A year ago, Everwind was my most wanted game coming out of Gamescom 2025. I met Enjoy Studio at the Bohemia Interactive booth, talked about flying bases, destructible islands and capybaras, then went home genuinely impatient to play it properly. Since then, Early Access has launched, I have bought three copies for the family, and we have put a rather unreasonable number of hours into them.
At Gamescom 2026, I returned to Bohemia’s booth to meet Enjoy Studio again. This time, however, I wasn’t there to ask what Everwind could become. I had played it, and now I had questions. I also met Dominik Sidlo, Enjoy Studio’s Community Manager, who was kind enough to talk through some of those questions with me. If you want to see where this conversation began, you can read my original Everwind interview from Gamescom 2025 here.
Table of Contents
From Most Wanted to Actually Played
There is always a slightly dangerous moment when a game you’ve been enthusiastically talking about finally becomes playable. Trailers are easy to love. A carefully prepared Gamescom demo is easy to love. Sitting beside developers while they explain their vision makes it even easier, because you can see the enthusiasm behind the project and start imagining where all those systems might eventually lead.
Then you install the actual game on your own PC, without a developer standing nearby, and reality gets its turn. In Everwind’s case, I went a little further than simply buying a copy for myself. I bought three. It cost me somewhere around $70 to get the family into Early Access, and after the amount of time we’ve already spent with those copies, I consider that money well spent. Last year I wrote about Everwind partly from the perspective of a parent looking at a co-op game we might eventually enjoy together. Now I don’t have to speculate about that part anymore.
We play it together. That is probably the strongest endorsement I can give it.
The flying base remains the central appeal of the whole idea. There is something wonderfully satisfying about returning from an island with bags full of resources, expanding the ship, adding another room or machine, and then taking the entire thing with you toward the next horizon. Your base isn’t the place you return to after exploring; it explores with you. Interestingly, I encountered a similar idea at Gamescom this year in Zeverland, where your mobile home also follows you through the world — although under rather different post-apocalyptic circumstances. You can read more about my hands-on experience with Zeverland here.
That simple distinction was one of the things that grabbed me at Gamescom 2025, and after actually living with the game, I think it was the right thing to focus on.
The procedural world also works remarkably well for family co-op because everyone can find their own little obsession. Someone wants resources. Someone wants equipment. Someone spots another island and immediately wants to see what’s there. Someone else is redesigning part of the ship while everybody else is raiding a dungeon. Meanwhile, my wife has somehow become our designated quartermaster, usually staying aboard to do the housekeeping and sort all the junk we bring back and dump into the intake chests. Every successful expedition needs someone responsible, apparently.
We’ve put enough time into Everwind to reach the point where its rough edges aren’t theoretical anymore. I’ve spent a frankly silly amount of time hunting specific equipment, including the Crystal Beast set, and I’m still missing pieces. That’s annoying for me. Try explaining to a seven-year-old that the thing he wants does exist, but the game would like him to continue searching random islands until the universe feels sufficiently generous. That experience became one of my questions at Gamescom, and Dominik had an answer for it, but we’ll get to that shortly.
Performance is a more significant concern.
Performance and Exploration
The longer we’ve played and explored, the more obvious Everwind’s performance problems have become. The game encourages you to pick a direction and fly, so that’s exactly what we did. Islands generate, the explored world expands, save files grow, and eventually the game starts carrying around the history of your increasingly extensive expedition. At that point, loading issues and lag become more noticeable.
During my conversation with Dominik, I specifically brought up the problems that can appear when traveling enormous distances and generating more islands. The team didn’t try to pretend this was news to them. They acknowledged world loading and optimization as known issues, with further work planned as development continues. Dedicated servers are also part of the longer-term plan, replacing the current peer-to-peer arrangement where the host has to be online for everyone else to access that world.
Early Access comes with technical baggage, but with Everwind now visibly moving toward 1.0, optimization is becoming less of an Early Access caveat and more of a release requirement. The fact that I am complaining about these issues is also a sign that I want to keep playing. That is a considerably better position to be in one year after declaring Everwind my most wanted game.
Now comes the harder part: turning a very playable Early Access game into something ready for release. And judging by what Enjoy Studio showed me at Gamescom 2026, there is still plenty to build, fix and rethink before Everwind gets there.
From Early Access to 1.0
Everwind is already a much larger project than the one I first saw at Gamescom 2025. The game has accumulated around 1.3 million Steam wishlists, sold approximately 300,000 copies and reached an 81% positive rating on Steam.
Enjoy Studio is using that audience to shape the game. Dominik described Everwind as a “community-driven Early Access” project, with regular polls and player feedback helping the team decide which systems need attention and which features should come next. That feedback covers everything from combat balance and quality-of-life improvements to entirely new ways of playing. You can check an official Discord feedback forum and vote for a favorite feature or express your own.
The next major step is Winds of Creation and Beyond, due in September. The update adds a new faction with its own building pieces, structures, furniture, enemies and bosses, alongside new animals, weapons and gadgets. One of the new enemies is an alarmist who can call nearby creatures into battle, making an impulsive attack considerably more dangerous — or, depending on your build, making AoE farming considerably more convenient. At the top of the faction’s hierarchy is a new chieftain boss.
Building Without the Grind – Sandbox!
Sandbox mode has been one of the community’s most requested features. That makes sense when you consider how much time some players already spend gathering resources for elaborate ship designs. The community has showcased builds that took around 200 hours to assemble, which is an impressive commitment but also a reminder that Everwind’s creative possibilities are often limited by its resource economy.
Sandbox mode removes that barrier. Players will be able to fly freely, become effectively immortal and use unlimited resources, turning the game’s building systems into a proper creative playground. It is not merely a convenience for people who dislike gathering; it gives builders a way to experiment with ambitious designs without first converting every idea into a mining expedition.
The update also begins Everwind’s move toward mod support. The first stage will be relatively limited, allowing players to make changes such as replacing character and enemy models. The longer-term plan is to give creators access to deeper parts of the game and allow them to alter far more than appearances.
Enjoy Studio is also considering how those creations could reach console players. Dominik told me the intention is for compatible community mods uploaded through an in-game library to be available on consoles as well. Console players would not necessarily create the mods themselves, but they could use creations made by the PC community.
Check out these fantastic airships created by Everwind community members and shared on Discord. If players are already building things like this with regular resource gathering, imagine what they’ll create once Sandbox mode is widely available.
That is an ambitious promise, particularly for a game still working through its core technical problems. It is also the kind of system that could give Everwind a much longer life after launch, provided the tools are powerful enough and the developers can maintain control over quality and compatibility.
Making Exploration Less Punishing
The same tension between freedom and friction appears in Everwind’s exploration systems. The game wants players to discover its world rather than follow a chain of objective markers. That philosophy is one of its strengths. Flying toward an unfamiliar island, landing without knowing exactly what you will find and gradually learning how the world works is more satisfying than simply following an arrow.
The problem is that procedural exploration can become exhausting when you are searching for one specific item or location. That is tolerable when the search produces interesting discoveries along the way. It becomes much less enjoyable when the game keeps asking you to repeat the same search without giving you any useful information.
Enjoy Studio’s planned solution is a locating system built around collectible cassettes. Different cassettes will correspond to different categories of points of interest, such as bosses, dungeons or loot locations. Once inserted into the localizer, they will help guide players toward that type of discovery.
The system is not intended to replace exploration with a precise map marker. Players will still need to find the cassettes, and the localizer will point them toward a category of content rather than simply revealing an exact destination. The aim is to preserve the uncertainty that makes exploration worthwhile while giving players a way to narrow the search when procedural generation becomes unhelpful. Everwind should not become a checklist of locations, but neither should finding a particular piece of equipment require an indefinite tour of randomly generated islands.
Teleportation Changes the Map
The biggest news here is probably the planned teleportation system. Enjoy Studio wants to let players place teleport points in different locations, including aboard the airship. That should make traveling between established parts of the world considerably easier, especially once the map stretches across hours of flight.
My immediate reaction was: does this finally mean we can settle down?
Everwind has never stopped us from building on islands. You can terraform them, construct a base and reshape the landscape however you like. The problem is that there has been little practical reason to stay. Once an island is cleared, exploration keeps pulling the airship forward, there is no respawn point waiting for you there, and your actual home simply leaves with you.
In practice, Everwind has always made us nomads. Teleportation could change that. If we can place a teleport point aboard the ship and connect it to locations on the ground, then building an island base suddenly makes much more sense. That opens up the possibility of having a proper land-based home, while still using the airship as a mobile base and a way to reach new parts of the world. I could see myself claiming an interesting island, building a permanent home there and using the ship to travel out on expeditions before returning through the teleportation network.
A flying portal hub? I’ll take one.
Enjoy Studio hasn’t shared enough details yet to know exactly how the system will work, but this is one of the most significant changes coming to Everwind. It could turn the game from an experience that forces you to keep moving into one that lets you choose when to roam and when to put down roots. Sadly, we will have to remain nomads a little longer: teleportation will not be part of September’s Winds of Creation and Beyond update, but is planned for a later update.
Dedicated Servers
Everwind currently uses peer-to-peer multiplayer. One player hosts the world, up to three friends join them, and the group depends on the host being online to access that save.
Dedicated servers are planned to change that arrangement. The intention is to create persistent community worlds that players can enter independently, while also increasing the current four-player limit. Dominik mentioned the possibility of PvP once those servers arrive, although the more important change for many players will simply be having a shared world that does not belong to one person’s schedule.
I know the limitations of the current system firsthand. Even on evenings when I had no time to play, I still had to power up my PC and launch Everwind just so the rest of the family could access our world. Then there is the tethering: players can only move so far from the host, which becomes another restriction once the group starts spreading out. We found a workaround by leaving my character aboard the airship, which was usually enough to let everyone explore an island and clear its dungeon, but it is hardly elegant.
It also means keeping an entire PC running for no real reason beyond acting as a doorstop for the save file. So for me, dedicated and persistent servers are a huge win. They remove an unnecessary technical dependency and let a shared world actually behave like a shared world.
The End of Wipes and the Road to 1.0
The September update is intended to mark another important point in the game’s development. According to Dominik, player progression should no longer be wiped between major updates from that point onward. That changes the way players approach Early Access. Experimenting is easy when you know everything may disappear. Building an enormous flying castle is a different proposition when you expect to keep living in it.
Enjoy Studio is currently targeting a full release in Q2 2027, roughly around June. Dominik was careful to describe that as a target rather than a confirmed date, and it should be treated that way. The plan is for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S versions to arrive alongside the full launch. Development will continue after 1.0 as well, with further content updates and the possibility of larger expansion-sized additions. That suggests Enjoy Studio does not see 1.0 as the end of Everwind. Before that happens, though, I wanted to challenge the developers on the parts of the game that still feel unfinished: combat, magic, progression, performance and the community’s influence over development.
The Questions You Ask After Many Hours
By this point, most of my questions were no longer about what Everwind is supposed to become. They came from things we had actually encountered while playing: systems that work, systems that need another pass, and a few promises from last year that I was going to bring up again. The first was the drill.
When I first played Everwind, the drill already seemed like an obvious fit for a game built around flying technology, mining and destructible voxel islands. Since then, asking where to get one has apparently become something of a Discord meme, with new players repeatedly looking for a tool that still does not exist. Dominik confirmed that the drill is planned, just not for September’s Winds of Creation and Beyond update. The team is currently prioritizing stability, optimization and larger systems, so our power tool will have to wait a little longer.
I will ask again next year.
Combat Still Needs Work
My more serious questions were about combat. Everwind already offers several ways to approach a fight, but after spending enough time with them, the differences in effectiveness become difficult to ignore. Some melee setups can deal enormous damage, while magic is limited by its charge system. A mage can cast only six or seven times before the spellbook runs out of charges, and restoring them means returning to base, waiting and spending rare resources.
That turns magic into something closer to resource management than a complete combat style. You preserve charges, wait for the right moment and occasionally unleash a large burst of damage or effect, but most encounters are still handled by other means. The problem is therefore not simply that magic deals less damage than some melee builds. Its limited charges restrict how often you can engage with the system at all, which feels very different from the mage fantasy suggested elsewhere in the game.
Dominik acknowledged that combat still needs attention, and Enjoy Studio does not seem to view the problem as something that can be solved by adjusting a few damage numbers. Warrior-style melee combat is planned to receive changes to its combo mechanics, while archery is also being revisited, including how ranged progression and recipes currently work. Magic is on the list as well, although Dominik deliberately avoided promising exactly what its eventual rework will contain because those details are still being evaluated from Early Access feedback.
For me, that is the right distinction to make. I do not expect perfect numerical balance in Early Access; damage values can change dozens of times before release. A mage should not feel like someone carrying an expensive ranged weapon with six shots, just as bows and melee should offer more than different ways of reaching the same damage number. Mages need a clear identity.
Early Access as an Actual Conversation
This also brings us back to Enjoy Studio’s description of Everwind as a “community-driven Early Access” project. That phrase can easily become marketing wallpaper because almost every Early Access developer claims to listen to players. What interests me more is whether feedback actually results in changes to systems that people interact with for dozens or hundreds of hours.
By this point, the evidence is scattered throughout the roadmap. Sandbox mode, the localizer, teleportation and dedicated servers all respond to problems players have encountered during Early Access. Combat is now going through the same process, with the team watching which builds people actually use, where certain options fall behind and which mechanics create frustration rather than interesting choices.
That does not mean every Discord request should become a feature. With an active community, “what players want” can easily mean several contradictory things at once, and Enjoy Studio still has to decide which ideas belong in Everwind rather than allowing the game to be designed by committee. So far, the more interesting responses are those that remove unnecessary friction without erasing the original purpose of a system: the localizer assists exploration rather than replacing it, teleportation could make settlements practical without making the airship obsolete, and dedicated servers remove the dependency on a host without changing why co-op works in the first place.
The community can point very clearly at where something hurts; deciding how to fix it without damaging something else remains the developer’s job.
One Year Later
Gamescom 2025 was about potential. I walked away from Bohemia Interactive’s booth looking at Everwind as a game I desperately wanted to play, with its flying base, destructible voxel islands, family co-op and enough interconnected systems to make me start planning ridiculous projects immediately. Gamescom 2026 was different because this time I arrived with complaints — not hypothetical concerns based on a demo, but problems we had actually encountered after living in its world for hundreds of hours.
Performance still needs work. Magic is too restricted by its charge system, and some progression can still leave you frustratingly dependent on procedural luck and the loot fairy. None of that disappears simply because I like Everwind, and optimization in particular remains the part I will be watching most closely as Enjoy Studio works toward its current Q2 2027 target.
At the same time, those complaints come after buying three copies and spending hours playing with my family. I have watched my kids disappear into dungeons while somebody rebuilds the airship above them, brought back inventories full of materials for my wife to sort, flown absurd distances looking for a single missing item and kept returning for another expedition anyway. Everwind no longer needs to convince me that its central idea works; we have already tested that part rather thoroughly.
A year ago, Everwind was my most wanted game. Today, it is one of the games my family actually plays together, which for me is a considerably more important achievement.
Now Enjoy Studio just needs to finish the bloody thing.
And eventually give me that drill.
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