“pancake” refers to a colloaquial term for tiny nimble classic recreational racing sailboats like sunfishes and lasers, essentially the hull is shaped like a pancake (well a bowl more like but whatever) and all of the lateral resistance to getting blown sideways (that would be provided naturally by a long slim hull that sat deep in the water) is focused on the narrow point of the single daggerboard and to a lesser extent rudder. This is what makes sailboats like this an absolute joy to sail even in fairly light wind in real life, they take almost no wind to go and can take advantage of passing bursts of energy from even the most capricious wind gusts, so it makes sailing them a very direct and deeply calming conversation with the immediate elements of the wind and water around you.
Sailing in light wind is fun in a chill way but for long sailboats that have a consequently big turning radius, often it is difficult to keep any speed when turning the front of the boat directly past the onblowing wind because you can’t pick up any speed in that moment, you have to rely on inertia. A pancake sailboat like this is made to spin like a top with a flick of the rudder so that even in light wind the hull can carry momentum through multiple quick tacks (changing direction by rotating the bow past the direction of the onblowing wind) or jives (changing direction by rotating the bow the other way, so that it never directly passes by the direction of the onblowing wind, can be very difficult to control in a small sailboat like this).
With this kind of sailboat you basically have two controls, you aim the rudder with an articulated handle in one hand and you control the angle of the sail/boom through a rope held in your other hand that runs through a pulley. In real life you also are able to control the center of mass of your personal meatcube for minute corrections as well, but with essentially just those two control inputs an incredible variety and complexity of movement is possible.
Even if you have never thought about learning sailing, it is worth learning for its own sake because of how primal and direct learning how to sail a pancake boat like this is that only has one rope to hold and one rudder and that is the whole dashboard of controls. If you have ever met sailors, they probably are really intense and get all hyped about racing around in conditions that look absolutely awful to a non-sailor lol, but it is just as valid to sail around in light wind normal on a blustery afternoon summer day as wiser and lazier alternative to paddling a kayak :). Honestly it takes an astonishingly little amount of energy to move a tiny sailboat like this at a pace faster than you can paddle a kayak.
Pancake Sailor and the developers non-free games are marketed definitely pretty heavily towards VR, but Pancake Sailor actually works bloody fantastic as a Steam Deck game. It is an immediate cozy and chill experience, the moment you open the game and start playing. I can easily see myself talking with someone on the phone while I focus on the conversation and mindlessly sail around in pancake sailor.
Check it out! It is free!
Also the main game is on sale for $5 in the steam summer sale, the game doesn’t seem to go cheaper, it isn’t necessarily a super rare sale either though so shrugs honestly I recommend just downloading Pancake Sailor and having some fun!
This game will genuinely teach you how to sail, and the really wonderful thing is that if you learn how to sail a really really simple sailboat like this you will understand the basics of how to sail any sailboat, no matter how complex. Yes there are a billion more things to learn with larger sailboats with multiple crew and sails and ways to manipulate those sails… but at the end of the day you are trying to accomplish the same set of maneuevers that will become deeply intuitive to you if you practice sailiing a simple sailboat like this. Honestly, master a boat like this and if someone threw you onto a typical 40 foot monohull sailboat and you had to sail it back to a harbor to save your life, you would be fine. You would do a really shitty job, but again the fundamentalis are the same. This is a human skill I think everyone should explore through video games!
Warning though, once you learn how to sail every time you play a video game where sailboats are just normal boats but with an animated sail that magically changes the wind direction around… or even if there are true sailing mechanics but they are shallow af, you will become very sad… :( but then valheim will give you a hug and remind you that there are people out there that really do care.
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Valheim actually has a decent sail simulator.
I was so fucking hyped when I realized Valheim actually has the fundamentals of real sailing in it, certainly I had already fallen in love with Valheim at that point, discovering the sailboats weren’t half-asssed just reaffirmed to me in that moment that the lifelong partner I had been looking for and never finding in Minecraft was here, waiting for me, with a beard and torch. This whole time it wasn’t me for being weird and always getting really disconnected from the core gameplay loop of Minecraft after the initial rush of revisiting the game after awhile ran off in the way others who liked the game as much as me didn’t seem to… and this whole time I wondered what was wrong with ME.
Valheim whispered into my ear “honey, you KNOW what you want and I am going to give it to you” and shattered that whole complex in an instant when that shitty raft popped into the water in front of me after I crafted it for the first time.
That DLC is actually $1.49 during the sale, at least in the US.
Wow long essay on sailing
Hey sorry if that was a long reach
joke rimshot sound
I’m also a big fan of sailing games. Have you tried Sailwind?
Oh gosh if I wasn’t broke right now I would instabuy Sailwind lol, it looks exactly like what my heart has wanted from sailing games forever, but have always gotten arcadey, shallow action experiences that use the theming of pirate ships as a thin veneer to mechanics that have nothing to with sailing.
I don’t know when I will get Sailwind but when I do I will play the ever living shit out of it.
edit well I watched too many Sailwind videos because I was curious and then suddenly out of nowhere I smelled something weird and I realized I had in my excitement for imagining being able to stack cargo in my sailing ship like a kid in a sandbox playing with toys that I had already lit a $20 bill on fire with a lighter I had unconsciously pulled out of my pocket and at that point it would have been a waste not to buy Sailwind so shrugs no way I can win I guess, you got me corned again life.
Well, video games are a good distraction from being hungry at least!
I hope the $20 doesn’t set you back too much! I think you’re gonna really like it though. I already have about 77 hours of playtime, and most of that was before the recent ship-customization updates. I know early-access is a contentious subject, but the developers have been pretty steady with updates.
I feel like I did when I impulsively splurged on Motor Town because it clicked with me so well, which is a very confident feeling of no regrets. This game has already blown me away with the clarity of its gameplay vision.
I hope resource use can come a bitttt down on the deck but its fine it is an absolutely perfect handheld game in gameplay.
It’s not perfect but I always liked how the sailing boats in watch dogs 2 were more realistic. The wind actually does what it is supposed to do and you can’t just simply go perfectly straight
Oh damn I never knew that, see in games like that I never even bother to jump in a sailboat when I see one because I know chances are it is going to be lame and make me sad and the sailboat wasn’t put there as a drivable vehicle to make me happy but rather the programmers just made it so you could drive all the boats even if some of them were painfully boring and oversimplified to the point of being an utter waste of time and honestly kind of a middle finger to sailing. Like Saints Row style comedic games should just have the character go down into the cabin, come back up with a chainsaw, cut the mast down and then turn on the outboard to make it into a motor boat, that would be way less horrendous than programmers spending a bunch of time animating totally fake sails that just magically spin the wind direction every which way they go (it hurts my brain a little just trying to explain it from the standpoint of actually understanding the very barebones basics of sailing).
I have always had a bit of a grudge against Rockstar for not having their sailboats behave like sailboats in their games. They absolutely have the money and they have shown the aptitude to make mechanically superb focused games like the midnight club series or more specifically the table tennis game they made that is… just a damn fucking good table tennis game.
Rockstar could have made their sailboats behave like sailboats at least in GTA 5 and when people realized that was awesome they could have stupendously easily turned it into it’s own entire separate sailing game built on the GTA engine… from there small rowable sloops for inland waterways useful for running rum covertly to unexpected and unwatched places where cargo could be discretely offloaded would naturally slot PERFECTLY into a Red Dead Redemption 2 dlc focused on swamps and waterways….
…sigh
No excuses game developers, learn to sail, go play Pancake Sailor, I will not accept this level of extreme sailing ignorance going forward. Sailing is one of the dopest skills humans have ever mastered (and is certainly one sentient aliens on ocean planets all over the universe must have mastered as well, certainly before becoming a spacefaring race if that is even possible right?) and unlike space video games, the moment to moment skill of sailing a ship is fundamentally rich in sensory feedbacks and necessary minute control corrections.
Thanks for the share! Great way to waste a few minutes from time to time
That is what I thought!
Thanks, will check it out! I dug Dredge, it was chill, even when it wasn’t
Dredge looks pretty awesome. I have to say though, I get just as hot and bothered about the idea of a game like Ships At Sea/Fishing Barents Sea .
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1266540/Ships_At_Sea/?curator_clanid=40205009
I want both lol.
I will say Windbound looks like it kind of launched with some frustrating game bugs and confused players a bit, but it is at a crazy steep discount right now and looks like it is worth buying. It has real sailing mechanics as far as I can tell and involves the exploration and navigation aspect of sailing that I love.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1162130/Windbound/
Sail Forth also looks like another dime a dozen pirate ship games with ships that don’t act at all like a sailing ship but rather just look cool with animated sails and drive like a tank… but the sailing mechanics are actually apparently really deep and fun. They are arcadey, but the spirit is real sailing.
VR Regatta is also great if you’re looking for more and have the equipment
Honestly I don’t think I will ever be financially stable enough to drop ~1200 extra JUST for another computer monitor that is only compatible with 5% max of video games. I just have a lcd steamdeck, I can’t even afford a full gaming computer, asking if I have VR equipment is like asking a starving person if they have been taking any cooking classes at the expensive Italian restaurant nearby lately.
To be honest I don’t like the idea of video games being made ONLY for VR unless they are extremely focused on being a quirky unique VR experience as this whole “revolution” in video gaming feels like from the beginning it was meant to provide exclusivity like a status object not a gaming device.
Unlike other gaming revolutions that perhaps started with high end gaming requirements and then evolved into broader contexts and other games that worked on potato computers, from the beginning VR has felt like the point was to become part of an exclusive rich people club.
I will take VR seriously when VR heavy games developed by developers with access to multi-thousand dollar high end VR equipment actually begin to have a serious adult conversation about the barriers that requiring VR equipment creates for players (that they ignore hanging out play testing their game on a VR headset that costs more than my car), and the spirit of inclusivity that violates. Come up with a way for the rest of us to play, integrate gyroscope sensors for a 2d tablet, phone or steam deck screen so it can be rotated held out in front of you like a “window”into the VR world. If your solution longterm is “well maybe people without VR headsets just shouldn’t play my game” then I will not give you money, and I think your game design goals are misguided at a fundamental level whether I own a VR headset or not.
I know that isn’t the point and that people love VR because it is cool as fuck, but it is real hard for me not to get that vibe from VR I guess?
I did get the non-vr marineverse cup though, I honestly can’t tell if it is basically the same as VR regatta or an outdated version of the same engine, it is very hard to tell just from the steam listing and stuff lol. Which again… why??! I feel like they are just assuming if I want to have the real, current up to date experience I will have already purchased a VR headset.
My understanding I got was they are basically the same game at the heart of it, but that vr regatta has a bunch of VR stuff bolted on top of it, but if that turns out not to be the case I will definitely ask for a refund if the non-vr game is clearly being ignored in favor of development only for the VR game. I don’t think that is the case however, on the contrary a lot of people seem to mention the dev being really friendly and genuinely inspired to spread awareness about sailing.
