Boat Abilities¶
Boat abilities are active powers your ship fires from its ability hotbar: broadside bursts, defensive windows, crew heals, enemy-fouling shots, sea hazards. Where the Ocean talent actives key off your character, these belong to the ship. You find them as deeds and install them.
Ability deeds¶
An ability deed is a droppable item carrying one ability. They ride in the hatch (hold) of NPC pirate ships, alongside upgrade and crew-member deeds, and the hatch stays locked until you clear the deck of its crew. So board the ship, kill the crew, plunder the hatch. Drops are tier-weighted: a Lesser is a common find, a Greater is a real haul. Each deed is tinted by its rarity, and that rarity rolls the deed's cooldown (see below).
To install, stand on a ship you own and double-click the deed. You can also use the boat menu's install cursor or the Dockmaster's FIT ABILITY button on a docked ship. The ability then shows up on your hotbar. Deeds you aren't using store in the Ocean Coffer alongside crew and upgrade deeds.
While not standing on a ship, double-click an ability deed from your backpack to open a crew-style detail card with its tier, rarity, rolled cooldown, shared tier, and slot count. This inspection does not install the deed; double-clicking aboard a ship you own still does.
The boat menu's ABILITIES tab lays out all six slots (3 Lesser · 2 Regular · 1 Greater). A filled slot shows the ability's icon framed in its rarity colour (green Uncommon, blue Rare, purple Epic, gold Legendary), its rolled cooldown, and a REMOVE button that pops the deed back into your pack. Hover the slot for the full effect text. An empty slot offers INSTALL. The per-tier cooldown rolls also surface in the STATS tab, folded in next to every other ship stat.
Click any filled ability slot to open its full detail card. It shows the ability's icon, tier, rarity, complete effect, and rolled cooldown. The same card is available in the Vessel menu at sea, through a Dockmaster's INSPECT view, and from a loaded ship deed.
You can open this menu off the water, too. The Dockmaster's INSPECT button opens it for a docked ship, and double-clicking a loaded ship deed opens it from your pack. Both are fully editable in dry-dock, and both show the same rolls and stats you'd see afloat - no need to launch first to read your hull. Ships themselves are launched from a Dockmaster ("Add a Boat from pack → LAUNCH"), not by double-clicking the deed.
Slots and tiers¶
Every ability sits in one of three tiers, and your ship has a fixed number of slots per tier:
| Tier | Slots | Base cooldown |
|---|---|---|
| Lesser | 3 | 60s |
| Regular | 2 | 120s |
| Greater | 1 | 240s |
Six fitted slots total, and those same six fill the first six positions on your hotbar. There are far more abilities to find than slots to fill, so a kitted-out ship has to choose its character: offense, defense, stealth, speed, crew-sustain, or board-control. Install an ability into a full tier and the oldest ability of that tier pops back to your pack with its roll intact - a lossless swap.
Four permanent ship controls follow those six fitted positions. They appear on every hotbar, never consume an ability-deed slot, and do not belong to an ability cooldown tier:
| Position | Control | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| 7 | Boarding Party | Starts [boardingrope, opens the picker for who crosses, and uses the existing 10-second Boarding Party cooldown. |
| 8 | Recall Boarding Party | Runs [recallboarding to pull your installed crew and controlled followers off a foreign deck and back to your own ship. You stay where you are. |
| 9 | Recall Followers | Runs [recallfollowers (also [embarkfollowers) to bring back controlled followers only, leaving your installed crew in place. |
| 10 | Embark / Disembark | Uses the contextual disembark speech action with a 14-tile reach: ashore, it boards a nearby ship you command; aboard, it returns you to a friendly ship in reach or opens a cursor that lands on the exact safe tile you select. It does not recall installed boarding crew. |
Shared cooldowns¶
Cooldowns are shared per tier. Fire any Lesser ability and all three Lesser slots go on cooldown; a Regular locks both Regular slots; the Greater answers to itself. You rotate one ability per tier per cycle, not dump everything at once.
The cooldown roll¶
Each deed rolls its own cooldown inside its tier's range, fixed the moment it drops. Rarer deeds roll toward the fast end, which is what makes a finely-rolled deed the find everyone's after:
| Tier | Cooldown range |
|---|---|
| Lesser | 45-75s |
| Regular | 90-150s |
| Greater | 210-270s |
Firing an ability sets its tier's shared cooldown to that deed's rolled value, so the faster your installed deed, the sooner the whole tier comes back.
Hull tuning¶
Each hull also rolls a small ±10% ability-cooldown modifier that multiplies the cooldown of every installed ability, on top of the deed's own roll. A top-roll hull shaves a touch more off everything: a top-rolled Lesser (45s) on a best-roll hull fires again at about 41s. That roll is fixed for the hull and carries across dry-dock; a different hull rolls differently. The Dockmaster's INSPECT view shows a ship's hull tuning. Beyond it, Cooldowns upgrades (Corinthian Spinnaker, Seawind Ratlines) trim every tier, and an Artificer crew member's rolls trim one tier each - all folded into the same capped chain on the STATS tab.
The ability catalog¶
Any ability that says "target a tile" fires only the broadside that bears on the tile you click - the side facing it. Cannons on the off beam never fire across your own hull. (If only one side carries guns, or the bearing side is empty, the fuller side fires instead.)
Burst damage runs a clean ladder: every Lesser burst out-damages a single broadside, every Regular out-damages every Lesser, and every Greater out-damages every Regular. The longer the tier's cooldown, the harder it hits. Each volley fires your whole bearing broadside, so bigger hulls - more guns per side - scale every burst up on their own.
Lesser¶
| Ability | Effect |
|---|---|
| Crushing Shot | Target a tile: 2 heavy volleys from the bearing broadside at 1.5× hull power. |
| Quick Tack | +60% forward speed for 12s - a real burst of pace. Shows in your buff bar while active. |
| Brace Lines | Incoming hull damage −25% for 20s. |
| Bilge Patch | Instantly repair 12% of max hull. |
| Depth Charges | Drop two rows of visible barrels in your wake - a large ship lays 2×4, a medium 2×3, a small 2×2. Any hull passing over one - including your own - takes 100/125/150 hull damage by the layer's ship size. Charges arm after a short delay so you can clear your own drop. |
| Chum Slick | Ladle chum over the rail: special catches (bottles, wreck pulls) bite ×1.5 for everyone fishing from this deck for 60s. Shows in your buff bar while active. |
Regular¶
| Ability | Effect |
|---|---|
| Aimed Salvo | Target a tile: 3 volleys from the bearing broadside at 1.5× hull power. |
| Honed Powder | +25% to every normal broadside for 60s. |
| Pike Wall | Enemy boarding chance against you −75% for 45s. |
| Spirit Rounds | 3 volleys at 1.2× power that ignore the enemy's hull damage reduction. |
| Chain Shot | 3 volleys at 1.2× power that slow the struck hull −25% for 15s. |
| Smoke Rounds | 6 volleys that foul the struck hull's aim (−50% accuracy) for 15s. |
| Venomous Rounds | 6 volleys that poison crew and players struck - including the enemy deck crew chipped by the splash. |
| Fouling Line | Draw a line on open water (like the cannon rake): it lays a continuous, perfectly straight fouling rope along it - the line snaps to a clean north-south or east-west run, and cannot be laid on land (docks, shore, or any non-water tile reject the whole cast). The first hull to drive into the rope consumes that section and is slowed to 20% of its current speed for 15s - the slow bites the instant you cross it (even at full speed mid-sail) and your hull recovers full speed on its own when the 15s runs out. The snared crew see a slow icon in their buff bar. Snares any ship that runs into it, including your own, so mind your own trap. Single-use per rope. |
| Cheat the Locker | Haul one random fallen crew member back from Davy Jones' Locker at 75% life, ignoring the usual 5-minute revive wait on their bones. Their level, XP, and rolls come back intact. (If no crew are down, nothing happens - but the ability still goes on cooldown.) |
| Trawling Nets | Run the nets for 90s: special catches bite ×1.75 from this deck, and your catches do not tire out schools of fish - a trawling crew can work a circle hard without killing it for everyone else. |
Greater¶
| Ability | Effect |
|---|---|
| Tempest's Wrath | Target a tile: 6 volleys from the bearing broadside at 1.5× power - the flagship cannonade. |
| Hammerfall | 3 volleys from the bearing broadside at 2.5× power - the hardest single blow. |
| Truestrike Barrage | 6 volleys at +25% power that ignore the enemy's hull reduction. |
| Boarders' Fury | Your installed crew deal +50% damage to hostiles on your deck for 60s. |
| Mutton Feast | Heal each crew 15% of max HP every 10s for 2 minutes. |
| Ghosting | Hide from all spyglasses for 90s - you cannot fire while hidden. |
| Bulwark | Incoming hull damage −90% for 12s - the apex defensive window. |
| Hullbreaker Rounds | 4 volleys at 1.75× power that leave the struck hull taking +25% damage for 30s. |
| Sargasso Bloom | Target the water: bloom a seaweed field that slows any ship crossing it. |
| Fire Storm | Draw a line anywhere - including straight across an enemy's deck (unlike Fouling Line, it does not need open water): it lays a persistent wall of sea-fire. Any ship that touches the fire catches alight for 20 hull damage per second - a flat 20/s whether one fire tile or ten overlap the hull. The flame clings to the hull and keeps burning for 20 seconds after you sail clear, so you can't just gun it out of the field to escape. The field itself lasts 45s and never blocks movement. Burns any hull, your own included. |
| Siren's Bounty | For 60s the sea gives up her best: special catches bite ×2 from this deck, and every bottle hauled up comes up one level richer (capped at level 5). The apex fishing window. |
Fire abilities from the ship hotbar while aboard a ship you command. It opens automatically the moment you board (no need to open the boat menu and click HOTBAR; [boathotbar still toggles it manually) and hides when you step off onto land. You can assign keys under Options → Macros: BoatBar1 through BoatBar6 fire the six fitted ability positions; BoatBar7 through BoatBar10 fire Boarding Party, Recall Boarding Party, Recall Followers, and Embark / Disembark in that order. These are available macro actions, not preassigned keyboard keys. See Naval Combat for cannons, boarding, crews, docking, and the Dockmaster.