Kraken Express responded quickly. Days later, on April 30, the studio pushed out a "housekeeping" update addressing SSD and CPU usage, connectivity issues, missing building blocks, and various bugs.

The results were dramatic: pre-patch, RocksDB was generating roughly 90,000 - 130,000 writes per second, while post-patch testing during sailing (one of the heavier write scenarios) showed an average of just 20 – 30 writes per second, with peaks never exceeding 60 writes/sec.

Am I crazy for thinking 20-60 writes per second is still way too high? I know it's small enough to no longer matter performance-wise, but wouldn't it make way more sense to increase the database cache size further and batch write the changes to disk every few seconds? That's still well within the margin where players wouldn't notice the lost data in the event of a crash, while also making it so the game's not queuing disk IO operations nearly every other frame.