Recently, while visiting through a portal, I experienced a glitch while travelling across an ocean and my exocraft jammed, refusing to work, leaving me with no choice but to swim to a tiny island. All I needed to do was summon the exocraft to correct the glitch but this is only possible on land. I had to swim quite a distance.
Once on this island, I summoned my Nomad and was once again able to travel on as before.
This prompted the scary question of:
How far do you need to be from an exocraft while through-the-portal to not be able to summon it and what happens if this was to occur with no island?
As you can see from the 2 pictures below; the maximum distance you can be from an exocraft to summon it is 3:00 minutes, even though when on the other side of a portal, an exo is your only vehicle.
3:00 minutes is this far. You can see the portal in the distance where I left my Nomad.
With this in mind, I’d like to warn my fellow travellers.
If you find yourself of travelling the oceans on the óther’ side of a portal and your exocraft glitches and jams, unless you have land within 3:00 minutes of your position, you are now walking and swimming for the remainder of your trip.
My recommendation is to ensure you take the means to make a new geobay once on land. Making a Dynamic Resonator from scratch on a distant ocean world may be extremely difficult.
Next post I’m going to test swimming and see if I can swim indefinitely or if I will meet a watery demise.
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Swimming.
Well the short answer is NO you can’t swim indefinitely.
Bobbing along DOES NOT allow you to get air. Only jet packing out does.
By jet pack boosting you use Thamium which means eventually you will be fish food.
Using a reasonably well equipped suit with extras, I went swimming in a ocean to see how I went.
Using zinc to boost my membrane mods would prolong survival but at the expense of moving.
I found jetpack boosting out of the water then diving headfirst back in (porpoise style) allowed for a good burst of speed.
I managed to go to an island out of sight of my starting point noted at a distance of 8:00 minutes without really damaging my fuel reserves much at all.
Due to the speed boost a porpoise dive gives you the time is actually halved once you are underway so some serious distance can be covered if you efficiently use what you have.
To summarise:
I’d say a well equipped suit with a decent supply of relevant fuels would see you back to land in the event of a stranding in the ocean but if not so well equipped, eventually you would use everything up and be dead.
Feel free to do your own extremes testing and post them here.
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I really want to see a video of this Porpoise Move now! This could be the new Jetpack Sprint equivalent!
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You jetpack-boost out of the water to a decent height that allows you to swivel your view downwards.
Drop into the water and level out and provided you don’t hit something, you can carry this speed for a bit.
Skimming close to the surface allows you to repeat the move without losing to much momentum. (A bit like a porpoise)
I learnt this on nasty worlds where I was desperate for Kelp Sack but I needed to move fast (or get disolved) 
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