Naval Combat¶

Sea battles in Lyonesse are real fights, not flavour. Your ship has hit points, mounts cannons, and can sink other ships — yours or someone else's. This page covers the combat toolkit (cannons, boarding, ship bombs, repairs, salvage, and docking), the lawless-waters notoriety rule for ship-on-ship PvP, and the sink-credit system that gives both your character and your specific ship a war record.

Cannons — firing, reloading, and the ready call¶

Every craftable ship comes with its cannons pre-mounted. After a volley they reload on a timer before they'll fire again:

While they're cooling down, a "Cannons Reloading" cooldown bar runs on the HUD of every player aboard the ship.
When the reload finishes, the tillerman announces "Cannons ready!" overhead, so you know you can fire again without watching the bar.
The bar tracks your ship's actual reload time. Reload-speed upgrades (or crew that speed up reloading) shorten it, and the bar shortens with them — no guessing.
No aiming while reloading. You can't raise the aim line ([firecannons or an offensive ability) until at least one cannon is ready — the line is a fire action, not a free preview. A blocked ability costs no cooldown; fire once the guns are loaded.
Hold still, shoot straighter. Keep the ship stationary and your cannon fire tightens — accuracy ramps up over the first few seconds you stop moving (toward dead-on shots and a 1-tile spread) and resets the instant you move again. A steady firing position is rewarded; the same holds for a parked enemy ship.

Crews in a sea fight¶

Ships are crewed, and the crew fight. In a boat-to-boat engagement an enemy ship's deckhands throw spears across the water at you and at your own installed crew. It's deliberately a light chip of damage — it's ranged, cross-water fire, not a broadside — but it's constant pressure, so an unguarded captain takes a slow bleed over a long chase.

Two things shape how that plays out:

Crews target the opposing crew first. Deckhands go for the other ship's crew before they go for the player. Put your own crew aboard and they soak the enemy's spears, instead of every enemy lining up on you at once.
Your crew hit harder across the water. Installed crew deal +50% damage to any target on a different hull — spears and rail-to-rail melee both. Fights on the same deck (boarding) are unchanged.
Crew-on-crew blows land at half strength. Any crew attacking any other crew — spears or melee, yours or an enemy's — deals 50% damage, so a crew fight is a war of attrition, not an instant wipe. (Crew hitting players is unaffected.)
The captain runs the guns, not a spear. A ship's captain is busy steering and firing the broadside; he doesn't throw.

A few rules about the deckhands themselves:

They keep to the walkable deck. Crew never wander onto the cannons, the mast, or the hull corners — they stay on the same standable deck surface you walk.
You always push through your own crew. Walking through a crew member on deck never costs you the shove or gets you stuck — they step aside for players regardless of your stamina.
Your crew read as friendly. A player's own installed crew show a green (ally) nameplate to you and your party/guild/alliance — easy to tell apart from a boarder.
Click a crew member to open their card. Their overhead name is just their name and role (no level tag); double-click them to open the crew detail card with their level, XP, mastery, and signature.
Installed crew carry no loot. Your crew — and any other player's crew — drop nothing when killed; only NPC pirate crew carry doubloons. Killing someone's deckhands is denial, not a payday.
A fallen crew member isn't gone. When one of your installed crew dies at sea, their roster slot survives — the CREW tab marks them DOWN with a revive countdown (about 5 minutes). When it's up, press BACK ON DECK on their card (or double-click the bones they left on deck) to bring them back with level, XP, and rolls intact.

Enemy warships — when they engage¶

NPC warships are picky about their fights:

They only engage targets on the water. A pirate hull will sail past a player standing on land — it only picks a fight with someone who is themselves aboard a boat. You're safe ashore.
They hold and fire when they can. Once a warship lines up a clean broadside on its target it stops maneuvering and fires rather than circling forever; if the target slips out of its arc or runs, it resumes the chase.
They sail fitted, and they fight fitted. Every NPC warship spawns with random upgrades and abilities — more of both on bigger hulls (a small carries one ability; a large carries a Lesser, a Regular, and a Greater). In a fight the captain actually uses them: burst salvos, venom and chain shot, emergency hull patches, even Bulwark when the hull is hurting. Each use is called out over the ship by its tillerman, so you get a tell and a moment to react.
Ghost riding. Kill the last crewmember of an NPC warship and occasionally — roughly 5% of the time — the now-driverless hull keeps its momentum: its tillerman cries "Ghost riding!" and it drifts on, coming to a stop a random 15–30 seconds later (or sooner if it fetches up against a ship, a player, or the shore). Most of the time, though, a hull whose last crew falls simply goes dead in the water where it sits.

Boarding — the rope and who crosses¶

The boarding rope ([brope) is how you put bodies on an enemy deck. Using it now opens a picker so you choose exactly who crosses:

Myself — just you.
Crew — your installed ship crew.
Followers — your pets and summons.

All three are checked by default (send everything). The tillerman announces the attempt overhead, and a 10-second "Boarding Party" cooldown bar runs before you can try again.

The decision matters because of one rule: an empty deck boards at 100%. If the ship you're boarding has nobody aboard — no players, no crew, no pets — the board always succeeds. The same is true in reverse: if you run off and leave your ship completely empty, anyone who pulls alongside can step aboard and take it for free. Leave a crewman or a pet behind to keep the odds against a boarder.

Once you're on the enemy deck¶

Your crew don't wait to be told. The moment your installed crew share a deck with an enemy ship's crew or captain, they engage on their own — boarding an NPC warship pits your deckhands against theirs without you lifting a finger.

For a coordinated push, say [crewattack: every one of your crew on the deck you're standing on focuses a single target, in a strict order — enemy crew first, then the enemy captain, and the enemy player only once their crew and captain are down. This is deliberate: a crewed player can't be fast-killed out from behind their deckhands — you have to clear the deck first. (3-second cooldown.)

A boarded ship can't sail¶

The moment any hostile stands on a hull — a boarder who crossed over, an enemy crew — that ship loses its engines. It can still turn in place and fire its cannons, but it cannot drive forward or back until the deck is cleared of intruders. This is symmetric: board an enemy and they can't run from you; get boarded yourself and you keep your guns and your steering but can't escape under power until you kill or repel whoever climbed aboard.

Getting back off¶

Say disembark (or use the Vessel menu) to leave a deck. If a friendly ship you command — your own, or a party / guild / alliance hull — is within 12 tiles, you hop straight back onto it (handy for getting off an enemy deck and back to your own ship after a boarding run). If there's no friendly ship in reach, you instead get a 12-tile targeting cursor to step off onto solid ground. From land, say embark (or press EMBARK on the Vessel menu) to board the nearest ship you command.

You can step off a moving ship cleanly now: you land beside where the hull is when you confirm — not the stale tile it had already sailed past. And if you were the last living player aboard, the ship comes to a stop rather than sailing on crewless (installed NPC crew alone don't keep her moving).

Your ship ability hotbar tracks where you are: it opens when you board and hides the moment you step off onto land. Hopping straight from one hull you command to another keeps it up.

Ship Bombs¶

A Ship Bomb is a craftable barrel charge for scuttling hulls and clearing a boarded deck.

Craft: Tinkering, 10 Boards + 2 Greater Explosion Potions.
Arm: double-click it in your pack while standing aboard a ship. It drops to the deck at your feet, locks in place, and starts a 10-second fuse — a countdown ticks over the barrel each second, and it crackles a burning fuse the whole time so everyone nearby can hear it cooking.
Detonation: 300 damage to the ship's hull (the same damage path cannons use, so hull upgrades and sink-credit all apply) plus 75 flat damage — ignoring armor and resists — to every player within 3 tiles, with a heavy gunpowder blast you'll hear across the water. Get clear, or dive off the deck, before it blows.
Defuse: double-click an armed (ticking) bomb to cancel the fuse and pick it up into your pack. Anyone can do this — a quick defender can grab a charge a boarder dropped.
Boat-only. Trying to arm one on land refuses; this is a naval tool.
Stackable. Ship Bombs stack in your pack; arming one peels a single bomb off the stack and leaves the rest.

Repairing your hull¶

A Ship Repair Kit patches a damaged hull at sea.

Craft: Carpentry (also stocked in the Boating tab of the playtest coffer).
Use: double-click it aboard a damaged ship. You lock in place for 5 seconds working the repair, and the hull is restored by 200 when the work finishes — so you can't patch and keep fighting at the same instant; you're committed for the channel. (Get the deck clear before you start, or a boarder can interrupt you the hard way.)
You can't patch a hull that's already sinking (past the point of no return).
Stackable in your pack, like Ship Bombs.
Crew and upgrades that increase how much a kit mends — and how fast — are on the way.

Taking on water¶

A battered hull springs leaks. Each time your hull's HP drops below a threshold — 75%, 50%, and 25% — water floods in and the tillerman cries "Arr! We're taking on water!" (with a flood sound). Each leak springs two puddles: one on the deck and one in the captain's quarters below.

Each puddle slows the ship 10%, automatically — so a single leak (deck + below) is 20% slower, and a hull leaking at all three thresholds wallows badly until you deal with it. The slowdown applies and lifts on its own as puddles appear and are cleared; it never stops the ship, just slows it.
Bail it out: double-click a puddle — on the deck or down in the quarters. You lock in place for 10 seconds while you bail, then that puddle clears and its 10% comes back. (Like the repair kit, you're committed for the channel — clear the deck of boarders first.) Bail both the deck and the below-deck puddle to get the full speed back.
Watch the count on your buff bar. While the hull is flooding, a "Taking On Water" debuff sits on your buff bar showing how many leaks are open and the total slow — so the whole crew can see how many puddles still need bailing. It updates as leaks spring and are bailed, and clears the moment the last one is gone.
A given leak won't double up: once a puddle is present for the 75% (or 50%, or 25%) threshold, re-crossing that line won't add another. But if you bail it and the hull dips past that mark again, it leaks anew.
Puddles are flood water, not cargo — they vanish if the ship sinks or you dry-dock it.

Salvage & the Ocean Coffer¶

When you sink — or board and clear — an NPC ship, its hatch holds the prize: a crew member (a Lookout, a Gunner, and so on) or a ship upgrade deed, a stack of doubloons, and a few crew training logbooks. The hatch is locked until every enemy crew aboard is dead, so the loot is earned by taking the deck, not by sailing past — see Crew training logbooks below.

The Ocean Coffer is the one home for your whole deed collection — every crew member, ship upgrade, ability, and paint you ever salvage, stored in a single place per character. (It is the only deed-storage chest; there's no separate "sea chest" to keep track of.) It accepts crew-member, ship-upgrade, ability, ship/cannon-paint, and whole-ship (loaded-boat) deeds and rejects everything else — and double-clicking it opens a management menu, not a plain bag:

Add a deed by dropping it onto the coffer — it files itself in and the menu updates live. Or left-click the coffer and pick "Add all in backpack" to sweep every naval deed in your pack (pouches included) into it in one go.
Remove a deed with its Withdraw button to pull it back to your pack when you're ready to install it (or Discard to destroy one you don't want). A withdrawn deed comes back exactly as it went in — same rarity, rolls, and (for crew) level and XP.
Store a whole ship. Drop a loaded-ship deed in and the coffer holds the entire vessel — hull, hull HP, and the crew (with their levels) and upgrades installed on her. Her card shows the hull, HP, crew/upgrade counts and a paint swatch; Withdraw hands the deed back so you can re-launch her exactly as she was.
Browse with filters along the top: the KIND picker covers crew, upgrades, abilities by tier (Lesser / Regular / Greater), Ship Paint / Sail Paint / Cannon Paint, and Ship (whole stored vessels); further filters narrow by slot / role, by minimum rarity (e.g. Rare and up), and a search box. Sort by newest, by rarity, by name, or by best roll — so finding "my strongest Sailcloth", "all my Greater abilities", or "that Royal Purple hull paint" is one or two clicks. Paint rows show a colour swatch so you can pick by eye.
Every entry shows its slot/role, the rarity in words (and colour), its rolled bonuses, and the crew member's level. Rarity (the colour + word) is the quality signal — higher tiers simply carry stronger rolls.
The list is paginated, so a veteran with hundreds — even thousands — of deeds browses smoothly with no cap to worry about.

It's the home port for the fleet you're building out of the ships you sink — collect, sort, trade, and pull out the right crew and upgrades for whatever hull you're fitting.

Your rolls are locked in

A deed's stats are rolled once when it drops and never change — they're safe whether the deed is in the coffer, in your pack or bank, on a vendor, or mid-trade. (There's no point holding a deed hoping it re-rolls into something better; it won't.)

Crew training logbooks¶

Crew you install on your ship earn XP as you fight at sea, and you advance them a level by spending crew training logbooks and doubloons.

See it on the CREW tab. Your boat menu's CREW tab shows each crew's level, a live XP bar, and the mastery they grant. When a crew's bar is full, a LEVEL UP button appears right on their card — it spends the listed logbooks + doubloons and ranks them up on the spot. This is the main place to read who's leveled and who's ready to train.
One logbook, any crew. There's a single crew training logbook resource — it trains any crew role. (Older role-specific logbooks you may already be holding still work; they all count the same now, one-for-one.)
Where they come from. Logbooks drop in the locked hatch of NPC ships — clear the deck of every enemy crew, then open the hatch to claim them (along with the deed prize and doubloons).
The Salty Seadog also trains crew. Standing aboard your ship, the Salty Seadog NPC offers the same training if you prefer.

Crew slots — any crew, any slot, and they stack¶

Your ship has a set number of crew slots, decided by her hull size:

Hull	Crew slots
Small	3
Medium	4
Large	5

The slots are generic — put any crew type in any slot, and you can carry more than one of the same type. A crew member's effect comes from the member, not the slot, so loading up on one kind stacks: four Carpenters mend your hull about four times as fast; stacked Surgeons heal your deck crew faster; stacked Captains pile on more Take the Helm speed; and so on for every role. That's how you build a flavour boat — a dedicated repair tug, a gun-heavy raider, a fast scout — instead of one of each.

To fit a crew, stand aboard a ship you own and double-click a crew deed (or use SIGN CREW at a Dockmaster). It drops into the next open slot; when every slot is full you must dismiss someone first. Dismiss a specific crew from the CREW tab of the boat menu (the deed comes back to your pack with its level and rolls intact).

Crew outfitting — dress your crew¶

Dress your crew in real clothing, from the Dockmaster. Outfits are set up by crew slot and apply to whatever ship you launch — set them once, and every boat you sail crews up in your chosen look.

How it works. At any Dockmaster, click CREW OUTFITS to open your wardrobe. You get one outfit slot per crew position (up to 5, for the largest hull). Press DRESS/EDIT on a slot and a fitting paperdoll opens beside you (drag it aside if it lands behind the menu). Drag clothing or armor from your pack straight onto it, exactly like dressing yourself; drag a piece off to take it back. That becomes the outfit for that crew slot. Walk away when you are done and the fitting figure disappears.

When you launch a ship, the crew in slot 1 wears outfit 1, slot 2 wears outfit 2, and so on. Set 3 of 5 slots and launch a 5-crew hull → crew 1, 2 and 3 wear your outfits and crew 4 and 5 keep their default look. An empty slot always means "default look."

Any clothing, armor, or weapon — no stats. You can use any wearable — fancy armor, dyed robes, a hat, even a weapon — purely for the look. It never changes a crew's HP, armor, or damage; those come only from the crew's roll and its level (a crew's melee damage is fixed by its rank, so a cosmetic weapon is just for show). Anything that would not show on a crew (a ring, a tool, a potion) is handed straight back to your pack rather than worn — nothing you drag on is ever lost.
One wardrobe, every boat. The outfit slots belong to you, not to one ship — so the same look applies across your whole fleet. Switch a slot any time and your next launch reflects it.
A real investment, never a dupe. You drag the actual item onto the mannequin, so buy or craft the gear you want. The pieces are conserved one-for-one — drag a piece back off the mannequin to reclaim the real item. On the water the crew wear valueless cosmetic copies (they cannot be looted or duplicated).
Show it off. Anyone can double-click one of your crew at sea and hit PAPERDOLL to admire the outfit — it is view-only on the water (you change it at the Dockmaster). Brag away.
Revived crew keep the look. Bring a fallen crew member back on deck and they return wearing their slot's outfit.

Crew leveling & mastery¶

Crew level from 1 to 10. They earn XP by fighting at sea — every cannon hit your ship lands on an enemy hull, and a big bonus each time you sink an NPC ship (scaled by hull size). When a crew's XP bar fills, take them to the Salty Seadog and pay the cost to advance:

Level-up	Logbooks	Doubloons
1 → 2	2	200
… rising to …	…	…
9 → 10	10	1,000

Leveling does two things. First, it scales that crew's rolled bonuses (up to +45% at L10). Second — new — every role gains an intrinsic mastery: a level-scaled bonus in its own domain, so each role levels into something different. Mastery values at level 10 (they grow each level, and stack on top of the crew's rolls):

Role	Mastery at L10
Captain	+10% Speed, +15% Morale
Gunner	+20% Cannon Power, −10% Reload Time
Bosun	+15% Boarding Defense, +15% Morale
Lookout	+10% Cannon Range, +5 Spyglass Range
Surgeon	+15% Morale — and passively heals your deck crew
Carpenter	+15% Hull HP, +20% Repair Rate — and passively mends your hull
Quartermaster	+20% Crew Damage, +15% Boarding Defense

What the support stats do:

Boarding Defense lowers the chance an enemy successfully boards your ship (it never makes a worn-down hull completely unboardable — there's a floor).
Repair Rate makes your Carpenter's passive hull-mend (below) faster.
Morale keeps the crew in fighting spirit: it boosts your crew healing and, on a high-morale ship, even patches the crew up a little on its own (see below).
Crew Damage makes your boarding crew — the deckhands who fight off boarders and throw spears at enemy ships — hit harder. The Quartermaster is the role that leads the fight, buffing every crew member's damage.

You can see the mastery a crew currently grants on its row at the Salty Seadog, and the boat's combined stats on the ship panel.

Passive upkeep (Surgeon & Carpenter)¶

The two support roles also work between the volleys:

Surgeon — every few seconds, patches up your deck crew, healing each of your installed crew a little (more at higher Surgeon level). Keeps your boarding defenders on their feet through a long fight. Morale amplifies this — a high-morale ship heals more, and even a ship without a Surgeon mends its crew a touch if its Morale is high enough.
Carpenter — every few seconds, mends the hull a little — but only once the ship has been out of combat for a spell (no hull damage for ~20s). It is a between-fights recovery, never a mid-battle heal, so it can't drag out a sea fight.

Crew signatures (combat procs)¶

On top of their passive mastery, every combat role has a signature — an effect that fires on its own during a fight (no button to press) and grows stronger every level, from a small nudge at L1 to its full strength at L10. Each one announces itself over your ship when it triggers. The Surgeon and Carpenter signatures are their passive auras above; the other five are:

Role	Signature	When
Captain	Take the Helm — a burst of speed and turn rate	every ~25s in combat
Quartermaster	War Cry — a surge of crew damage	every ~20s in combat
Lookout	Spotter's Call — a window of extra cannon damage	every ~15s in combat
Bosun	Repel Boarders — +crew melee and the ship is harder to board again	the moment your deck is boarded
Gunner	Charged Shot — every 3^rd broadside hits for bonus hull damage	every 3^rd time you fire

A few things worth knowing:

They scale smoothly with level. A level-1 crew already procs — just weakly — and each level adds a little more, up to the cap. There's no "unlocks at level N"; it's a steady climb to maxing at 10.
Better crew hit harder, automatically. A signature stacks on top of that crew's rolled bonuses, so a higher-rarity (better-rolled) crew of the same role procs harder without any extra system — another reason to farm for the good ones.
The periodic ones only fire in a fight. Take the Helm, War Cry and Spotter's Call trigger only while your ship has recently taken or dealt fire — a ship sitting idle on open water stays quiet.

Speed, maneuver, and turning¶

The boat menu's SHIP STATS tab shows two movement numbers, both in tiles/second, and they read the real speed your ship moves at — the same number a live speed check shows. The SPEED figure is live: leave the menu open while you sail and it climbs the instant you pop a speed ability like Quick Tack, drops back when the burst ends, and falls as you take on water and recovers as you bail. (At a dead stop it shows your steady cruising figure — still docked of any water you're carrying — since there's no motion to measure.)

SPEED — your forward cruising speed (full ahead). Smaller hulls are faster: bare base speeds are about Small 5.5 / Medium 5.0 / Large 4.5 t/s, raised from there by Sailcloth speed rolls, speed upgrades, and the Captain's Take-the-Helm burst.
MANEUVER — your drift speed: how fast you slide sideways or sail in reverse. It is always slower than forward — exactly half at zero maneuver (a Large strafes worst of all) — and it climbs toward forward with maneuver rolls from Sailcloth / Rigging and the per-hull craft roll. The row tells you what percentage of your forward speed your drift is.

Because drift and forward are distinct, holding a firing arc by sliding sideways instead of turning the bow is a real, slower trade — a knife-fighter's move. And changing direction is instant now: cut from full-ahead to reverse (or back) without stopping first and your ship settles to the new direction's speed right away, instead of carrying the old speed until you stopped.

Turning has weight too: each hull takes a moment to come about (a Large is the most ponderous), and your MANEUVER stat shaves that turn delay down toward a floor. Rig for maneuver and your ship answers the helm noticeably faster.

Docking your ship¶

You can put a ship away the way you stable a pet, without losing anything about her.

Stand on a ship you own and type [dock.
Her full state is remembered losslessly: every crew member with their level and XP, every installed upgrade, and her exact hull damage.
Reclaim her later from a Dockmaster NPC, who relaunches her exactly as you left her.
When you dock, everyone aboard is set safely ashore beside the Dockmaster — not just you. Any other players on the deck, plus your pets and followers, are moved off with you, so no one is left stranded in the open water where the hull used to be.
Anything in her hold is unloaded at your feet — loot left in the hatch (and loose items on deck) lands on the ground at the dockmaster instead of vanishing with the hull. Pick it up before you walk away.

You can't dock while the ship is moving, while there are hostiles aboard (an enemy player or a boarding creature blocks it — so a ship can't be vanished out from under a boarding party), or while she's sinking.

At the Dockmaster¶

The Dockmaster does more than hold ships:

Inspect and edit a docked ship. Each ship card has an INSPECT button that opens her full boat menu right there in dry-dock — her crew, her upgrades, the paint (ship + cannon), the abilities those fitted upgrades and crew unlock, and her combined ship stats. SIGN CREW and ADD UPGRADE let you install crew and upgrade deeds from your pack onto the docked ship before she ever touches the water; each fitted chip has an × to eject it back to your pack. On the CREW tab you can LEVEL UP (pay logbooks + doubloons), REMOVE (eject the crew back to your pack as a deed), and SWAP crew without launching her first. Upgrades are one-per-kind — fitting a new one of a kind hands the old back (rarity and rolls intact). Crew fill open slots and stack (any type, multiples allowed, up to the hull's slot count), so on a full hull you eject one first. Nothing is ever destroyed. Because abilities come from your fitted upgrades and crew, swapping those is how you change what the ship can do.
Add a boat from your pack. The ADD A BOAT FROM PACK button lets you drop a ship you carry as a deed straight into the fleet list, then launch her. A loaded ship deed re-enters with her whole crew, upgrades, and hull damage intact; a fresh boat deed docks a new empty hull of that size.
Launch where you want. Launching gives you a placement cursor (the same as setting down a ship deed) showing the hull's footprint. Pick a clear stretch of water; if the spot won't fit, you get a "can't place here" notice and simply try again — your docked ship is never consumed by a bad placement.
Retrieve her as a deed. Each docked ship also has a Retrieve button (a two-click confirm — the button turns red and reads CONFIRM? before it fires). Retrieving hands you a loaded ship deed in your pack that carries the whole ship — hull damage, every crew member with their level and XP, and every installed upgrade. You can bank it, store it, or trade it to another player; whoever double-clicks the deed places the fully-fitted ship on the water and becomes her owner. (Launch puts her to sea now; Retrieve lets you carry or hand off the ship instead.)
Find a ship fast. A FIND box at the top filters the fleet by ship, crew, or upgrade name — handy once you keep more than a few hulls in dry-dock.
See each hull's colour. Every fleet card carries a small boat thumbnail tinted to the ship's applied hull paint, so you can spot the right hull in a crowded harbour at a glance — unpainted hulls show natural wood.
Work from up to 18 tiles away. You can open the menu and launch, retrieve, or fit ships from 18 tiles of the Dockmaster — no need to stand right on top of them.

When your ship sinks — salvage & recovery¶

A sunk ship is never lost. When your hull goes down, the whole vessel — every crew member with their level and XP, every upgrade, every installed ability, her hull rolls, her paint and sail lettering, and her name — is preserved as a wreck in your account's salvage ledger. You raise her back, fully intact, from any Dockmaster.

It shows at the Dockmaster. Open any Dockmaster and a WRECKS AWAITING SALVAGE panel sits above your fleet, one card per sunk ship — her name, captain, when she sank, what she carried (crew / upgrades / abilities, all preserved), and the doubloon fee to raise her.
Account-wide. The ledger belongs to your whole account, not one character — so any of your characters can salvage a wreck. Lose a ship on one character, recover her on another.
Survives everything. The salvage record persists across server restarts — and even a world wipe. A ship that took months to build can never quietly disappear because she sank or the world was reset.
Recovering her. Click SALVAGE (a two-click confirm — the button turns red and reads CONFIRM?) and pay the doubloon fee (from pack or bank). She is re-filed straight into your dry-dock fleet at full hull HP, fully fitted exactly as she was — launch her from the same panel. (Her hold cargo is the one thing lost at sea; the ship and everything fitted to her come back.)
Your first 3 salvages are FREE. So a new captain who gets sunk before they've earned any doubloons can still raise their ship and keep sailing. The Dockmaster shows the next recovery as FREE (and how many free salvages you have left); a free salvage is only used when it actually waives a fee (raising a bare hull that costs nothing doesn't burn one). After that, the fee below applies.
The fee scales with what she carried. It's a flat base by hull size (small / medium / large) plus a surcharge for the rarity of every upgrade, ability, and crew aboard — a richly-kitted flagship costs more to raise than a bare hull.

Captain Borgwyn

The old salvage master now just points you to the Dockmaster — all salvage is handled there.

Painting your ship¶

Ship paint is a find, not a command. Pirate captains sometimes drop paint deeds in their loot. There is one palette of named colours — Corsair Red, Doubloon Gold, Forge Bronze, Kraken Green, Lagoon Teal, Abyssal Navy, Cutlass Steel, Royal Purple, Stormfront Slate, Driftwood Grey, Bleached Bone, and Pitch Black — and every colour exists on all three channels: a hull paint, a sail paint, and a cannon paint. So "Royal Purple" is three separate deeds (one per channel), and you collect the ones you want. The hues are chosen so the boat's woodgrain and the canvas folds still shade under the colour rather than going flat. The deed itself is tinted the colour it applies, so you can tell at a glance what is in your pack.

Hull paint recolours the entire vessel — hull, deck, hatch, tillerman, and planks; cannon paint recolours every gun; sail paint dyes the canvas of the sails on its own, so you can fly crimson sails over a black hull (or any pairing you like). Unpainted sails show natural canvas — the hull's colour no longer bleeds onto them, so a black hull keeps white sails until you choose a sail paint.
To apply, stand on a ship you own and double-click the paint deed (or use the boat menu's install cursor). The colour takes effect immediately and the new deed is consumed. If a paint was already on that channel, it comes back to your pack as a deed — repainting never destroys your old colour.
The boat menu's UPGRADES tab shows three paint slots — SHIP, CANNON, and SAIL — each with a colour swatch of the applied hue (matching the real in-game colour). INSTALL fits a deed, REMOVE strips the paint back into a deed you keep. All three slots also show on a dry-docked ship at the Dockmaster's INSPECT view (the sail slot used to be missing there).
Paint survives dry-docking: dock her, relaunch her, and she comes back in her colours — sails included.
Paint is cosmetic only — no stats, no advantage — and trades like any other deed, so a colour you like can be bought, sold, or gifted. The Ocean Coffer stores sail paint alongside your hull and cannon paints (the coffer's KIND filter has a Sail Paint option).

Lettering your sails¶

Beyond colour, you can stencil a short word or initials onto the canvas. Open the SAIL paint slot in the boat menu — the box beside it holds a lettering editor: type a few letters, pick a colour from the swatches, and APPLY. The text renders on the sails when your ship points south or east (the headings where the sail faces you), and like sail paint it survives dry-docking and can be edited from a dry-docked ship too. Cosmetic only.

Lawless waters¶

When both the attacker and the defender are aboard boats, naval PvP is treated as a pirate fantasy and not a notoriety penalty.

While both parties are on boats, attacking another player:

Does not flag the attacker as Criminal (no gray name).
Does not add to the attacker's Kills count.
Does not make the attacker a Murderer (no red name).
Does not call guards. (Even in the unlikely event a guarded region extends out to open water, the guard hail is gated on the same criminal flag.)

Every corpse at sea is lawless too. Any corpse on open water or a ship's deck — a player's, a crew member's, an NPC pirate's — renders grey and is freely lootable by anyone, with no criminal flag and no looting-rights window. Your crew landing the killing blow on an enemy deckhand no longer leaves you a blue corpse you'd flag yourself to plunder: at sea, the prize belongs to whoever takes it.

When the rule applies¶

The rule is evaluated at the moment each attack lands, not at swing-start. A boat-vs-boat duel that drifts ashore mid-fight resolves like this:

If a defender is knocked off a boat and dies on land, vanilla murder rules apply to that final blow — the attacker on a boat killing a defender on land is not lawless, and the kill counts.
If an attacker on a boat hits a defender on a boat with a lethal blow, that hit is lawless even if the boat sinks a second later.

This is intentional: action time equals consequence time.

When the rule does not apply¶

Either party standing on land: vanilla rules apply.
One party on a boat firing on a target on land (e.g. cannon strike at a shoreline NPC or player): vanilla rules apply to the off-boat target.
Self-targeting (firing your own cannon at yourself to scuttle): vanilla rules apply. Lawless does not free-pass self-targeting; you cannot use it to suppress incidental Criminal flags from your own actions.
Same-guild / same-faction allied PvP on boats: is lawless. The rule does not consult guild or alliance status — if both are on boats, it lands.

What this enables¶

Open-water PvP can be played as the pirate-fantasy it should be — chase a treasure-laden merchant ship, board it, kill the crew, take the hold. Your character finishes the engagement with the same Innocent (blue) name they started with, because the open sea is not subject to the same notoriety code that applies in town squares.

How sink credit works¶

Every ship — your own and the NPC pirate vessels prowling the coast — carries a hull hit-point pool. Cannon hits, special abilities, and a few other damage sources whittle it down. When the pool hits zero the ship is lost: she shudders to a stop and settles visibly beneath the waves over a few seconds — sinking step by step amid the bubbles rather than blinking out — and then she's gone for good.

Who gets credit for the sink is decided by the 5-minute contribution rule:

Any player who dealt at least 1 point of hull damage to the victim within the last 5 minutes gets full credit when it sinks.
There's no "tagged" gating, no "majority damage" gating, no last-hit sniping. If you helped, you get credit.
Credit lands on both the player and the ship the player was aboard when they last fired. If you switched ships mid-fight, the most recent hull you were on when you damaged the victim is the one that gets the per-ship credit.

A single victim can credit up to 20 distinct contributors per sink — if more than that pile in, the oldest stamp drops off as new ones come in.

What "fleet sunk a ship!" means in chat¶

When your contribution scores a sink you'll see something like:

Your fleet has sunk a pirate cutter!

…in your combat-log colour. That's an instant confirmation that both your lifetime counter (on your character) and the per-ship counter (on whichever hull you were aboard) just ticked up by one.

If you weren't on a ship when your last shot landed (e.g. firing a dock cannon from shore), the per-ship counter doesn't tick but your personal lifetime counter still does.

What counts as "NPC" vs "Player" ships¶

NPC ships: the kraken-bodied pirate ship-mobs (cutters, frigates, men-of-war), and any captain-piloted real hull whose owner is an NPC. Anything not owned by another player counts as NPC.
Player ships: anything owned by another player. (Your own ship is filtered — you can't credit yourself for scuttling your own hull.)

The categories are tracked separately. If you sink a mixed fleet of NPC pirates and other-player vessels in the same engagement, the per-victim classification determines which counter ticks for each.

The spyglass — seeing, and not being seen¶

Every ship can raise a spyglass ([spyglass while aboard) to scan the horizon for other vessels — name, hull class, bearing, distance, and hull %. Two ship stats shape that game of hide-and-seek, and both show up as candlesticks in your SHIP STATS panel:

Spyglass Range — how far your spyglass reaches. The base is 80 tiles; Spyglass Range rolls (from Rigging upgrades and Lookout crew) push it higher, up to a hard cap of 200 tiles. Every hull is also born with a small ±10 craft roll on this stat, baked in at build time and shown on the STATS candlestick — so two identical builds can see slightly farther or shorter. A long-sighted hull spots trouble — or prey — first.
Profile — how hard you are to spot on someone else's spyglass. A higher Profile is a lower, sneakier silhouette: every point shrinks the range at which enemies pick you out of the haze. Roll it from Figurehead upgrades and Lookout crew, plus a per-hull ±10 craft roll (a negative roll just floors at base — Profile never makes you more visible than a stock hull).

Building stealthy has a real cost. The more Profile you stack, the softer your cannons hit — at the top of the curve a maximum-stealth hull deals only half cannon damage. So a low-profile ship slips past patrols and ambushes stragglers, but it farms NPC fleets far slower than a gunline built for raw firepower. Pick a lane.

Two abilities also touch the spyglass directly: Smokescreen and Ghosting both hide your hull from every spyglass for their duration (you can't fire while Ghosting is up), and the Ocean talent Ghost Sails shaves a few flat tiles off how far others can spot you.

The Ship Stats panel — `[shipstats`¶

Type [shipstats or [boatstats and target any boat (yours, a docked vessel, anyone's — read-only). A small panel opens showing:

The hull's name and owner (if any).
NPC ships sunk — lifetime count of pirate / patrol vessels this hull has helped sink.
Player ships sunk — lifetime count of other-player vessels this hull has helped sink.
Last sink — when the most recent kill landed.
Recent kills — the last 10 kills, newest first, colour-coded green (NPC) or red (player), with the victim's name and date.

The counters travel with the hull — not the owner, not the captain — and they stick to her through dry-docking and salvage: dry-dock your flagship and relaunch her, or raise her from a wreck at the salvage master, and her sink record comes back intact. Only building a brand-new ship from a fresh placement deed gives you a clean slate. Sail one hull a long time to build a real war record.

Inspect any ship from its helm. Double-click a ship's tillerman to open the full Vessel menu for that hull. For a ship you command it's the normal editable menu; for an enemy or NPC vessel it opens read-only — showing that hull's stats and its SHIPS SUNK record (so you can size up a target before you commit) without exposing its owner's controls. The menu always reflects the hull you clicked, so checking an enemy's record from your own deck no longer shows your own ship by mistake.

Per-character lifetime totals¶

Open your Profile panel ([profile) and the lifetime-achievements grid on the front tab now shows two new cards:

NPC SHIPS SUNK — lifetime total across every ship you've ever been aboard when an NPC vessel went down (within the 5-min credit window).
PLAYER SHIPS SUNK — same, but for other-player vessels.

These are character-scoped, not account-scoped. They started at zero on 2026-05-25 — there's no backfill of older sea battles.

Achievements¶

Six new naval achievements (browse them under the NAVAL category in [achievements):

Achievement	What it takes	AP
First Sea Blood	Sink 1 NPC ship	10
Salty Captain	Sink 10 NPC ships	50
Fleet Destroyer	Sink 100 NPC ships	500
Pirate	Sink 1 player ship	50
Dread Pirate	Sink 10 player ships	200
Scourge of the Seven Seas	Sink 50 player ships	1000

Same earn rules as the rest of the achievement system: the second your criteria are met you'll see the credit pop, no claim button required. Already-earned achievements are immune to re-credit.

Edge cases worth knowing¶

Self-scuttling: a player firing cannons at their own hull (intentionally or via collateral) gets no credit. The damage is filtered out of the ledger before it can ever credit.
Guild-mates: there's no friendly-fire filter today. If your guild-mate sinks your ship, they get player-ship-sunk credit. Coordinate.
Ship sinks while you're logged out: if you damaged a victim and then logged out, and the victim sinks within the 5-min window, your lifetime counter still ticks. (The per-ship counter only updates if your hull was still around at sink time.)
Server restart mid-fight: contributor stamps are memory-only. A restart between your damage and the sink resets the ledger; you won't get credit for sinks that resolved after a restart you damaged before. Production fights resolve in minutes — this is rarely an issue.
Dock / shore cannon kills: if your last shot landed while you weren't aboard a hull, your lifetime counter ticks but no per-ship counter does. There's no "ghost boat" credit.