Weizarred

Someone else and I posted about this same thing in the bugs forum since finding nothing at sea for so long seemed like it could be a glitch of some kind. Seems so far like you can just have really bad luck with it, but it definitely seems like a problem issue to me with how boring and frustrating it is finding nothing at all in the ocean for days. One user suggested that birds fly between islands, so to avoid this maybe you can't just set sail in any direction and instead have to circle your island until you find a bird to basically follow elsewhere, but I haven't tried this yet.

My girlfriend has been having a somewhat similar issue. Her computer doesn't shut down entirely, but the screen goes completely black and she is unable to do anything but a hard shutdown even though the game sounds are still playing. My guess was that the game is overheating her graphics card so that it stops working, but the weird thing is that it seems to affect specific save files permanently once it happens. She can start a new world and play fine for a while, but once this happens in a save for the first time, it will then happen again as soon as she enters that world, every time, which doesn't seem to fit with overheating. Best of luck solving this, GoblinGirl. Hope you're able to enjoy this game with your partner.

Your 4th screenshot looks exactly like what I experienced on my older laptop. Same strange glowing sphere with white in the middle, and the UI mirrored on the top and bottom. I'm assuming the game was too much for my bad laptop but it runs on my better one.

I had this same issue earlier today. Sailed for 3 days in-game, straight west from my starting island, without seeing a single bird. Got so boring and frustrating that I had to give up on playing. It's hard to go back into that game not knowing whether I'm just having extremely bad luck or something glitchy is going on. Have you at least seen sharks? I encountered literally nothing other than one passing rainstorm, and had the same deal where if I peaked underwater I could see mountains but nothing ever reaching above sea-level. Any info on approximately how long it should take to sail across the world in a raft, or how the map edges are handled (i.e. does it loop around or are there invisible edges?) would be helpful, but this was a really discouraging experience for me in terms of the exploration aspect of the game, which is what I'm the most interested in.