Yeah, something is definitely messed up. I tried to refloat it with buoys outside the hull and it still lists to that side, but now the whole thing floats out of the water 
#Tugboat!
haughty niche
@pseudo sun ?
P.P.P.S as you can see from pic 4 to pic 5 I managed to right the thing only for it to tip over to the other side, so I switched to trying to balance it with buoys
Also! Protip for steamboats: extend hose pulley below waterline > place block below hose pulley > concealed water intake!
pseudo sun
I haven’t had time to do anything Minecrafty since the vs 2.4 release, but I have heard balancing is a lot weirder in this update
I will look into it when I have time
One thing I have noticed, that has also been a thing since 2.3, is that sometimes a ship that is perfectly balanced will still lean to the side due to some quirk with VS physics
I added the magic ballast block specifically for those cases, so add one and see if it still doesn’t work
haughty niche
This seems a little more than a balance issue
pseudo sun
buoys won’t really do much out of the water
haughty niche
Well the thing is I added them and the entire thing is now floating a meter over the water
The more I added the higher it went without changing the balance
pseudo sun
they provide a slight magical buoyant force to the entire ship no matter what, but they only provide locational buoyancy when placed underwater
you can disable the magic buoyant force in config if you don’t like it
but yeah, without any magic forces, placing an air filled buoy above the water will only weigh the ship down, since the buoy case itself still weighs something
that applies to real life as well
pseudo sun
not trying to be sassy
some people just don’t know this stuff or don’t think it through
haughty niche
that applies to real life as well
but come on man :/
pseudo sun
probably mostly small children
I’m sorry. I have no concept of the knowledge level of the person I’m talking to 😭
I have genuinely had people who don’t know stuff like this before
anyway, did you happen to update this world from 2.4.1 to 2.4.2 at any point?
OMG WAIT
I know what’s wrong 
I changed ballast blocks to be 2000kg instead of 20000kg because the weights changed in 2.4, but the weights changed back in 2.4.2 and I never changed ballast back to 20000kg
that’s the problem
use gold blocks in the meantime @haughty niche
or raw gold
those are roughly 20000kg
haughty niche
That would do it!
pseudo sun
I’ll try and get an update out as soon as I can to fix ballast
haughty niche
I'm poking around in the config, is the buoy-float-strength variable the one to change to disable the magic buoyancy?
pseudo sun
yeah
I added it because too many people were complaining that they couldn’t fit enough buoys in their ships
most people build ships with effectively no draught
haughty niche
Incidentally, is there a way for me to go in and change the below-waterline buoyancy? Is that a job for a datapack?
pseudo sun
that part just uses VS physics
the buoys are 0.01kg, so they're basically air blocks that you can place
haughty niche
Man, this this just does not want to stay upright then
pseudo sun
unfortunately, you can't really do negative mass with a datapack or anything
haughty niche
Are copycats super heavy? I'm thinking it may be the roof
haughty niche
I wish I knew how it was calculated. The roof uses a bunch of half layers and I'm wondering how they're counted; since the pilothouse is so high up, if each side of a block occupied by half layers is counted separately, or worse, each half layer (for a total of 16 possible per block), then it would royally fuck up its CG
pseudo sun
vs treats all versions of a block the same
so any version of the half layer is treated as 500kg
are you able to get it sitting somewhat upright but lopsided?
pseudo sun
is the whole thing made of copycats?
haughty niche
Most of it
pseudo sun
if you're using a lot of buoys, you might want to restore the magic force
that way you can add more ballast (gold)
you should be able to balance your ship with only ballast. The only thing the buoys are good for imo is making your ship float
or fine tuning
but you really can only afford to fine tune on bigger ships
for smaller ships, I would recommend just adding 1 magic ballast for fine tuning
haughty niche
I really want to figure out from an engineering standpoint what's wrong with this thing XP
pseudo sun
what's wrong with it is that VS doesn't simulate water displacement yet, so we have this stupid buoy system and magic ballast to try to get around it
(ie. there's probably nothing wrong with it)
haughty niche
I asked ChatGPT and I suspect this is the issue
Great question — this is a classic stability pathology in naval architecture, and it leads to some very strange-looking ships.
What you are describing is a vessel with two stable equilibrium states at non-zero heel angles and an unstable equilibrium at upright.
In other words: the ship wants to lean, and upright is the worst possible place for it to be.
This is called negative initial stability with positive range stability, and it happens when the metacentric height near zero heel is negative, but becomes positive after some angle of heel.
Here’s how that happens.
🧭 The Core Mechanism
A floating body is stable when:
G is below M (center of gravity below metacenter)
Your ship behaves like this:
At 0° heel → G is above M → unstable
At ±θ° heel → the underwater shape changes → M rises above G → stable again
So the stability curve looks like a double-well:
Upright is the top of a hill. The ship naturally falls off to either side.
🚢 What Hull & CG Geometry Causes This?
- Low waterplane moment of inertia
If the hull has:
A very narrow waterline when upright
And becomes much wider when heeled
then the metacenter is very low at small angles but rises quickly as the ship heels.
This happens with hulls that are:
Round-bilged
Tumblehome
Or deep-V shaped
At upright, the waterplane is tiny → very low M → unstable.
As it heels, the waterplane widens dramatically → M rises → stable.
pseudo sun
pseudo sun
wtf does it mean by "narrow waterline"
oh nvm
you don't have a narrow waterline tho
the easy solution would be to increase the draught of the ship
either by making it sit lower in the water, or make the hull deeper
haughty niche
I'll probably have to, which sucks cause I was really hoping it would be able to go down rivers
pseudo sun
yeah
vanilla mc water is way too shallow
even just 1 block of increased draught would probably do the trick tho
or even half a block if you can figure out how to make that work
haughty niche
okay I removed buoys from above the waterline and the thing tipped over in that direction
something is wrong with the math im positive
i feel like im going to cry
pseudo sun
would you be able to send a video of that happening?
haughty niche
I'll upload it to youtube
I don't feel like I should have to use half this many buoys in the first place and I swear something isn't right
pseudo sun
oh, go into config and disable aerodynamic wind
the wind is probably pushing your ship
you really should be balancing with ballast instead of buoys tho
haughty niche
I finally got it to balance (the raft to the side of it is symnmetrical but is still listing really bad
This is the keel situation
pseudo sun
send me a schem and I can try to balance it when I have time
haughty niche
How would I go about doing that?
pseudo sun
install ship in a bottle and bottle it up, then grab the schem from the generated folder in your world
haughty niche
The version for forge says it needs fabric aaaaaaa 
haughty niche
gah im dumb