Swimming and recovering floating items

Choose Swim out to enter deep water

In Adventure, open the interaction menu on adjacent deep water and choose Swim out. A carried boat does not force you to launch when you choose this action. Stable a brought-out mount or pack animal first. You can swim on the overworld and in ordinary dungeon water. Water on volcanic and Dragon Lair floors is lava and cannot be swum. Other scenes can use water as scenery.

Held strokes and movement cost

Consecutive swimming strokes alternate a moving stroke with a held stroke while you stay in deep water. If more than 2 world turns have passed since the previous stroke began, the next stroke moves. The first stroke into the water moves, and stepping onto the bank or shallows ends the swim. A held stroke pays a full-turn action cost without moving you. A moving stroke pays the movement cost at its destination. Changes to speed can therefore affect world time. There is no ordinary drowning countdown, but creatures in the water can still attack.

A moving stroke can lose a whole stack

Each moving swimming stroke has a 10% chance to put one eligible backpack entry into the water at your destination. Eligible entries have equal chances, regardless of their stack size. A selected stack floats away whole. Held strokes do not make this roll. Equipped items and quick slots are not searched. If an item is still floating on the destination tile after the catch attempt, the stroke does not lose another item there.

What stays in your pack

Retain or Protect prevents an item floating away. Legacy locked items are protected too. Boats, keys, books, craft recipes, spell blueprints and treasure maps stay put. Some irreplaceable story items also stay put. Ordinary equipment, ammunition, materials and food in the pack can float away. An ordinary gathering-quest ingredient is not protected just because a quest asks for it.

Water cheeses protect the pack

Coral Cream and Bogwater Curd give Water Breathing. Tideberry Brie gives Water Walking. While either effect lasts, swimming strokes are never held and nothing floats out of the pack. The names do not add a drowning timer or make lava safe. When the effect ends during a swim, ordinary stroke and pack-loss rules resume.

Tide-Runner changes pace

Tide-Runner removes held strokes once you have at least 1 point of its water-speed bonus. Each point also adds 1 tile per turn on overworld deep or shallow water, up to 3 stacks from this upgrade. It does not stop items floating away. In dungeon water, the stroke exemption still works, but the separate overworld water-speed addition is absent.

Catch floating items promptly

Swim onto a floating item, or steer a boat onto it on the overworld, to try to take it back. Normal pickup rules apply. A pickup refused for lack of space leaves the item afloat. Catching is attempted before that swimming stroke’s loss roll, so a successful catch can be followed by another loss. The item you just caught can be selected again. Sailing can recover floating items without a swimming loss roll.

Floating items drift with world turns

A floating item can move one tile in any of eight directions on each drift step. It needs an available destination and waits when the local water is not loaded. In a recognised river current, 75% of drift rolls first try the downstream neighbour. A blocked downstream tile falls back to another available neighbour. Current is read at the item’s actual river position. Only the current scene drifts, and movement actions that advance no world time do not trigger a new drift step. A jump in world time catches up at most 30 drift steps in one update.

Sea loss and inland shore attempts

Once its tile is loaded and a drift step checks it, an item at least 200 world turns old sinks permanently if its water is classed as ocean. Inland water instead removes it from the floating list at 400 turns and tries to place it on nearby ground. This can fail when there is no suitable ground, so inland water is not a guarantee of recovery. An adjacent bank can wash an item ashore earlier. The ocean test uses the world-map land cell, so the sea limit can apply close to shore.

Recover before leaving the scene

An item’s age uses world turns since it fell into the water. It can reach the sea or inland limit while you are elsewhere, even though that scene’s items have not moved. Each scene keeps at most 96 floating entries. Adding another beyond the limit removes the oldest entry. Emptying the pack and returning later is less reliable than catching a nearby stack while you can still see it.

Leave and return to a boat

On the overworld, Dive in leaves your boat floating where you left it and swims to adjacent deep water. Put co-op passengers ashore first. From a single-player ship deck, stand at the rail and choose Jump overboard. The landing helper prefers adjacent deep water and otherwise tries walkable bank or shallows. The hull stays put. Bump it to climb aboard again, subject to ownership and brought-out animal checks. The boat guide explains launch, hull condition and repairs.