I know Wes is supposed to be a joke/challenge character so his rework won't exactly bring him up to the level of other characters, but hear me out. I figure his ability to blow up balloons could and should be expanded upon for his update, and one of the things he could do with them is make balloon rafts. So here are the details:
Balloon Raft Proposal:
- Crafting lowers sanity by 45 (low sanity does not prevent crafting however)
- Crafted in "Balloonomancy" tab while Pile o' Balloons is in Wes's inventory
- Rafts can only hold one person and no structures
- Rafts can be very slowly (35% of normal walking speed) propelled without any extra tools
- When an oar is equipped, the player automatically rows the boat when you issue a move input
- Oar's durability is consumed at an equivalent rate of one use per second while being used to propel a raft
- Balloon rafts handle exactly like the boats in Shipwrecked. They have no drift or momentum, start and stop pretty much instantly, and are moved with the normal WASD keys instead of by manual clicks/sails
- Balloon rafts have exactly 1 (one) health, and any external source of damage, even as weak as a simple wave from Malbatross, will pop them, "drowning" the player as if they'd walked a larger vessel's plank; additionally, the rafts "deflate" during use and after two minutes of bearing the weight of a player will pop, preventing their extended use
- However, they will notably not suffer collision damage from bumping into other rafts, big boats or solid land due to their nature as soft balloons (large boats will simply push them out of the way); a notable exception is if a large boat pushes the raft into a solid landmass or object such as a sea stack, in which case the raft immediately pops
- Rafts can be popped to free up space in the water; this also creates a small radial impulse that pushes away nearby rafts (which quickly lose momentum and come to a stop) and large boats (which may drift long distances)
- Like normal balloons, rafts come in a random assortment of colors!
I genuinely think this would bring a number of fun benefits to the game:
- Wes can contribute to his team more than just laying near-worthless balloon decoys and doing any-character tasks like wood chopping
- Rafts could be ridden by anyone but, like Wes himself, are very fragile and come with a very serious downside
- Players who like the Shipwrecked-style boat movement and were disappointed with DST's boat mechanics will probably enjoy having those mechanics available in some form
- The vast majority of code and possibly even a few of the sprite assets needed to implement this can simply be re-used from Shipwrecked's source code, possibly making this easier to implement, plus any challenging physical interactions that might otherwise require complex solutions can be resolved by just having the raft pop if it enters that situation