Who sails with you, and what you leave behind

These are the crew and legacy systems as designed and proven end to end in the first version. In the rebuild, the people are only beginning to come aboard — the measured figures live on the Status page.

• Crew and survival

  A minimum crew to work the ship at all. Water that kills in three days and food in three weeks. Morale that turns into desertion in port, and mutiny that can cost you a ship — one you can hunt down and take back.

• Mates

  Named officers with the same six skills you have, who grow alongside you and lift the ship only while stationed aboard. They have loyalty, they can be bought, and below a threshold they walk — sometimes with a ship.

• Six skills and the Captain's Chronicle

  Trade, Carpentry, Discipline, Survivalism, Exploration and Infamy — each earned by doing the thing, each with a tree of three branches and a lifetime budget that forces real choices. No respec. Six trees are live.

• Your fleet

  Buy hulls, put mates in command, give orders — follow, hold, sail to. Stances and engagement filters are in, and the boats work real logistics: hands row between decks to man a prize, cargo loads into any hull in reach, and a rail to heave things over the side.

• Nations and allegiance

  Seven crowns own the ports. Pledge yourself at creation, invest at a town hall to flip a port's allegiance, re-pledge at a palace.

• Campaign

  The Portuguese line: an audience with the King, six parallel story arcs gated behind different skills, and per-nation standing that moves with what you do. The exploration arc is the one that carries you south to Australia — a continent this century hasn't charted.

• Dynasty

  Court by gift, marry, raise children who serve aboard as your officers, and on your death hand the ship to an heir who keeps the heirlooms and the skills they actually earned at sea.

• Rescue and passengers

  Pull castaways aboard; they eat your stores and die if the casks run dry, and the Crown pays per man landed alive.

• Sea-stories and epithets

  Nine earned, permanent traits with small perks, and the dockside titles that come with them.

• Exploration

  Your Exploration level is half ports found and half fog burned off the open water. Nothing is handed to you — and because the world is the real Earth, a coastline you half-remember is a coastline you can actually use.

• Treasure hunts

  Map pieces bought as riddles, dug up by camping ashore where you think the answer is. No waypoint markers.

• Curiosities and the grey lady

  Twenty-four collectible valuables, four of them one-of-a-kind, worth little where they were made and dear far from home. A stranger at one port per game runs a hidden ten-errand line for a set of usable curios.