Regions are a grid of some size with islands on some of the tiles -- you can see things in all four directions and the boundaries and island count but otherwise have to explore a region to uncover islands. This is upgradeable:
Gems will permanently upgrade your viewing capacity via the Telescope fixture (a set of charges that you can use for two purposes, more on this in the Telescope section).
Shallow water can have some other POIs in its own right. These have to be mapped or explored to find. More on this in a bit.
When you leave an archipelago in one of the four directions you get a choice of a few different random archipelagos with random properties -- island count, shallow hotspots, dungeons, cavern depth, etc. Rarely you'll get deep water hotspots.
This takes some amount of time as well (measured in days). It isn't real time but it does alter farming, allows you to do deep water fishing and affects hunger of both you and your Crew (if any). You can of course just skip it with your bed, with all of those caveats.
You can alter the choices you get here (and possibly the amount) by creating different Mastheads.
Islands
Islands start somewhere on one of the four sides and then do a magicsel thing that creates a similar-elevation tile in an adjacent direction until the entire grid is filled. Island size varies by archipelago (in a range)
Elevation is important here -- going up takes more time than town, and if it's too high or too low you need to use a consumable Rope (which has other purposes and can get expensive quick).
Islands have both resources and POIs (more on that in those sections).
You have tools equipped by default and they don't break. You can instead upgrade them in various ways by collecting resources.
You have a Cart as well rather than a Backpack. The difference here is that it needs Containers within it to actually carry anything. The Cart can also be upgraded like other Tools -- carry more containers, certain types take up less room, etc.
Containers are also how you store things on your Ship. They take up space. Base storage is a bit different -- like Farming you can just throw things down anywhere.
Containers are based around specific types of items -- granular stuff for example needs a barrel.
Combat is very different. It's basically been simpgraded to be more of a real-time puzzle, based on the old dodges mechanic.
All enemies are handcrafted, however their specific dodges and weaknesses are randomized by game seed.
Range
Enemies can be in one of these positions:
Close -- you're literally right on top of them.
Near -- they're within reach but not *close*.
Far -- there's some distance.
There's also modifiers, such as:
Airborne -- Completely out of reach by melee without jumping.
High -- a more extreme version where even jumping doesn't work.
Underwater, hidden, etc -- depending on their distance and *your* status, this does various handcrafted things. Underwater typically means that you can't use ranged weapons (unless they're specifically coded for that) and melee attacks don't do as much.
Attack Phase
This is where things differ heavily from other combat engines.
You have an Actions bar that goes down over time. You can do things like move around, jump, duck, whatever as well as attack when you're within some kind of range.
The difference here is that the links you click/tap appear in different positions each time so you have to find them. With bosses, they'll also move around.
There are different "moves" that play around with this system, deal damage obviously and also allow for combos (depending on the weapon in question). It's pretty dynamic.
Defense Phase
Enemies do various things and if they attack, you have a similar system to deal with to do dodges/parries/whatever. Most of this has to do with the enemy in question, but specific weapons/shields whatever can have their own as well which might be useful in some circumstances and might not be.
Unless they have a ranged attack they're going to need to get Near or Close to actually do anything.
Environment
The environment can also have various things that you can interact with (particularly with bosses). These are again links that appear and possibly move, but they're colored differently (green I think, with red being attacks, blue being defense and yellow being movement or w/e).
