Here be helpful hints on the essential duty of Sailing, which involves correctly combining rope, wind, and water into a configuration that will speed up yer vessel- a crucial arrrt it be, too, because without sailors yer fine vessel will take more than five minutes to travel a simple league!

Sailing stations are all above-deck, and look like bits of the rigging, or winches. (a winch is the thing that the sailing icon looks like) They never look like actual sails.

If you have sailed before and don't want the intro or the basic tips, click here for comboing tips.

If you just want some advanced hints on the BIG combos, click here

This tutorial will use the same format as the sailing puzzle itself, except without the actual background that the sailing puzzle might use.

The first thing you need to do is get a hang of how the keys work- skip this bit if you've sailed before. This puzzle works using the arrow keys and spacebar only, no mouse for this one. Spacebar will accelerate the speed your pieces drop, but won't stop at quite the same to as you do, so be careful and learn to stop a while before you need to do any manuevring. (so be careful when using it, you need to pause and wait for the star to drop before turning further!) The up and down arrows will rotate your pieces CLOCKWISE for up, ANTI-CLOCKWISE for down.. Right will move your pieces right, and left will move them left.

Sailing blocks are effected by gravity, but they can hang off secured objects regardless of how heavy they appear. This means any combo can be extended potentially as high as the board will allow. This means you have to work some restraint into your strategy to keep the indicator ssparkling.

In the sailing puzzle, you recieve more difficult types of platforms as your rating increases and as you sail for longer, allowing you to make higher-scoring combos.

There are no special requirements to sail, and it is one of the most important puzzles to learn- if you want to be a valued jobber or crew member, you will need to be good at either sailing or carpentry, and on pillage missions, swordfighting is also essential.

Right! To the actual tutorial. In case you didn't read the help files either in game or while it was downloading, in sailing you try to clear targets of colour blocks using group of two pieces that are fixed together, until one piece is eliminated. This can happen either by it being used to clear a target, or being made into a line of four or more (horizontally or vertically) with pieces of the same colour.

Don't just plonk these pieces into columns! Each piece you use costs you time, and eliminating columns or rows won't score you enough points to get you very far.

On your first board, you'll just want to put pieces into the targets as quickly as possible, not worrying about combos. This starts you off with a decent rating so that you don't booch trying to set up your ultimate sailing double-vegas, 5-targets combo. (that would be a combo that starts off with a column of four being cleared, then drops a piece into a target below that clears it, which drops the pieces needed to clear another four targets. This would probably keep you on an incredible for the time it would take you to clear the whole board again, and more)

First I'll show you some basic targets, and several ways to clear them. (and remember that the colours can be switched around, too. So if I show you a blue and yellow target, it could be white and yellow, too) You'll need to use the one which involves as little blocks of the wrong colour falling into targets below as possible- so start with those bottom targets, if you can!

This can be filled in two of this piece:

2x

Or with three pieces:

And if it's not on the edge, you can do it with four, if you're getting none of the right pieces:

This type of target comes in a 2x3 version, too:

You also get various targets that just need one colour, and the first two are kindof obvious. These can be good oppurtunities to stack blocks on later, seeing you won't get too many double-colour blocks.

There's also one more 'one-colour only' type of target, which is GREAT for combos, as you can fit the stuff you want to fall down in the diagonal gaps:

That's the end of looking at basic piece combinations- next is combos.

Right, if you've got the hang of the basic puzzle then I'll dump all the key icons and talk to you properly. Just remember that your rating is based off your AVERAGE performance meter for the league, so you'll need to bump it up at the beginning before you start comboing. Also, if your rating begins to slip, that means you will need to "break" your combo as soon as you can to keep the average up. Your average performance indicator is directly related to your score which is directly related to your effect on the ship.

There are two ideal objectives to sailing: the first is to put as many column or row eliminations as posible in before you hit a target when building your combo. Seeing targets are what score points, putting them as late in the combo stage as possible makes sense: only the second stage of a double gets double, and the triple multiplies the third stage by three and the second stage by two, etc...

The second is the clear a lot of the board in one or two really big combos- seeing you spend so much time setting them up, they ought to clear a lot of the board for you so that you don't have to clean off too many targets without big combos, increasing your rating.

Right now it's worth mentioning how the puzzle computes combos, as it looks stupid when you first see some of the things it does. When you make your move, it first checks if any targets are cleared. If not, then it moves onto looking for columns and rows. Say you clear a column, which then clears a target, making another column and simultaneously clearing two targets...

The puzzle will then ask itself: Any targets cleared this phase? Yes. Two. Each recieves double bonus for being in the second phase. (note that there is no bonus for clearing two things in the same phase!) It then checks for columns, finds one, and declares it a triple somewhat counter-intuitively, as it just declared two other moves that happened at the same time to be a double and to get no special bonus...

To put that in general words: clearing two targets or two columns/rows in the same phase of your combo is only worth one stage. If you clear a target and a row at the same time, the puzzle will wait until you stop clearing targets to set off the columns. Dissapointing, but true- in this case you have to be really careful to make the puzzle NEED your columns to go off first.

The really basic double, something you can pull of on the first board if you get the pieces:

A good, reasonably simple triple:

Targets are not the only time you should be making doubles.

Like all Y!PP puzzles, sailing requires efficiency- piece efficiency. That means that you cannot just blunty attack the board and expect to get an incredible- you have to set up at least multiple doubles and triples, if not bingos, donkeys, and the occasional (double-/triple-)vegas.

One of the tricks you need to do to get those really large combos is often to clear away any square blocks between a target above and a target below before you get started, or even utilise them in your combo. This allows you to stack multiple blocks far more efficively, and create nice, large, four-, five-, or six-step combos.

Here's a really nice donkey (5x combo) that you could set up with some luck and a little work. The trick to doing these combos, like you see below, is to either stack on top of the targets, or nearby square blocks, in order to make a column of four in the middle to add another step, and of course, using the initial column of four at the beginning to make sure you don't waste oppurtunity for further multiplied score.

Note that combos like this WILL and DO dominate at least one half of your board, if not more, especially seeing this is a very clean one. Be careful and don't waste too much time setting it up, lest you booch, or even worse, have to port/collide before you can set it off.

Note that it is almost always worth trying to build up lots of rows and columns of four into your combo, not just to add extra steps at the beginning or middle, but also, if you can afford the extra building time, to land at the bottom of your playing field and add another step to the end of the combo. (making the difference between a bingo and a donkey, for example- it's often worth the time to multiply the score for your row of four by five)