Virtual Sailor NG Sail anywhere, at your own pace

There is no route to follow and no clock to beat. You pick a boat, plot a passage and go: a ferry run between ports you know from real maps, a slow coastal cruise, or a full crossing if you feel like it. A handful of ready-made scenario missions exist, but most of your time goes into voyages you plan yourself. The weather and water are yours to tune from in-game menus, so the same stretch of sea can be bright blue tropics one evening and grey chop the next. It is unhurried by design, and learning each vessel's controls is the quiet pleasure at the centre of it.

The built-in vehicle and scenery designers are the reason this sim keeps growing. The vehicle design is simple enough to learn from and powerful enough to work as a preliminary design tool: assemble a boat from parts, launch it, and see whether it behaves the way you expected. One player reports building a working helicopter from parts in a couple of minutes, and editing landscape and placing objects into a scene in real time while the simulation runs. If building is not your thing, a large library of existing mods and add-ons covers everything from small sailboats to passenger ferries with working bridges, plus detailed port cities.