Good:
Islands World - by kapaer. Great worldgen, just what I had in mind.
Cargo Ships - by rude_grass. Of course. Necessary for anything here.
Hovercrafts - by Arcani_Victus. Seems useful.
Maybe:
Airccraft - by SuicidalKid
Aircraft Realism - by haih_ys. These two seem good for midgame exploration, with the runway requirement putting a limiter on their use.
The problem:
Noxys Swimming
Noxys Waterfill - by Noxy, of course. Without swimming, biters simply can't reach my islands and I can deal with them at my leisure. But WITH swimming, I run into conflicts with boats. Because swimming modifies the baseline speed of player movement (but notably NOT enemy movement), boats move at a crawl. I can modify this in settings by changing movement speed to 1.0, but then I just run across water with no limitations faster than the basic boats can move, and bugs just treat everything as open land, which is not ideal.
Potential solutions (and what I'm hoping people here can help me find):
- A water movement mod that allows biters to swim, but actually slows them, and doens't mess with boats (may not be possible with available mod hooks)
- An alien mod that allows bugs to spawn "flier" types that can cross water, at which point I can run with NO water modification mods (I don't need to swim).
- ??? Something I'm not thinking of that fits this general theme. I'm sure I'm not the first to try setting up a game like this.