Everwind’s flying ship sandbox just ate my weekend, and it’s only in early access

Everwind turned “I’ll just try it” into a lost weekend

I went into Everwind expecting yet another “Minecraft, but…” experiment. Voxel blocks, floating islands, crafting benches, you know the drill. I figured I’d poke at the early access build for an hour, grab some notes, and move on.

Instead, I looked up from my monitor and realized it was 3 a.m., my tea was cold, and my ridiculous flying junk-ship was limping between thunderclouds held together by mismatched planks and sheer optimism.

Everwind, from Enjoy Studio and published by Bohemia Interactive, is a first-person sandbox RPG where your main “base” is a fully customizable airship that you pilot between procedurally generated floating islands. Picture Minecraft’s building, blended with light Skyrim-style dungeon crawling, then mount the whole thing on a rickety airship core that you keep upgrading to reach stranger, harsher biomes above the clouds.

After a full weekend on PC, it’s already one of the more generous and player-friendly early access launches I’ve touched in years. It’s rough in spots, for sure, but the core loop-build, explore, loot, upgrade the ship, aim higher-had me in that dangerous “just one more island” trance almost immediately.

The first two hours: a tutorial that actually respects your brain

Everwind starts you on the rooftop of a lonely stone tower. No walls of text, no 15-minute cutscene, just you, the clouds, and a staircase leading down.

That tower is basically a vertical tutorial, but it’s smartly paced. Each floor quietly teaches something new:

• The top floor throws a couple of basic enemies at you so you can swing a sword and feel out the first-person combat.
• A floor below, the game hands you tools and shows how blocks work-mining, placing, carving paths.
• Next, you craft simple gear and learn how the inventory and hotbar actually function in practice.
• At the bottom, you get a tiny “exam”: a short encounter that asks you to use everything you’ve just learned under a bit of pressure.

It sounds basic, but the pacing sold me. I wasn’t stuck reading obtuse tutorials, and I wasn’t dumped into chaos either. I was just… playing, with the game quietly nudging me along.

Right after that tower, the game does something that sets the tone for everything else: it immediately points you toward building the barebones version of your airship. Not in an hour, not after three side quests—right away. You collect a few core materials, slap together a hilariously ugly platform, bolt the engine-like “core” onto it, plonk down a helm, and suddenly you’re hovering over an infinite ocean, steering your little disaster into the sky.

I did hit one early access pothole here: my first attempt bugged out and I had to restart the tutorial because a crafting prompt didn’t trigger. Annoying, but it only happened once, and on my second run everything worked smoothly. It’s the kind of jank I unfortunately expect in early access, but it didn’t ruin the good impression that tower sequence left.

A flying ship that actually feels like home

The airship is the heart of Everwind, and it’s where the game quietly separates itself from every “voxel survival” clone I’ve uninstalled in the last few years.

Your ship starts as a wooden raft with a magical engine stuck underneath. As you explore islands and dungeons, you find or craft parts that let you expand its footprint, raise its maximum altitude, increase its speed, and decorate it into whatever flavor of sky-home you want: a tidy little workshop, a chaotic multilevel barge, or a floating castle if you’re patient.

Functionally, the airship is your mobile base. You install crafting stations, storage chests, beds, even defensive structures. What makes this work is how tightly it’s tied to progression. The “core” at the center of the ship is upgradable, and each level of core lets you:

• Fly a bit higher into more dangerous, better-rewarded layers of the sky.
• Push the ship faster so long-distance trips don’t feel like a slog.
• Expand build limits so your vessel can grow from dinghy to dreadnought.

One of my favorite moments came maybe three hours in. I’d just scraped together enough rare resources from an early dungeon to upgrade the core. Before that, the world was mostly sea-level islands and sparse clouds. After the upgrade, I pushed the throttle forward, watched the altitude meter creep up, and slowly rose into a dense layer of broken landmasses and glowing, hostile flora. When I looked down, the ocean had vanished beneath a blanket of clouds. It felt like graduating from the kiddie pool.

That upward progression—physically rising into tougher tiers—is a simple idea, but Everwind uses it brilliantly as a carrot. You always know the next upgrade doesn’t just give you +5% something; it literally opens a new slice of sky to poke into.

Islands, biomes and that perfect 30-minute loop

Everwind’s world is a stitched-together archipelago of floating islands. Everything is procedural, but the devs seem to have found a sweet spot: each island is big enough to hide secrets and dungeons, and small enough that you can meaningfully “finish” one in around half an hour.

At early access launch there are seven main biomes, each with its own look, enemies, and sub-biomes. You’ve got your gentler, grassy starting isles, then things escalate into harsher, more vertical terrain and weirder fantasy spaces the higher you climb. They aren’t just palette swaps; I had to adjust how I approached certain areas, especially in more vertical islands where falling becomes a real risk.

Exploration is helped a lot by one of Everwind’s best gadgets: the spyglass. You get it right from the start, and it does three things really well:

• Three zoom levels you can snap between quickly.
• A tiny overlay that tells you exactly how many blocks away your target is.
• A little indicator light that turns on if the island you’re looking at hides a dungeon.

It’s such a small, elegant tool. I’d stand on my ship’s deck, scan the horizon, see that telltale glow on a distant rock, note the distance, and adjust course. It made the act of choosing “what’s next?” feel deliberate instead of random wandering.

Once you land, the islands themselves are fully destructible voxel playgrounds. Dig tunnels under ruins, carve safe staircases down cliffs, or just level half a forest to feed your crafting addiction. Because each island is self-contained and not absurdly huge, there’s this lovely feeling of closure when you’ve mined the good stuff, cleared the dungeon, looted the chests, and blast off again in your ship. You’re not bound to stay and grind endlessly; you can just sail on to the next sky-rock.

Combat and dungeons: Skyrim in chunky voxel armor

If building and flying are the comfort food, dungeon diving is the spice. Everwind plays in first person, and the combat is closer to “slightly janky Skyrim” than tight FPS gunplay, but there’s enough weight and danger to keep you awake.

Early on you’re mostly swinging melee weapons and timing blocks or dodges. Later, you start getting access to magic and gear with more interesting properties. You’re not juggling Dark Souls-level movesets here, but you do need to respect enemy patterns and your positioning, especially in cramped underground spaces.

Early on you’re mostly swinging melee weapons and timing blocks or dodges. Later, you start getting access to magic and gear with more interesting properties. You’re not juggling Dark Souls-level movesets here, but you do need to respect enemy patterns and your positioning, especially in cramped underground spaces.

My first death came in a cave beneath an otherwise chill grassy island. I saw the spyglass dungeon light, shrugged, walked in with basic armor and overconfidence, and promptly got boxed in by a pair of stronger enemies while I was busy looting ore. The game is generous with respawns, but trekking back and realizing I’d basically dug my own kill box was a nice lesson in not treating every dungeon like a casual stroll.

Combat feels OK right now—good enough that I don’t dread fighting, but not so tight that I’m playing just for the battles. The real strength is how dungeons feed into progression. They’re where you’ll find a lot of the rarer resources, unique gear, and, importantly, experience for your character level.

Progression that actually changes how you play

There’s a character leveling system in Everwind, and it leans more toward “RPG utility” than tiny stat bumps, which I appreciate. Each level gives you access to perks and abilities that genuinely reshape your priorities.

Some examples that stood out during my run:

• Enemy scanner: a skill that lets you sense nearby threats, making cave crawling less of a blind gamble.
• Item value reveal: suddenly every piece of junk in your inventory has a visible coin value, and you start thinking like a trader instead of a hoarder.
• Glider/paraglider-style movement: once you unlock a way to glide inside islands, you stop building clumsy staircases everywhere and start jumping off cliffs on purpose to cover ground faster.

Layer that on top of ship-core upgrades, and you’ve got two progression tracks—your character and your vessel—that play off each other nicely. A new combat ability might let you safely tackle a dungeon in a higher biome tier, which then drops the materials you needed for the next core upgrade, which then unlocks the altitude you needed to reach an even weirder island.

It’s the kind of feedback loop that a lot of early access sandboxes promise and then fumble. Here, it’s already mostly working.

Co-op chaos and building together

Everwind supports up to four-player co-op, and it’s absolutely the way I’d recommend playing if you have friends even vaguely interested in building stuff.

I spent an evening in a shared world with a friend, and the dynamic felt instantly natural: one person steering the ship and calling out distances with the spyglass, the other rearranging workstations and reinforcing the deck so we both stopped falling through gaps whenever turbulence hit. We tag-teamed dungeons, split roles (one lures, one loots), and argued about whether we really needed a second furnace right next to the helm “for efficiency”.

The game doesn’t turn into a pure co-op experience—it’s still the same content, just tackled faster and with more chatter—but building a shared flying base scratches a particular itch that solo can’t touch. It feels like your little pirate crew, just without the sailing boats and with more gravity-related accidents.

Performance, optimization and the early access caveats

Technically, Everwind is in surprisingly solid shape for an early access launch. I played on a mid-range PC (think a modest modern CPU and a mid-tier GPU), and the game ran smoothly at high settings without major dips, even when I was carving into big islands or filling my ship with clutter.

The install size being around the 5 GB mark is almost comical in an era where everything wants 80-100 GB of your SSD. It loads quickly, saves are snappy, and I only hit a couple of minor hiccups beyond that early tutorial bug—one odd physics glitch where a block didn’t quite know which way gravity was supposed to work, and a short audio loop during a hectic fight that fixed itself after a few seconds.

It’s not flawless. The UI is functional but a bit clunky in places, especially when sorting through bigger inventories. Keybindings and readability could use polish, and some combat animations lack impact. But compared to a lot of “we’ll fix it after launch” survival sandboxes, this feels unusually stable and content-rich out of the gate.

That last part matters. A lot of early access games arrive as empty frameworks. Everwind already has seven biomes, a full basic progression loop, varied weapons and tools, and a clear sense of what you’re working toward. The devs are talking about adding things like more enemy types and expanded systems (farming is mentioned in their plans), but this doesn’t feel like you’re paying to beta test a feature list. You’re getting a full, coherent toybox now that will (hopefully) get deeper over the next year or so.

Who Everwind is (and isn’t) for

If you’ve been burned out on aimless survival sandboxes, here’s the pitch: Everwind keeps the freedom, but gives you a clear upward trajectory via that ship-core progression and layered biomes. There’s always a next height to reach, a next dungeon tier to test, a new module to add to your flying base.

If you enjoy Minecraft’s creative building but always wished the combat and structured exploration felt a bit more like an RPG—lighter than Skyrim, but in that direction—this clicks nicely. Likewise, if you’re one of the people who’s been waiting forever for games like Hytale to finally materialize, Everwind already feels like it’s quietly stepping into that space on Steam.

On the other hand, if you need a strong authored story, memorable NPCs, and tight, crunchy combat to stay engaged, this might feel too loose or repetitive after a while. Everwind is about systems and loops, not narrative payoffs. It’s the kind of game you put on a podcast with and sink ten hours into building a nicer kitchen on your airship for absolutely no mechanical reason.