is restarted and is it only caused by that? I also need some details, was there food in the larder upon the server starting up, and were they still under the curse(Skeleton form) after the restart? Once they die the curse is removed, and they should only start dying from starvation once the curse is removed. If they died while the curse was active on them, it would mean the health regen was not enough to mitigate the health loss from starving.
The curse buff for players and crew is supplied by the cursed ship every 3 seconds or so. So was the ship still cursed?

These should help narrow down the issue even further.

I don't believe they were cursed after the server restart, I think the curse just didn't get applied even though the figurehead was still on the ship. I will confirm with the player who lost their crew though.

I do know that the larder was empty since they were using the figurehead....the food drains in the the larder very fast for them (not for me as an admin apparently) so they remove the food when they apply the figurehead.

In my testing of the new PVE setting the health regen was enough to overcome the combination of starvation, thirst, and cold weather (that causes damage).

Yeah my testing in the kit shows that the regen is enough, so it does seem that the curse was just not being applied. We'll see what your player has to say about it.

"I had a bunch of food in my larder but it was eaten so no at the time of the restart it was all gone when ppl were dieing the crew had lost there buff (no longer skelly) so they all starved to death the figure head had bugged out and made us lag super hard around it once I removed it from the ship the lag got a lot better and I was then able to save the little crew I had left "

Yeah when I showed up to replace crew there were still like 2-3 left that hadn't died yet, and they did not have the curse. They didn't die because I think he added some food to the larder to make sure they wouldn't with the figurehead off.

Was the ship still cursed when the figurehead was attached after the restart? If it wasn't then that would explain why the curse wasn't passed down to the crew on board. Lag issue sounds like the same thing as before with multiples of the buff stacked on the ship, but that should still pass the curse to the crew on board.