Patching

Patching is a duty puzzle. Players' performance at the puzzle can repair a ship's normal wear and tear, as well as sea battle damage. It is an alternative to the carpentry puzzle, and is started from the same place on a vessel. Carpentry stations on a vessel are considered occupied while a player is using the station for carpentry or patching.

How to Play
The patching board consists of a field of square pieces representing a torn piece of sail cloth. In order to fix the damage, you'll have to maneuver the tears so they connect the spool of thread piece with the tie-off piece. Once that's done, you can activate the spool to stitch the tears up and then start in on a new board.



Act quickly, however: the meter at the bottom of the board is a countdown to a gust of wind. When the wind gusts, the spool will be activated, whether you are ready or not! At that point, if you have any stitches that are not properly connected to the tie-off or a grommet, you will tear a hole in the sail and have to start again!



Controls
Using the mouse, you can click and drag pieces to swap their positions, as well as use the mouse wheel to rotate them. You can also click on the spool piece to activate the stitch, completing the board.

Using the keyboard...


 * W,A,S,D moves the cursor.
 * Q and E rotate the piece your cursor is hovering over.
 * Spacebar selects pieces to be swapped.
 * Enter will activate the spool, completing the board.

Scoring
Scoring is based on connecting up as many tears as you can on a single board, without tearing the sail more by failing to move fast enough to deal with wind gusts.

The shortest possible path isn't necessarily the best scoring one. Use grommets and extra loops to stitch up as much of the board as you can before the wind comes.

Unravelling
After a wind gust, any grommets that have been connected to the spool will unravel and become regular stitch pieces. This will buy you some extra time to ponder your connection path, but be careful not to take too long and tear the sail!



Blockades & Maneuvers
In blockades and other areas where maneuvers are enabled, Patching takes on an additional level of complexity. A patcher will still need to connect the spool to the tie-off as efficiently as possible, as usual. In addition to this, however, if you are patching well, your Patching board may include small maneuver tokens at the corners of some pieces. If the four pieces surrounding any of these maneuver token are connected to the spool, the maneuver token will be activated and turn green. If you complete a board with only one type of maneuver token activated, you will earn your ship progress towards that maneuver. If you have multiple types of maneuver token activated, they will all turn red and you will not get credit for them on a complete board, so be careful!



Although progress may be earned towards any maneuver, the navigator may request a specific maneuver from the pirates plying the ship's stations. This requested maneuver is shown in the maneuver indicator along with the current progress of the bilgers, carpenters, patchers, riggers and sailors on the ship towards that maneuver. The progress bar for Patching is shown in red and is displayed wider than the others while you are in the Patching puzzle. Once each bar is filled to the top, that maneuver will be added to the navigator's tokens and the ship will perform its maneuver: moving with great speed or agility, firing powerful cannon shots, dropping flotsam behind the ship to slow and possibly damage opposing ships, or other amazing feats.