At the current moment, sea bases and bridges are being built with boats. They are totally functioning and practical as it stands.
However, as they remain, the use of the boats deviate from the intended use, the way the camera works on the boats is disorienting in my opinion and to look at, it's quite frankly, out of place.
My pitch is to introduce a new block you can walk straight onto but placeable on water. Think of it like a turf, but instead you'll be placing it on the ocean.
Excuse how out of place this mock up is against the don't starve theme and how rushed it looks, but this illustrates my vision for what i'm talking about.
Say for example you place tiles on water and the result would look something similar to this.
It will operate as any landmass would as usual except, you wouldn't have the ability to plant on it. You'd be able to place structures on it, beefalo and spiders could walk from the land it originated on to the placed pier/bridge block and it wouldn't be limited to just hunchback mobs and hounds who could jump or swim to it.
A weakness I'd like to implement for this sort of block would be for it to either crack or burn if any sort of ignition occurs on it. But instead of just getting destroyed, a character could still walk on it albeit very slowly as is the case with antlion fissures, in addition, your wetness would increase. This would be remedied by repairing with wood or twigs as is the case with boats.
Another function for this is to create true sea bases without the need of tacking boats upon boats by each other.
By simply placing each tile of the pier block directly on water and have them connect like so, would net you floor to stand on for your sea base.
Above, there are 4 tiles worth of this pier block.
As for materials used to craft the new addition, Perhaps some boards, wooden flooring turf and cut stone could be used. The exact amount isn't something I'm fussed about weighing in on directly.
Building off of that point, other bridges could be built such as arched support stone bridges made using cobblestone and cut stone as demonstrated by the stock image below I took off of google.
I realize what we have now with boat bridges currently function well enough and my pitch is by no means completely necessary, but I truly want the best out of this game and the mega world I'm attempting to make and the addition of these would go an extremely long way in the appearance of any world and large servers such as any klei official server or Glermz's community server would look incredible with these additions.
The only functional upside I could see from this would be ferrying herd mobs such as beefalo and volt goats across water. Even if a boss were to walk on to a pier block from the mainland, the damages of the pier or bridges would not end the fight for either party but instead, make a fight harder by slowing a character's pace down.
Thank you for reading the post and I would appreciate any input from anyone kind enough to reply
-Chirsg