The Mirage Boat is one of the rarest mounts in Where Winds Meet, and it sits in a strange place between pure cosmetic flex and a genuinely useful tool. While horses carry you across the land, the Mirage Boat gives your wanderer a more thematic way to travel by water — if you’re willing to grind for it.
What the Mirage Boat is
Mirage Boat is a mount in Where Winds Meet. Mounts are a broad category: some are straightforward horses you capture in the wild, others are premium shop purchases, event rewards, or gacha-style draws. Mirage Boat is different again: it is a constructible water mount that you unlock by trading in a specific currency.
Mechanically, Mirage Boat behaves like other mounts in the game’s cosmetic list: it’s selected from the mount menu and summoned when you use the mount hotkey (keyboard 6 by default, or Touchpad + Square on PS5). The key difference is the fantasy; instead of a horse appearing, your character calls up a sleek boat that makes river and lake crossings feel much more in line with the game’s wuxia setting than simply swimming.
How to unlock mounts in Where Winds Meet
Before you can use Mirage Boat or any other mount, the game has to introduce the mount system at all. That happens across the early main story.
Mount access appears once you reach the General’s Shrine story segment. Near the shrine, you encounter a pair of horse thieves. Defeating them lets you claim a horse, and that unlocks the mount mechanic for the account.
From that point on:
- On PC: press
6to summon your active mount. - On PS5: press
Touchpad + Squaretogether.
This same system later handles any additional mounts you earn, including Mirage Boat.
How to get the Mirage Boat mount
Mirage Boat is not a drop, event reward, or faction benefit. It’s built piece by piece from a specific gacha currency called Diagrams.
| Mount | Unlock method | Free-to-play friendly |
|---|---|---|
| Spirited Courser | Shop (1280 Echo Bead) | No |
| Qin Horse | Shop (1280 Echo Bead) | No |
| White-browed Goose | Shop (680 Echo Bead) | No |
| Snow Oath | Shop (60 Echo Bead) | No |
| Horskie | Shop (680 Echo Bead) | No |
| Veilstride | 15 Million Wanderers Gathering Gift | No |
| Ghostride | Draw | No |
| Hua - Flame Red Stallion | Horse Capture / Snatch Horse | No |
| Representative wild horses (Chibiao, Chizhui, Chibo, etc.) | Horse Capture / Snatch Horse | Yes |
| Mirage Boat | Exchange 170 Diagrams in the Draw Shop to construct the boat | No |
To unlock Mirage Boat specifically, you need to:
- Accumulate 170 Diagrams from the game’s Draw system.
- Go to the Draw Shop and spend those Diagrams on the Mirage Boat blueprint.
- Construct the boat once you have enough Diagrams.
This path makes Mirage Boat a premium-adjacent mount. Diagrams originate from the Draw system, which is tied into the game’s monetization. You can obtain some through normal play and event rewards, but reliably reaching 170 Diagrams is aligned with spending, not with purely free play.
How Mirage Boat compares to horses and lightness skills
Mount choice in Where Winds Meet is less about raw stats and more about roleplay and context. Mirage Boat fits into a triangle of traversal tools alongside horses and lightness skills.
Mirage Boat vs. horses
Horses are your baseline. You first get one through the General’s Shrine encounter and can then upgrade by capturing or stealing different breeds in areas like Wild Mane Ranch. Each horse can roll different stats and perks, from higher speed to terrain bonuses. Captured horses can also be sold off to nearby merchants for Echo Jade.
Mirage Boat doesn’t replace a horse on land; it complements them on water. The appeal is straightforward:
- On land, a good horse remains the fastest, most controllable option.
- On rivers and lakes, Mirage Boat is there for players who want to sail rather than swim or abuse ledge jumps.
There is no flying mount in the game, so you still swap back to a horse or lightness skills when you leave the water.
Mirage Boat vs. lightness skills
The real competition for Mirage Boat is not other mounts but the game’s lightness skills. The earliest one most players unlock is Meteor Flight, obtained during the Afterglow side mission by talking to a fisherman near a lake west of the starting region. Meteor Flight lets your character launch into the air and glide in any direction, drastically reducing the friction of crossing long gaps or climbing steep slopes.
Other lightness skills expand on that: dashes in midair, multi-jumps, safe heavy falls, and more. Taken together, these effectively give every character self-powered flight and precision movement that mounts cannot match.
There are two big constraints, though:
- Some regions disable lightness skills until you earn a local permit or keepsake by pushing the exploration rank for that zone up to level 4.
- Lightness abilities cost stamina and often require good timing, especially when chaining jumps or midair dashes.
Mirage Boat ignores those constraints on water surfaces. It does not care about regional lightness bans and does not drain stamina; it simply obeys the mount system rules. That makes it a niche but convenient fallback in areas where the designers clamp down on airborne movement.
Why Mirage Boat is not free-to-play friendly
The mount list divides each entry into “F2P?”, yes or no. Mirage Boat lands firmly in the “No” column for a reason: it is locked behind the Draw economy rather than story progression, exploration, or direct shop purchase with purely grindable currency.
To see the pattern:
- Wild horses like Chibiao - Red Dappled Courser or Li - Jet Black Steed are marked F2P and come from Horse Capture or Snatch Horse.
- Cosmetic mounts such as Spirited Courser and Qin Horse are shop-only, priced in Echo Beads.
- Mirage Boat sits with premium/gacha mounts: it requires 170 Draw Diagrams, not Echo Jade, exploration, or a one-time quest.
In practical terms, that means:
- Players who never engage with the Draw system are unlikely to see Mirage Boat any time soon.
- Heavy Draw users will gradually accumulate enough Diagrams as a side effect of chasing other rewards.
Functionally, Mirage Boat does not unlock new content or provide progression power. It is a traversal flavor item intended to sit alongside — not above — the core system of horses and lightness skills, with its scarcity driven by the Draw economy.
Where Mirage Boat fits in a typical early-game build
Early progression in Where Winds Meet generally revolves around a few key unlocks:
- Picking a strong starter weapon at the Oddities Collector: Thundercry Blade for tank builds or Vernal Umbrella for ranged DPS.
- Grabbing mystic skills like Heavenly Snatch (stealing from NPCs and disarming enemies) and Meridian Touch (disabling stone statues and stripping posture buffs).
- Unlocking Touch of Death from the Verdant Wilds castle puzzle for instant assassinations and better stealth clears.
- Acquiring a reliable healing tool via Panacea Fan and pairing it with internal arts such as Royal Remedy and Morale Chant for sustain.
- Picking up impactful inner ways like Divine Roulette and Bitter Seasons out of dungeons like Gleaming Abyss.
Within that context, Mirage Boat is a luxury. Early Echo Jade and time are much better spent on core combat tools, internal art pages, and exploration rank for region permits. The boat’s unlock requirement — 170 Diagrams — pushes it naturally into a mid- or late-game cosmetic goal for players already deep into Draw.
That’s ultimately the Mirage Boat’s role: an aspirational, water-focused mount meant for players who are already committed to Where Winds Meet’s monetized systems and want a traversal toy that fits the setting’s river-bound poetry. You can cross every lake in the game without it; the boat is there to make those crossings feel like part of the wuxia fantasy instead of a chore.
