Your port
Every captain begins at a home port with a plot or two of ground and a small purse. The port page is where you build; the chart is where you sail. Nothing is lost by exploring — sailing costs energy and time, never gold.
Everything, explained once
The guide
Every system in the game, with the actual figures it runs on — these are read from the game itself rather than written out here, so they cannot fall out of date.
Getting under way
The first hour, and what to do with it.
Making money at first
Claim a resource node on the industry page and collect from it. Refine what it gives you into something worth more, then sell that at a port whose prices are kind. This is the whole economy in miniature, and it never stops being how the game works.
Rank
Experience comes from almost everything. Rank 100 is the ceiling, and each rank widens what you may build, sail and take on. The curve steepens: rank 10 is an afternoon, rank 60 is a campaign.
Energy
Nearly every action spends from one pool of 100, refilling 20 an hour. It is the game's clock. Raiding is the most expensive thing you can do with it; collecting is the cheapest.
Trade and industry
Nodes, refining, markets and standing orders.
Nodes
Ground you claim at a port that yields over time. Claims are shared — another captain claiming the same node takes nothing from you. Yield is capped, so a node left for a week gives no more than one left for a day.
Refining
A workshop turns cheap goods into dear ones. Each recipe card shows how many runs your warehouse will bear and which ingredient runs out first, so there is nothing to work out by hand.
Markets
Every port prices goods differently, and every trade moves the price. Buying pushes it up, selling pushes it down, and both drift back over hours. Large loads are filled in steps rather than all at one price, so dumping a hundred tons pays less per ton than dumping ten.
Standing orders
A port will buy in bulk at about 45% above market, delivered over days. Goods handed over are gone at once, and missing the deadline forfeits what you have already delivered. Worth taking when you have production set up, dangerous when you have not.
The Trading Post
Captains selling to captains, in cargo and whole ships. The valuable goods — cut stones, gold, spices — change hands only here. Prices must sit between 40% and 300% of what the ports pay, and the harbour takes 4% of an honest sale, rising toward 30% on lots priced far above the going rate.
Ships and crew
Hulls, officers, repairs and loss.
Rates
Ships run from Rate VI, the humblest, to Rate I, the finest afloat. Each is unlocked by owning the rate below it, so the tree is climbed rather than jumped.
Premium hulls
A few ships are laid down in no yard, at any price and at any rank. They are won out of a consignment at long odds — one in 350 from an Admiralty consignment, and longer from the cheaper chests — or handed over at a giveaway. They carry a mark on the quay, and they sail for whoever holds them whatever their standing.
Berths
You may keep 2 hulls without a shipyard, and 2 more for every level of every shipyard you own. A shipwright bought at the black market adds one permanently.
Officers
Five trades — navigator, master gunner, quartermaster, carpenter and surgeon. Each serves one ship, and better rates carry more of them: 3 on a first or second rate, 2 on a third or fourth, 1 below that. They learn their trade at sea, and they go down with the ship.
Condition and repair
Fighting and sailing wear a hull down. A shipyard puts her right for gold, supplies and hours out of the water — a carpenter aboard makes it faster and cheaper. Below a quarter condition she can be lost outright.
Insurance
Cover against total loss, taken at the shipyard for a share of her value and running 7 days. Cover reaches at most 75%, never the whole — a fully insured first rate would be a ship with nothing to lose.
The sea itself
Weather, wrecks and the passage between ports.
Weather
Every stretch of water has its own sky, the same for every captain, turning every 4 hours. A calm adds a third to a passage; a hurricane can add two thirds and threaten the hull. Nobody can wait for better weather by refreshing — it changes on the clock, not on the page.
Storm season
June to November. Bad weather goes from roughly one passage in ten to nearly half, and hurricanes are possible only then. Plan long voyages around it or pay for them.
Wrecks
Every ship lost leaves one where she went down, and anyone may send divers. 6 dives each and gone within 24 hours, so news of a sinking is worth acting on. Coin, ship's timbers, and now and then whatever she was carrying off the books.
Raiding and reputation
The Death Triangle, notoriety and contraband.
The Death Triangle
From rank 5 every captain is fair game to every other, wherever they lie. A raid costs 25 energy and is decided by hull, condition and rank.
What you may do to them
Beating a captain lets you choose: let her go for the full experience, plunder her for a slice of their gold, or cripple her and put her out of action for hours. Each trades reward against how badly you set them back.
Protections
Rank bands keep the strong away from the weak. A defeated captain has 45 minutes of shelter, the same pair cannot fight again for 2 hours, and anyone with no free ship cannot be attacked at all.
Notoriety
Raiding makes you known, and it fades on its own. It is not purely a penalty: a feared captain is stopped far more often when running contraband, which is the one place fame costs you money.
Contraband
Goods no harbour master will enter in a ledger. The fence at the black market pays 3.2 times their worth and asks nothing, but every sale risks seizure — from 8% for a quiet captain to 45% for a hunted one. Caught, you lose the cargo and gain 30 notoriety.
Companies and territory
Guilds, ports, sieges and blockades.
Companies
A guild with a treasury, ranks and its own chat. Members can be promoted to officer, which is what lets them commit the treasury.
Holding a port
A company of 3 or more may raise its flag for 250,000 gold. Members then trade 5% better there and draw 10% more from its nodes, and every outsider selling at that port pays 2% into the treasury.
Sieges
Marching on a held port costs 400,000 gold and opens a 24-hour contest. Both sides earn standing by trading at the port and by beating the other company at sea. The higher score holds it when the clock runs out.
Blockades
A holding company may close a port. Outsiders pay 12,000 gold to enter and 6% to trade, but it costs the treasury 60,000 a day and lifts itself if the treasury cannot pay. A weapon for a quarrel, not a permanent tax.
Anchorages
Six hidden roadsteads where corsairs' charts are drawn, from rank 55 upward. One captain holds each, it yields once a day, and the only way to take one is off whoever has it. An anchorage whose holder has no free ship falls without a shot.
Working the water
Fishing grounds, uncharted squares and torn maps.
The fishery
Send a hull out from any port and she comes back with a hold full. What swims off a coast is worked out from how far north it is and what month it is, and nothing about it is rolled: every captain in the same harbour sees the same water, and it is the same water next week. Cod runs cold and in winter, turtle warm and in spring. Out of season a ground is thin rather than empty.
What a catch is worth
Fin-fish land the same raw fish a fishing ground node yields, so the salting house still does its work ashore — this is another way to gather, not a way round the industry. Turtle and whale are neither fish and land their own goods. A whale wants a rate III hull or heavier. The catch is landed where she sailed from, so the second half of the decision is where to carry it: fish fetches most where it does not swim.
Charting
The sea between harbours is worth entering. Pick a bearing and a reach, send a hull, and what she finds goes on your chart and nobody else's. The world is cut into squares 5 degrees to a side, and what lies in each is fixed: the square west of here holds the same thing for everyone, today and next month. Most of it is open water, and is meant to be.
What is out there
Reefs worth knowing about before you find one in the dark, derelicts still floating, wrecks in the shallows, and islands nobody had marked, which take a name when found and the same name for whoever finds them. A square already surveyed has nothing more to give, so the finding is always at the edge of what you know.
Torn maps
4 scraps of a map agree on a place. They turn up in wreckers' caches out in deep water and at the bottom of the better consignments; nothing sells them and nothing buys them. Piece them together and they name a square between 2 and 8 squares out. Follow it with a hull and dig. Most holes hold coin, a few hold something older, and one in twenty holds nothing at all — which is what makes the other nineteen worth the crossing.
One thing at a time
A hull fishing, surveying or following a map is at sea and cannot also be sailing, carrying, raiding or taking work. She will tell you what she is already doing rather than quietly going twice.
Crowns and commissions
Standing, letters of marque and the season roll.
Standing
Every crown keeps score of the work done for it. Work for one is remembered by that crown and by its rival, who take it rather differently: the rival loses half what the patron gains. A captain who takes every job on every board ends up middling with everybody. One who picks a side ends up honoured in half the Caribbean and unwelcome in the other half. Standing never decays.
What standing buys
A better price at the counting house and a cheaper yard in that crown's harbours, rising through Noted, Trusted, Favoured, Honoured. It is read from the flag over the harbour, so the same captain gets a different answer in Willemstad and Havana — and standing below nothing works against you at the same rate it would have worked for you.
Who pays it
The crown a job pays for is the crown the person handing it out serves. Whoever is behind the table is who you are working for, whatever the errand is.
Letters of marque
A crown that thinks well enough of you — 400 standing — will sign a paper licensing you against its enemy. 6 prizes in 24 hours, signed only in that crown's own harbours, one at a time. Fighting work counts and must be won; trade does not count at all. Meet the tally and the bounty rises with how well they already regard you.
A letter that lapses
Every prize pays standing on its own, so a letter that runs out short has still been worth sailing under. What is lost is the bounty, not the week.
The season roll
50 rungs, climbed by anything at all that pays experience — sailing, fishing, surveying, refining and fighting all count already, and there is nothing to grind on its own. A rung is 1,200 experience. Everyone takes the free column; a running Crown Charter opens the second beside it, and it is asked for when a reward is collected rather than when it is earned — so a charter taken late in a season still collects everything you walked past.
Bringing friends aboard
Every captain has a code. Give it to somebody before they make an account and you are both paid as they rise, at ranks 5, 10, 20. Nothing pays for a signing-up, only for ranks reached, and two accounts made from the same address never pay each other.
Charts, crowcoins and the Charter
The two currencies beyond gold, and what they buy.
Corsair's charts
Won from raiding missions, drawn at anchorages, and found in consignments. They buy the black market's favours: winds, careening, safe conduct, pardons, an extra berth, an extra plot. Charts are carried on your person, so they are the same at every port.
Treasures taken at sea
Three more things are carried rather than stored, and none is sold in any port. An admiral's astrolabe puts voyages 50% quicker for 12 hours, or goes two at a time into a first rate. A royal seal is wanted by every first rate and is good for nothing else, so one hull is one seal. A sunken reliquary opens for 5,000 experience, and no slipway asks for one. All three come off work taken at the tavern, rarely, and the better the job the better the odds.
Crowcoins
Bought with money, and the only thing that is. They buy gold, consignments and the Crown Charter. Nothing bought with crowcoins can be taken from you by another captain.
The Crown Charter
A subscription: more experience, faster energy, a larger pool, better market terms and extra berths, with a badge beside your name.
Nothing in the guide matches that.