The survival aspect will not be as extreme as in regular survival games. As mentioned before the survival in our game will kind of be like a minimum base form. You will have to eat, but not every 5 minutes. You will have to craft clothes and tools, but only once. You will however need to go back to islands every now and then to stock up on wood, iron and such to repair your ship. Ships needs to be repaired with resources. If you are planning to stay on the water for a while, it’s wise to fill your ships inventory with as much resources as possible. Cannon balls will need to be crafted as well. Cannon ammo will be linked with the ship’s storage. You dont’ have to reload them manually, but when there are no more cannon balls in the ship storage you will not be able to fire the cannons anymore. Same goes for repairs, you can keep repairing the ship as long as there is wood in the storage. You can repair cannons if there is iron in the storage. And so on… You will be able to fish from upon the deck of your ship as well so for food you don’t always have to go to an island, only to repair and get ammo or to explore the islands. This is kind of how “far” the survival in our game goes. You will not have a cold meter or any other small meters. Only a food and health meter. When your food is above 50% your hp will autmatically regenerate. When your food is below 50% it will not. That’s kind of the only reason we have food in the game. So as you can see survival will not stand in the way of the other gameplay aspects, it will merely add a bit more depth.
The water is synchronised by checking if a client is connected using post login event in game mode. If yes, the server sents it’s own gametime to that client. That client then compares his own game time with the server’s and looks at the offset, this offset is then applied to the client’s game time so it matches the server. This also happens with a server to client wide event which re-synchronizes the water every 5 minutes. In theory this is not really needed as there is no immediate reason why the water should ever go out of sync, as the game time once synced should always keep ticking at the same rate regardless of hiccups and such. But just to make sure and beause it doesn’t hurt anyone I force the resync every 5 minutes just because i’m a paranoid maniac. 
About the blueprint nativization, we are having issues with it. Building our game with it works fine. But when we launch our game we get an error. Very strange. We’ve been looking for a solution for a while now and can’t find it. Once we fix that we should be able to build our game using nativization.
About character stats, there will not really be such a thing in our game. However there will be a level system. Most of the stuff you can get in the game will have to be bought with gold. A lot of this stuff will only be available at certain levels. At first the buying menu will be accessible from anywhere. But later we might add npc’s all around the world that all sell different things. But we are not sure yet. We will see in the future.