15 Mistakes in Windrose That All Players Should Avoid

Windrose is the ultimate swashbuckling pirate adventure, featuring a risky world filled with dense biomes and intense naval battles. Whether you’re a beginner pirate or an experienced sailor, your journey on both water and land won’t be free of mistakes. So, we’re here to tell you the 15 mistakes that every Windrose player should avoid.

1 Don’t Purchase Ships Before You Have the Required Resources

You can build your reputation with four Factions in Windrose, but all of them offer and sell different items and provisions. For example, Brethren of the Coast sell Ship upgrades while Smugglers of Port Royal sell Hull upgrades and Naval Tactics. Now, we recommend investing in Ship upgrades from the Brethren of the Coast Provisioner, but do not waste your hard-earned Piastre on new Ship designs.

The Brethren of the Coast Provisioner sells Ship Designs: Brig and Frigate for 1,000 and 3,000 Piastre respectively. If you have the required reputation Rank, you might be thinking of purchasing the Brig, but it’s worth noting that after you buy the Ship, you’ll need to craft it using a hefty amount of resources from the Foothills.

2 Don’t Neglect Boarding Party Gear

You can upgrade and craft various items at your Shipwright’s Workshop. However, your focus should be on crafting and upgrading the Boarding Party Gear. It’s a Crew Equipment that increases the power of your crew when boarding other ships, and improving your crew’s overall strength means surviving longer during pirate battles.

You won’t be able to take on all the pirates on a ship at once, which is where your crew will shine. If you get killed while boarding an enemy ship in Windrose, you’ll have to restart the entire encounter. So, upgrade your Boarding Party Gear and let your crew do the heavy lifting during a boarding battle.

3 Ensure Your Ships Can Support Heavy Cannons

A costly mistake you can make in Windrose is purchasing heavier artillery without the required Ship to support it. Cannon calibres are limited by your Ship’s class and hull variant, so you won’t be able to equip 36-Pounders on smaller ships such as the Ketch and the Brigantine.

If you want to improve your Ship’s combat capabilities, all you need to do is ensure that your Ship can support heavy artillery, as smaller ships don’t have the capacity and gun port size to support the substantial weight of heavier cannons.

4 Don’t Forget to Use Fast Travel

Windrose has an incredibly accessible Fast Travel feature, and not using it to teleport to key locations quickly will be one of the biggest mistakes you make, wasting time for no reason. The way this works is after you’ve unlocked fast travel points on the map, you can craft Fast Travel Bells or obtain them from Chests and place up to 10 of them on the map.

If you want to place Fast Travel Bells at newer locations, you’ll need to remove some of the previous ones, assuming you’ve reached the limit. You’ll also unlock permanent fast travel points at PoIs, so use the Fast Travel bells and the static fast travel points to save time and get around the map quickly.

5 Always Purchase Merchant Contracts

The Faction Provisioners in Windrose sell Merchant Contracts for specific resources that you can purchase with your Piastre. Once you purchase a contract, you can construct a Merchant building at any location in your base, and they’ll directly deliver goods to you for Piastre. Merchant Contracts are inexpensive, so if you have Piastre to spare, purchase them from Vendors.

Each Merchant Contract will offer specific resources, such as Food, Natural Resources or even Animal Products. Only a handful of resources will be available after you set up the Merchant building, but the lineup will expand after certain conditions are met.

6 Retreating in Combat Is Always an Option

One of the worst mistakes you can make during intense encounters in Windrose is thinking that you can bite off more than you can chew. Thanks to the game’s Soulslite combat, you’ll need to conserve Health and Stamina, but when you run out of both, don’t hesitate to retreat to regain your Stamina and restore Health by eating Food.

The best part is that as long as you don’t travel far away from the bosses and mobs, you can pick up the fight directly from where you left off, preventing the enemy from regaining 100% of their health. We recommend setting up camp beside the enemy base for a swift retreat in case things go south.

7 Don’t Forget to Carry Wood During Exploration

A lot of players make the mistake of not carrying Wood while exploring dark caves and mines. These areas are specifically shrouded in darkness, and you won’t be able to locate or discover rare resources and materials inside caves and mines without light. Carrying wood while exploring ensures that you can craft Torches whenever your surroundings get dark.

You can place Torches anywhere inside dark areas for maximum visibility, and you can also use Wood to craft platforms to reach elevated areas. As XP is tied to progression, it’s paramount that you carry Wood during exploration. Otherwise, your sightseeing will be cut short, thanks to limited visibility.

8 Avoid Travelling to the Foothills Early

Nothing is holding you back from travelling to the Foothills with your Ship early on in Windrose. While Foothills is full of crucial resources, we do not recommend taking that risk. After you reach a certain point when heading there, you’ll be unceremoniously greeted by ridiculously powerful Gunboats and Ships.

Reaching Foothills early in the game will offer a massive progression boost. However, is the venture truly worth your pirate life? Despite being a resource-heavy biome, Foothills is also tougher, so we recommend leveling up adequately before thinking of setting sail towards this biome.

9 Read Every Note and Curio

A pirate’s main objective in Windrose is to survive in a dangerous world and engage in naval battles for loo. However, a bit of reading will do you good, too, so ensure you read every note and Curio that you find during your Windrose adventure.

Not reading all the notes and Curios that you find will cost you, as they usually mark buried treasures on the map. If you don’t read them, the location for the treasure or Chest will not appear on your map, so in this case, knowledge is valuable.

10 Hire the Right NPCs

As you progress throughout Windrose, you’ll come across multiple worker NPCs with unique bonuses that you can hire for a hefty sum of Piastre. For example, hiring Rosalinda Mercer doubles Clay Bottle production and offers a chance to craft an extra Elixir, while recruiting Jasper Crowe provides a chance to recover resources spent on upgrading an item.

So, it all depends on your requirements, and since Piastre is involved, you should take your pick carefully. After you recruit a Worker, head to the Armor and Clothing Workshop in your base and navigate to the Worker tab to assign them and activate their bonuses.

11 Tortuga Doesn’t Have a Buyer

If you were expecting to hoard your loot and provisions in Tortuga and sell them to get rich quickly, you’ll be disappointed to know that Tortuga doesn’t have a Buyer, only Faction Bounty Agents and Provisioners. You’ll need to reach the People of Tortuga faction base to sell your provisions to an actual Buyer NPC.

Tortuga acts as a biome where you can only access Bounty Agents and Provisioners and recruit Workers. The real Buyer is present in the People of Tortuga Faction hideout located elsewhere on the map.

12 Don’t Rush Into Fights

After you begin your Windrose journey, you’ll come across Outposts teeming with enemies, and the worst thing you can do is rush straight into battle without any sort of strategy or planning. Some areas will contain both ranged and melee enemies, making it challenging for you to fight aggressively.

The solution to this problem is to scope out the area before you engage to determine the number of enemies present. Use the terrain to your advantage to kill the ranged opponents from a distance first, and then kill the melee enemies without worrying about getting shot.

13 Use the Marking Feature to Mark Specific Spots

Windrose has a marking feature that allows players to mark specific locations with a name and Icon of their choice. Utilize this feature to mark resource-heavy spots, so you can return to them later when you run out of a specific resource.

Mark everything from Dodo Nests to Pig Dens, and when you’re out of the resources that these locations provide, you can easily return to them without thinking about where to go next. Your markings will make exploration and resource grinding much more convenient.

14 Bandages Are Your Best Friend

During combat in Windrose, if you don’t have Bandages, you will lose your life, especially against high-level enemies. Craft them using Plant Fibres at your Workbench. Plant Fibres are a resource available readily in the open world. Bandages are a crucial item that you must carry at all times to avoid dying, along with Food.

The strategy is to attack your opponents, retreat when your health is low, and use Bandages to restore health and return to combat. If you assign Bandages to your hotbar, you’ll be able to access them swiftly, so carry this item against any threat that you encounter during your Windrose adventure.

15 Don’t Forget to Clear Your Inventory When It’s Full

When you’re exploring the diverse biomes of Windrose, you’ll find yourself unable to pick up new resources and items, thanks to a full inventory. If that happens, don’t make the mistake of discarding resources that are hard to come by.

Instead, discard the things that you know you’ll be able to obtain easily. In the heat of the moment, you might discard your valuables, so don’t make that rookie pirate mistake.

Game	Windrose
Developer	Kraken Express
Release Date	April 14, 2026
Platforms	PC

That wraps up the mistakes you should definitely avoid to dominate the Age of Piracy in Windrose.

How’s your Windrose journey been so far? Are you enjoying the game? Let us know your thoughts and opinions on it in the comments section below.