Swimming
| Crafting skill |
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Swimming is a skill used to swim on water tiles.
With the addition of robbers, swimming has become a very important skill. If you are robbed, and you do not succeed in fighting them off, you will be thrown somewhere to the northwest of your location and that may very well stick you on an island.
Fortunately, you will be carrying almost nothing because they took all your stuff, so if you have good swimming skill you may be able to swim to a nearby island and keep island hopping back to the mainland.
With 0 encumbrance, you will get about 7 fatigue per wilderness map tile, so theoretically with a skill of 100 you should be able to swim 14 wilderness map tiles.
To train swimming, drop everything you are carrying, make sure you are unfatigued, and then swim away from the shore. Pay attention to both the percentage and the messages. When the messages say "you feel moderately fatigued from swimming", you should turn around and head back to shore. Then you will get back to shore in plenty of time to avoid drowning. Sometimes you can go until the next message "You don't feel you can swim much further", but it is risky and sometimes you drown doing that, so better to turn back at the moderately fatigued message.
In winter it is easier to train swimming because you swim alongside the ice and then you don't need to get out until you hear the "danger of drowning soon" message, because you are always only one turn away from safety.
You will drown if your fatigue rises above your swimming skill, or above 5, whichever is higher. So if your swimming skill is 0-5, you can swim until your fatigue is 5 but you will drown when it reaches 6, so for safety's sake it is best to turn back when your fatigue is 2, because it will be 4 before you get back to shore.
If you are very injured, be careful of swimming because you may get stuck. For example if you have 40 swimming skill, you can normaly swim safely until you are 40 fatigued (dying when you hit 41 fatigue) BUT if you are 80% injured, then you can swim until you have 20 fatigue and then you will be stuck, unable to move at all and unable to reduce fatigue and then you will drown.
Gallery
Entering the shallow water on the shore of a lake
Wading through the shallow water and preparing to swim
Actively swimming through the deeper water in the lake
See also
- Bodies of water - Environments that need to be traversed through swimming or by boat.
- Watercraft - The more comfortable alternative to swimming, but doesn't add to the skill.
