Voyages
one captain, one plan, no skill sheet underneath it
There's no Fishing bar or Combat level ticking up in the background. IdlePiracy dropped the old skill-and-XP system entirely — progression is diegetic: your ship (bigger hulls reach farther waters and carry more), your standing at each port and island (trust, earned by trading and visiting, not bought), and your officers (tavern hires who make you meaningfully better at one lane). Everything you used to read off a skill level is now read off one of those three.
The voyage: one committed action
A voyage is a single plan of up to twelve legs. Each leg picks a destination and a focus — what the crew spends that leg doing. Commit the whole plan and it resolves leg by leg, on its own clock, whether or not you're watching. Checking your character is the collect mechanic: any read materializes whatever's finished since you last looked.
| Focus | What the crew does |
|---|---|
| fast | Sail there quickly. The baseline leg — get somewhere. |
| ship | Work the ship en route — maintenance and small gains that pay the same as a plain sail. |
| salvage | Work a wreck field along the way — driftwood, scrap iron, sailcloth, and the richer materials wild islands carry. |
| hunt | Seek out one encounter at the destination — a bounty tier, a merchant target, a monster. See Combat. |
| explore | Push into an uncharted ring of the fog instead of a real destination — 1h / 4h / 12h, gated by ship tier. See World. |
fast, ship, and salvage pay the exact same gold-equivalent
value per leg-hour, by design — there's no objectively-best focus to spam, only the one that
suits what you're trying to do on that leg. Odds, ration cost, and any hull risk are shown
before you commit a plan — informed gambling, never a mystery box.
Rations: fuel, never a meter
Rations pay for the plan's travel, charged in full up front at queue time — which is what makes a long, multi-leg plan possible without an idle cap eating it. Three hard rules keep this from ever turning into an energy system:
- A gold-free path to rations always exists — you can cook your own from a plain catch, no purchase required.
- Being unable to move is impossible — the cheapest ration grade is never gated behind anything you can't already do.
- Rations are limited by cargo slots, never by a separate meter or timer ticking down while you're away.
Better ration grades exist — provisions, salted and provisions, feast — cooked from better fish plus Saltmarsh spice. They aren't a purchase gate, either: they're unlocked by standing at the port you're provisioning from (Known for the salted grade, Trusted for the feast grade — see Trading), and they're what lets a longer voyage or a tougher hunt-focus leg actually happen.
Hull wear and the idle cap
Your hull only takes damage from a chosen risk — losing a hunt-focus fight, mostly. Nothing decays while you're away; the ship you left is the ship you find. A limping hull (0 current hull) never strands you — it just closes off further risk until you repair at a Shipyard, which is always available, any port, any time.
Every account gets a free idle cap (currently 8 hours of queued work) — but a committed voyage plan is exempt from it: paying rations honestly up front, not a timer, is what makes a multi-day plan possible, so a longer plan never sells content the free tier is supposed to have. See Fairness for how the idle cap fits the never-pay-to-win rulebook.
What the sea gives back
These are the goods a voyage actually produces — the catalog behind the loop, not a level you need to reach first. Anything ties to a real recipe or vendor sale; none of it is gated by a skill any more.
Fish (via salvage-focus legs, cooking, and rigged nets)
Sprat → Mackerel → Herring → Pollock → Cod → Halibut → Swordfish → Leviathan Eel, smallest to biggest. All feed the Galley: the cheap grades cook into plain rations, the bigger fish into the better provision grades.
Salvage
Driftwood, Scrap Iron, and Sailcloth Scraps are the everyday haul; Oak Planks, Iron Fittings, and Canvas the next tier up; Teak, Steel, and Silk Rigging the richest. Wild islands out in the Thousand Isles carry noticeably richer fields than anything in the Shallows — a real reason to sail farther, not just a flavor difference.
Shipwright — the one crafting bench left
Shipwright is still a queueable action in its old shape — the one system the voyage rework left alone. It turns salvage and market goods into:
- The Galley — rations, the provision grades, and cooking. Ungated at the plain grade; standing-gated above it.
- Tools & gear — rods, hooks, spyglasses, toolkits, weapons: equip one for a flat bonus while it's on.
- Ship parts — hull sections, rigging sets, cannon mounts: the big material sink behind every ship-tier upgrade.
- Repair — now a timed action at the Shipyard rather than an instant fix, and it pays Shipwright progress the same way crafting does.
A captain can do a bit of everything solo, but officers make you 15–25% better at whatever you assign them to — specializing and trading beats trying to be self-sufficient. See Officers.