A new update lets you pay gold to go island hopping
After 20 hours of lite farming, crafting, sailing, and fetch-questing, I finished Summer in Mara feeling like I’d probably never come back to mop up my final few optional questlines – at least not without updates. The game is wholesome and likable, but at a certain point you’ve seen the sights, you know the routes, and you’re just mindlessly running from Point A to B to Z to give NPCs some new item or recipe.
I checked back in with Summer in Mara this week, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a recent quality-of-life update on Steam that helps cut down on monotony. It makes a huge difference.
The big new feature is something that should’ve been there on day one: fast travel.
Instead of manually sailing through the same repetitive ocean sections (and loading screens) to reach particular islands only to come all the way back again, it’s now possible to pop open the map, click on a quadrant, and pay a small fee to fast travel. The price varies depending on how many “screens” you’re going to bypass, and you can only jump to islands you’ve explored, but it’s a great solution.
Better yet, you don’t even need to be in your boat to use fast travel – it’s a true time-saver.
Fast travel isn’t necessarily something you’ll be able to afford for every single trip if you’re only several hours into Koa’s adventure, but if you’re done with the main story or you’ve saved up, it’s not too pricey. The feature motivated me to close out some longstanding quests and dig up far-off buried treasure.
In the update, Chibig also added three crafting spots (which I’ve included screens of below) so that you don’t have to return to your home island every time you need to whip up something for a character.
You can cook outside of Taka’s beachfront restaurant.
There’s a crafting table near Akaji’s forge.
You can also craft whenever you pop by Dunna’s volcano island.
Summer in Mara will be way too low-key for some players, but it sure helped me unwind. It’s currently available for Nintendo Switch, discounted on PC, and coming later this year to PS4 and Xbox One.