World
a charted corner, and thousands of islands still in the fog
The Shallows
The Shallows is the starter archipelago — four ports, always visible on the map, with idle sailing between them. Each port has a Market, a Tavern (officer recruitment), a Shipyard (upgrades and repairs), and Docks (the skill actions available there).
| Port | Character | Specialty |
|---|---|---|
| Gullport | starter town, tutorial | fishing waters, basic tavern |
| Ironreef | industrial, sooty | salvage fields, shipyard discounts |
| Saltmarsh | swamp traders | cooking ingredients, ration demand |
| The Meridian | wealthy, naval | best tavern (officer pool), gear demand |
Travel between ports takes roughly 10–30 minutes on a Dinghy with no Navigator aboard (current design value — better ships and a hired Navigator shorten it). Because each port has its own specialty, prices form a gradient between them: hauling goods from where they're cheap to where they're wanted is genuinely profitable, which is why Sailing matters and the market actually breathes instead of sitting still.
The Thousand Isles
The Shallows is only the charted corner of a much bigger archipelago. Beyond it lies the Thousand Isles — thousands of islands still in the fog, procedurally generated from hand-tuned templates so exploration never runs dry and charts stay a living, tradeable commodity. Every island that generates rolls a type:
| Type | Share | What's there |
|---|---|---|
| Inhabited | ~15% | Towns with a tavern (fresh officer pools — the reason to visit), NPC quest-givers, and unique NPC vendors. No player market here — trading stays at the main ports so liquidity never fragments; town goods have to be hauled back, which keeps Sailing and cargo relevant. |
| Wild | ~50% | Treasure: rich salvage fields, dig sites, buried caches, rare fishing waters. |
| Feral | ~35% | Wilderness combat: beasts, feral hogs, and the drowned dead — same fiction family as Ghost Ships. Resolved with the ordinary Combat skill; no new skill needed. |
Generation uses seeded templates — size, biome, 2–4 content nodes, and a danger tier set by distance from The Shallows. A handful of hand-crafted landmark islands carry story beats and legendary officer encounters. v0.1 ships with the generator and a modest active radius (hundreds of reachable islands, thousands implied) — the radius widens with future content patches rather than every island being hand-built up front.
Discovery & naming
The first captain to chart an island names it — picked from a filtered wordlist with a generated fallback. The name is permanent and shown to every captain who ever lands there afterward: the strongest free vanity reward in the game, and it costs nothing to hand out.
Charts
An expedition is a long idle action launched from a port — 1h, 4h, or 12h, gated by your Sailing level, ship tier, and available rations. A successful expedition either discovers an island (longer expeditions weight toward deeper, richer tiers) or turns up a partial find — salvage, gold, a flavor event.
Discovering an island yields 1–3 chart copies for it. Consuming a chart grants your character permanent access to that island. Charts are tradeable — the explorer who found the island sells access to the crafter who needs its teak, and that single exchange is the engine of the whole player economy. Fog is tracked per-character, but islands themselves are shared world content: everyone eventually lands on the same map. Repeat expeditions to an already-known island still yield occasional extra chart copies, so supply keeps flowing and price finds a natural level rather than drying up after the first discovery.