Uncharted Waters Origin – Land Exploration and Mechanics Guide

Basics

You can stop near most land in the game for land exploration. Land exploration costs a bedroll each time, but gives you a chance to make discoveries, acquire ship parts, and acquire items that can be turned in at a collector or gifted to mates or inn employees.

Land exploration operates by zones. Unlike other Uncharted Waters games, you don’t have to drop anchor at particular, small spots to explore. Rather, most of the shore areas are divided into zones. Stopping anywhere within a zone to do land exploration is equivalent to any other place, with only the exception of quests that lead you to a very particular spot.

Each land exploration attempt will last two to four days. There are two events per day. If the last event of the second day fails, then the land exploration attempt fails. If it succeeds, then it continues for the third day. Similarly, if the last event of the third day succeeds, then it continues for a fourth day. Land exploration always continues for at least two days and stops no later than the end of the fourth day.

Land exploration events are divided between combat, observe, and gather. At the menu to start land exploration, it will give you probabilities of each event type appearing in each particular slot. Usually, they are 40% for each of two types and 20% for the third, though sometimes it is 60% for combat and 20% for each of the others.

Every land exploration zone has some difficulty rating. It uses the same difficulty rating for each of the three event types. Your party also has a rating for each of the three event types. Your chances of success at each event depends solely on the difference between your rating and the zone’s rating in the relevant event type. All three types use the same formula. I don’t know the exact formula, but empirically, this formula seems to be very, very close:

success chance (as percentage) = 96.42/(1+exp(-0.05451*((party skill)-(zone difficulty)-18.73))-1

That formula is so close that the true formula is definitely some sort of logistic curve. It also levels off at something significantly less than 100%.

The party skill rating depends mostly on particular skills. The relevant skill, by event type, is:

Nature and supply are adventuring skills that have fleet levels. Your skill for land exploration depends on the fleet level, not on the exact skill value. You get 14 points per fleet level in the skill. A table up to level 10 looks like this:

Note that it is only the fleet level, not the total number of points. Having 6300 points in nature or 9300 makes no difference, as either will give you nature level 5. Having 6300 points rather than 6200 makes a big difference, as that’s the difference between level 4 and level 5.

Combat goes by melee skill, which is calculated separately for each ship. Each ship in your fleet gives a bonus based on its own melee skill. A table up to level 5 looks like this:

Thus, which mates are on which ships does not matter for nature and supply, but it does matter tremendously for melee.

You can also increase various stats by using exploration items that are sold in item shops. Each land exploration attempt will consume one of each item that you use, so this increases the cost of exploration considerably. The items available to buy are:

Prices given are base prices, before the language discount.

Every ship gives a large stat bonus to some particular stat, in addition to the stats that the mates in the ship cabins give. The ship stat bonus depends only on the particular ship type, such as a cutter or xebec. You can find the list of them in my ships guide.

All ships that give a bonus to supply are low grade. For land exploration, it is optimal to have only ships that give a bonus to nature or melee rather than stats unrelated to land exploration.

A melee ship’s bonus gets you to melee rank 3 all by itself, and depending on the ship, possibly even to rank 4 or close to it. You don’t gain that many combat skill points for going from melee rank 3 to 4 to 5, though you should at least try to get to rank 4 if the ship bonus alone puts you close.

In contrast, you gain a lot more points by going from melee level 1 to 2 to 3, and it only takes 1350 stat points in melee for a ship to be melee level 3. If you can, you want to get your nature ships up to melee level 3. This can entail putting your best melee mates on nature ships, not melee ships. Until you are very high level, there is little sense in trying to get nature ships above melee level 3 or melee ships above level 4.

Do be sure to set your ship cabins to have an appropriate mix of adventure, trade, and combat cabins. In particular, you do want some trade cabins, as S-rank trade mates and likely also A-rank trade mates will tend to give you better stats than B-rank adventure or combat mates. You may also want a combat cabin on adventure ships to help get the ship to 1350 melee points.

Land exploration zone boundaries generally match company level region boundaries. Or perhaps rather, there can be several land exploration zones with the same company level requirement, but each land exploration zone has all of its shoreline in territory with the same company level requirement. As such, you can see the boundaries for a lot of zones on the world map if you display company levels.

The event difficulty and bedroll type depend on the company level requirement of the zone. Rather than listing them separately for each zone, I’ll only list the company level requirement for the zone.

Zone list (Europe, Mediterranean, and Americas)

The name of each zone gives the approximate location. Some are a little misleading, such as that there is a “Near Bahia” zone, but the shore that is actually near Bahia is all part of the “Near Caracas” zone.

I give a separate column for my own description of the location. Directions generally mean the coast, so something like “east USA” includes the east coast of Florida but not Vermont, even though the latter is objectively further east. My references to countries use the modern political boundaries, not those from the 1520s.

The level column is the company level requirement to reach the zone. As above, that also determines the difficulty rating of the zone, as well as the type of bedroll needed.

The S/A/B/C/D columns are the number of discoveries of each grade available in the zone.

The sea, mom, and ice columns are the minimum values of seaworthiness, momentum, and ice breaking needed to reach the zone. A lot of zones straddle multiple values of this, so I pick the lowest one. For example, part of “Near Ushuaia” requires 30 momentum and part has no momentum requirement, so I report is as 0. If you just want to get to the zone at all, you don’t need any momentum.

There are probably more further up the western coast, but that requires seaworthiness of at least 75, which I don’t have yet.

Zone list (Africa, Asia)

This is coming, but I don’t yet have enough data recorded to fill it in.