Stuck on an island?

[Cocci]

Hi, I've just come back to the game after a longer break. I chose to start my new character on an island in the south (Islander area). Now, it seems I'm stuck on that island. Any ideas how I might get off?

I have only a stone axe and can't make boards with it. No boards, no paddle. No paddle, no movement on deeper water.

There's no island close enough to swim across and there is no village on my island for trading.

There are some robbers with better tools but they've already robbed me. I have no real weapons anymore. (Just started with a bow anyway.)

[Privateer]

Wow, that does sound like a tough challenge.
So many things.. Depend but
Depending on the size of the island.. Maybe lay some random pits, in the hope of trapping some robbers.
You could fight them and see where they dump you.
You could stock up on rocks and javelins and stone axes and mount an attack throwing everything at them.

Just spit balling
Good luck!

[Dungeon Smash]

My best advice is to get into modding, you could make something like "desperation board" which requires 8 hours and produces only one poor-quality board.  Then at least you could make a rough paddle to escape.  Otherwise... not sure

[PALU]

If the robbers are on the same island it's possible (but definitely hard) to kill them one at a time and take their gear. The trick is to attack them during the night, throw rocks at them, and then disappear into the night, although a sufficiently large island may allow you to let them chase you to exhaustion before slowly pelting them with rocks. Anyone with a missile weapon is a serious threat, though, as all it takes is a lucky shot, so take extra care with those using missiles.

A tale of a robbed start

Spoiler: show

I had a character who started out robbed and dumped in the archipelago. The character started with no equipment, and so had to do with a stone axe and a stone knife on a small island (10 tiles?), with the start in "spring". As soon as the water was warm enough, as much time as possible was spent on swim training, allowing for excursions to nearby islands, and eventually a couple of kilometers could be covered, provided that the encumbrance was at most 1 (allowing for some clothes and a knife or a little food: a new [crummy] knife could be made fairly easily), and it was possible to bring some items from a nearby island (some food that didn't perish: good as a backup).
A very long swim led to a larger island than the starting one, with further islands within reach, and expeditions were made to those islands. Unfortunately, the water started to get cold on the way back from one of those, so the character turned back to the island just left (reasonably large), and started exploring it, to find that the original robbers were on that island! After killing a couple of them (see tactics above), a real axe was claimed, and luck allowed for an easy kill of an elk (i.e. food and cords), so a raft was quickly made. Using the raft, a shield recovered, maximum armor, and lying down on the raft to reduce the profile, it was possible to get the robbers to exhaust their arrows when out of physical reach, wait for them to run themselves into the ground, and then kill them with recovered arrows (with at least one surprise return of fire when one of the buggers claimed arrows from a downed colleague).

When all robbers were dead it was time for a trip to the original island to pick up some gear, and then to the mainland for a permanent settlement.

The character was eventually one-shot-killed by a bow wielding Njerp on an attempt to engage it from a large, but not sufficiently large, distance...

[Cocci]

I've checked the Wiki for more information on swimming. It seems I might get off if my swimming skill is high enough. So, back to training then... Luckily they left me the fishing rod and I started in summer. So survival is at the moment no issue.

I've also thought about training timbercraft in the hopes of forcing my character to make those one board I need. However, it seems that this is not the way the skill is working.

I'm very bad at fighting and always tried to avoid fights with all my characters. I'm just hopeless at it. So fighting the robbers isn't a good idea. I might try a few trap pits though.

[PALU]

The way I train swimming is to swim back and forth along the shore and return when getting tired. As it's along the shore, it's a single or two tile movement to get back to wading depth. Also note that you should have no encumbrance (or at least at most 1) to get the most out of your training. Cold will force you to stop, but I assume that doesn't matter too much early on when you won't get far anyway, so you tire before getting too chilled down, but you'll get further and further, and if you count the distance you can then figure out when you're ready for a hop to the closest island (and you should have some margin, of course). Note, though, that encumbrance cuts the distance severely: getting an encumbrance of 2 essentially halves how far you can go (a cheesy trick is to pack more than you can bring, swim a bit, and then drop it, let if float (it does), return to shore, rest up, go back and carry it a bit further, return to shore, rest up... Also note that making more complete trips with a lighter load might be more effective and definitely is less cheesy).

If you try pit traps, make sure they're not adjacent to trees on both sides, as humans recognize "trap fences". It should, however, be possible to make mine fields, but you need luck in them actually getting trapped in them as well as in making the traps without them detecting you (making them while hidden can help).

[Cocci]

I've been training along the shore and reached swimming skill of about 50. According to the Wiki I'll need probably 100. Apparently you can cross 7 wilderness tiles with a skill of 100 and no burden. The safest way to get off the island is by crossing twice about 5 tiles. I can see a village from my shelter but this will mean crossing 7 tiles which seems a bit risky. All I need is my fishing rod and a few cords to create a new stone axe and a new stone knife. The robbers only left me with boots, so I'm running around naked anyway. ;-) The coldest I got so far is numbingly cold and I'm at the end of Fallow month. So, I suppose water temperatures should still rise a bit.

I can't see the robbers anymore. I don't know where they are. Could they possibly get off the island? There are bears, elks and even reindeers. I stumbled upon almost any other animal but no robbers anymore.

[PALU]

Each tile is 2 * 2 meters and each overland tile is 50 * 50 of those. Thus, to cross 5 wilderness tiles you need to be able to reliably swim 250 zoomed in tiles, and you can count your performance as you perform your training (I've counted the number of tiles between two landmarks and then count the number of laps and multiply by that number).

Also note that you can go island hopping, i.e. swim to one island, rest up, swim to the next one, etc. to both explore the area and reach further. Maybe the village you can see can be reached through a series of shorter trips?

Robbers tend to leave the area after a while, but that while can be rather long, and robbers are good at hiding. If you cross back and forth over their "base" and find neither robbers nor reasonably fresh footprints they've probably left, but I wouldn't risk my character to make such an investigation...

[Cocci]

I've already counted tiles with island hopping. Total distance is about 15 tiles diagonally. Longest distance is about 6-8 tiles. If I cross two tiles diagonally, it's 6. If I miss it's 7 or 8. So I think it's too risky.

However, there's a small island only 2 tiles away. I can reach that to explore the region further. Maybe I can see more from there.

[Cocci]

The robbers have transformed into Njerps...  Swimming skill at 61. I want to get off that island... 

[Brygun]

IIRC my BAC mod is among those with a way to get boards a bit easier. "Radial Board" by splitting into half then quarter logs only then the radial. I set up the time steps to avoid the "to long" with the vanilla board making.

This of course is using a mod which you may or may not want to take that plunge.

Of note is that once items are created you can remove the mod (other than the tile graphics) and still use the items.