Ahoy!
Set the studding sails! Course for the Bay of Creativity!
Kirill here, and a very emphatic welcome to you all.
This is our second development diary covering the gameplay side of Patch 2.0. Today, we begin exploring one of its key changes: the new in-game economy.
Unequal Earning Potential
Broadly speaking, there are only three main ways to make money in the game: piracy, trade, and quests. There is also treasure hunting, but I consider that a type of quest: find someone selling a map, buy it, sail to the right place, locate the chest, and get into a fight.
There is a clear divide between these activities, and each has problems of its own.
Piracy means risking your ship and spending resources to capture valuable cargo. The spoils receive a hidden “stolen goods” rating, which experienced players can erase through a warehouse exploit. For newcomers, piracy remains difficult, risky, and not especially profitable.
Trade, on the other hand, consists of shuttle runs along well-known routes with a narrow selection of profitable goods. Again and again. Once you memorize a route such as “coffee: Saint-Pierre to Willemstad,” an incredibly lucrative playstyle becomes little more than watching the Global Map.
Quests occupy the middle ground. They are less profitable than piracy, let alone trade, but also far less repetitive. Players value quests—especially generated ones—primarily as a source of experience rather than money.
The result is an economy where making money simply is not very interesting. There are few meaningful decisions to make, yet the captain’s coffers still need regular replenishment because of…
The Financial Roller Coaster and the Value of Pesos
As the game grew, both income and expenses grew with it. The economy became larger rather than deeper: a captain’s savings came to be measured in millions of pesos, while fleet upkeep climbed into the hundreds of thousands.
A captain’s purse now rises and falls with the tide. One successful trading voyage can bring in several million pesos, only for fleet upkeep, provisions, and supplies to swallow a substantial part of it. Having millions in your pocket does not mean financial security, so experienced players build enormous cash reserves and send yet another convoy between Martinique and Curaçao.
Money really does grow on trees in the Caribbean, but we could do without a jungle quite this impenetrable.
The One Optimal Strategy
In the end, series newcomers struggle to scrape together enough money, while experienced players methodically grind the most profitable route. There may be several ways to earn a living, but the economy keeps steering everyone toward the same answer.
With this overhaul, I want to reduce the grind, make the economy deeper and more demanding, and replace the single optimal strategy with the opportunity to build one of your own.
A port capable of accepting five fluyts’ worth of ebony without missing a beat can probably be found somewhere in Europe. Certainly not in the Caribbean.
Warehouses and port facilities have their limits. Dockworkers do not appear from thin air, warehouses are not bottomless, merchants do not have infinite capital, and demand eventually runs dry.
A wealthy colonial capital may be able to afford another pair of dockside cranes and a spacious warehouse. Even there, however, the best berths, available workers, and expedited paperwork will go first to trusted trading partners—not the first captain to wander into port.
To represent this in the game, we are introducing Market Turnover.
Turnover Limit
Every colony has a Turnover Limit: the volume of goods its market can accept or release without sharp changes in price. This mechanic applies only to colonial, European, and Crown goods. No one will stop you from buying another thousand units of provisions.
One part of this limit reflects the colony’s own capabilities. The other determines how much warehouse space, capital, and working time the colony is prepared to allocate to a particular captain.
The calculation takes into account:
- the colony’s size and importance;
- the class and specialization of your ship, as well as the size of your squadron;
- your relations with the nation that controls the colony;
- your Commerce skill;
- the captain’s Local Trade Reputation;
- the effects of perks, Seasons, and a Trade License;
- deposits and businesses owned in the colony.
Together, these factors determine the captain’s standing as a trader. The stronger your ties to the city and the better your relations with its nation, the more time, attention, and warehouse space the locals are prepared to offer you.
It pays to look like a merchant and act like one. A captain who has done business in the city for years, keeps money with local usurers, and owns local businesses will be trusted with far greater turnover than a stranger who suddenly sails into the harbor aboard a cannon-laden brig.
Market Load
Buying and selling increase Market Load equally: the colony needs time both to distribute incoming cargo and to replenish the stocks you bought out.
Market Load falls gradually as goods spread through the shops, warehouses clear, and demand returns. This is not a rigid counter that resets at the start of a new day; perks and other bonuses can accelerate Market Recovery.
Local Trade Reputation
If a transaction remains within your Turnover Limit, it goes through at normal prices. Better yet, part of that turnover strengthens your Local Trade Reputation.
If you are a familiar face in port and avoid distorting the local market, the city begins to regard you as a reliable partner. Warehouse owners, customs officers, and usurers remember your name. The next time you arrive, more dockworkers, cranes, and warehouse space are made available to you. In this way, favorite colonies begin to feel like home, while the connections you have built remain visible on the Global Map.
You can exceed the Turnover Limit, but the terms of the deal will deteriorate.
A few crates of mahogany will hardly crash the market of an entire colony, but a suspicious captain aboard a freshly painted sloop is bound to raise questions. While trade volumes remain modest, the Turnover Limit primarily reflects trust: merchants are reluctant to reserve warehouse space for an unknown trader, round up dockworkers on their behalf, or risk large sums of money. Every doubt and additional expense is priced into the deal.
Once large merchant ships enter the picture, the scale of the transaction itself begins to matter. Selling an enormous shipment floods the market and drives buying prices down, while buying in bulk creates shortages and pushes selling prices up. The greater the Market Overload, the stronger the Price Pressure.
Market Overload costs more than pesos. Regularly abusing the locals’ trust, turning the market upside down, and leaving merchants to deal with the consequences will damage your Local Trade Reputation—and can even drive it below zero.
What Will This Change?
Planning a trade route will now require you to consider not only prices, but also available turnover, current Market Load, and your reputation in each colony.
You will no longer be able to sail endlessly between two ports carrying the same goods. Available turnover will quickly run out, the market will become overloaded, and your profits will begin to melt away. You will have to give the colony time to recover, switch to another cargo, or continue on to a different port.
Spoils of war will also require more careful distribution. An unknown combat captain with no local connections will not be able to unload the spoils of an entire convoy at a single shop in one visit and walk away with a handsome profit. The cargo will have to be spread among several colonies, or the captain will need to cultivate relationships with selected ports in advance.
Routes spanning four or five colonies will become a natural part of trade, but they will not turn into another mandatory chain for everyone to follow. One captain may rely on businesses, another on national connections and licenses, while a third prepares a network of familiar ports. Instead of memorizing one perfect route, players will build trading systems of their own.
Trade will gain meaningful progression. As the protagonist grows, so will their turnover, connections, and opportunities. Businesses, Seasons, national relations, and trade-related perks will no longer exist in parallel; they will work together as parts of a broader economic strategy.
And the endless stream of coffee from the plantations of Martinique to Willemstad will finally need to be mixed with something else.
To make the new economy work, we had to fundamentally overhaul the way goods are handled.
Previously, cargo in the hold technically had no provenance. Whether you bought it, found it, or seized it in battle, the game remembered only a hidden “stolen goods” rating—one that experienced players could erase without much difficulty through a warehouse exploit.
Capture 300 units of coffee and mix them with 700 purchased units, and you end up with a thousand units of coffee carrying a “stolen goods” rating of 0.3. You must now live with this knowledge.
In Patch 2.0, that rating will be gone. Instead, the game will track the provenance and trading history of every batch: where and how it was obtained and, for purchased goods, how much the player originally paid.
At first glance, this may seem like a purely technical change. In practice, it allows us to clean up several mechanics at once.
The Commerce skill will now improve only through genuine trade: the player must buy goods and then sell them at a profit. Moving the same batch back and forth between a store, warehouse, and cargo hold will no longer provide endless experience or allow players to abuse merchant ship traits.
Because the game knows the purchase cost of each batch, the interface can display the expected profit from a transaction rather than only the total sale value. Players will immediately see how much they actually earned after accounting for the cost of the goods.
Finally, trading history allows us to collect meaningful statistics: identify the most profitable goods, compare transaction results, and display each player’s most successful routes.
Together with the dynamic economy, which I will discuss in the next diary, this should make trading more engaging, deeper, and more purposeful.
But Goods Provenance is only the foundation. The true stars of this diary are going to be…
There is a special satisfaction in returning to a familiar colony and finding a building that was not there before. Not another piece of scenery, but a real business—built with your money, shaped by your decisions, and earning income on your behalf.
This is the investment system we want to add in Patch 2.0. Your accumulated wealth can be invested directly into the game world instead of disappearing into a magical “receive ten thousand pesos per month” button. That particular role will be filled by secondary sources of income, which I will discuss in the next diary.
Every business physically exists in the chosen colony. It buys raw materials on the local market, manufactures goods, pays wages, reacts to Seasons, and can make a profit or suffer a loss.
From Construction Site to Workshop
Abandoned construction sites will appear in the colonies. Someone once planned to start a business there, but the money ran out before the builders could finish the walls. Now the captain will have an opportunity to complete what they started.
The first step is to buy the plot from the governor. Each additional plot will cost more than the last, so building an industrial empire will require serious investment.
The number of businesses available to the player depends on the Commerce skill, relevant perks, and the captain’s background.
No one will force you to collect the complete set. You can develop several different workshops, cover the Caribbean in bakeries and attempt to defeat hunger single-handedly, or settle for a handful of businesses whose income is enough to maintain your ship. The choice is yours.
Once the land has been purchased, a master craftsman will appear beside the construction site. This is the person who will handle every matter related to the business. Starting production requires money and building materials. You can deliver them yourself or purchase them locally at a substantial markup if the captain is too busy to haul bricks.
Construction and upgrades take time, during which the business remains idle. Choosing the right moment to expand will therefore matter.
Four Types of Business
Once construction is complete, you must decide what the new workshop will produce.
Each business manufactures goods of local importance. This is not a plantation or a cannon foundry: you are tied to local markets and must find a place within the economy of a specific colony.
There are four options:
- the weaving workshop buys cotton and produces clothes;
- the bakery buys wheat and bakes bread;
- the carpentry workshop buys planks and produces fittings;
- the cigar workshop buys tobacco and rolls cigars. Yes, cigars already existed in the 17th century. The Spanish first adopted the practice of rolling them by hand from the Indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, while the fashion reached Europe only after airtight boxes appeared.
This is the basic production line with which every business begins. Later, you can open a second production line beside the workshop and furnish living quarters with storage chests upstairs—a small home of your own in any colony.
For its additional production line, each workshop chooses one of two specializations: a luxury good or a complementary good. Those are economics terms. My education finally came in handy! Each specialization uses a different raw material and changes the exterior and interior of the business, making every workshop recognizable at a glance.
- the weaving workshop can turn leather into hunting doublets or use sailcloth to produce hammocks and bunks;
- the bakery can use vanilla to bake pastries or paprika to make spicy sauces;
- the carpentry workshop can craft luxury furniture from ebony or turn mahogany into coffers and carved panels;
- the cigar workshop can produce coffee-infused salon cigars or make cider from fruit.
You will be able to change the additional production line, but doing so will be extremely expensive. We want specialization to be an important strategic decision, not a switch that players flip whenever the Season changes.
The business sells its finished goods on the local market automatically. You will not have to collect them by hand, load them into the hold, and carry them around the archipelago. The player controls raw materials, location, and development, while hired workers handle the day-to-day trade.
Not a Magic Chest of Pesos
Every day, a business purchases raw materials, manufactures goods, and sells them at local prices. Part of the profit is set aside for the owner, while the rest replenishes the working capital used to pay for raw materials, wages, and difficult periods.
If those funds run dry, production stops until the captain delivers raw materials or restarts the business.
You cannot freely bury an operating business under millions of pesos; otherwise, any mistake could be corrected through the brute force of the captain’s purse. You can, however, deliver raw materials—buying them cheaply in other colonies, acquiring them as spoils, or drawing them from your own stockpiles.
The business remains an independent participant in the economy, but the captain can always intervene in a crisis or help it build momentum more quickly.
The Right Place
The most important decision is made before construction even begins.
A bakery in a colony with cheap wheat can become a reliable source of income. The same bakery in a colony forced to import wheat at ruinous prices will struggle to survive every day. A cigar workshop beside tobacco plantations is in a far better position than an identical workshop on an island where tobacco is considered an expensive foreign luxury.
Profit depends on:
- local raw material prices;
- the current Season;
- the chosen specialization;
- the business’s level and performance;
- relevant perks;
- the captain’s Local Trade Reputation.
A high Local Trade Reputation allows a business to process larger quantities of raw materials and accumulate more substantial working capital. After all, every business remains part of the economy and depends on a local market capable of absorbing only so many goods. Trading in a favorite colony becomes doubly useful: the player profits from their own routes while creating better conditions for local production.
Seasons, rising raw material prices, and events within the colony can disrupt even a profitable workshop. An established business can weather a difficult period using its accumulated capital, while a newly opened one may grind to a halt. If the colony is sacked, the business will lose part of its funds and need to be restarted.
Business Growth
A business develops as the workshop reaches new working-capital milestones. Progress already earned is never lost.
Upgrades expand the warehouse, working capital, and production capacity, while one of them unlocks the chosen specialization. The building changes along with its statistics, gradually transforming from an abandoned construction site into a fully fledged part of the colony.
A merchant will appear beside an operating business, while the master craftsman will move inside and continue to oversee its development. The business should feel like part of the colony—not a line in an accounting ledger.
A Warehouse of Your Own
Every business comes with a warehouse accessible to the player.
You can deliver raw materials for processing, store captured goods, or simply leave items there for safekeeping. These facilities will replace the old shipyard warehouses, which we plan to remove.
Management Without a Second Job
We do not want to turn Caribbean Legend into a simulator of filling out invoices every day.
The internal operation of each business is automated: the player will not have to monitor prices, wages, and raw material purchases on a daily basis.
You will learn more about this in the next diary.
Businesses solve several problems within the new economy at once.
They turn enormous cash reserves into long-term investments. They create recurring income that depends on the player’s decisions instead of appearing from thin air. They bring trade, Seasons, Local Trade Reputation, businesses, and events within the colonies together into a single system.
Most importantly, money finally leaves its mark on the world.
Previously, dozens of trading voyages left the captain with nothing but a larger number in their purse. Now you will be able to enter a familiar port, walk down the street, and see a bakery, weaving workshop, or cigar workshop that exists because of you.
And if smoke rises from the chimney, workers are carrying crates, and the master craftsman greets the owner with good news, then those millions were not spent in vain.
At the beginning of this diary, I outlined the three main problems with the current economy. We can now sum up how the new systems address them.
Unequal earning potential. We are removing the artificial “stolen goods” rating and beginning to track the true provenance of every batch. Traders gain experience only from genuine, profitable transactions. Pirates no longer need to launder their spoils through a warehouse, but selling large shipments requires finding buyers and building a distribution network. Cargo delivery and merchant escort quests also strengthen the captain’s position in the local market, allowing different activities to contribute to the same economic progression.
The financial roller coaster and the value of pesos. Market Turnover curbs excess wealth: endlessly printing millions on a single route will no longer be possible. Businesses, bank deposits, and other recurring income sources will soften the sudden emptiness left behind by major expenses. Accumulated wealth ceases to be a dead cash reserve and becomes capital that works for the player and leaves its mark on the world.
The one optimal strategy. The Turnover Limit, Market Load, Local Trade Reputation, Goods Provenance, Seasons, and businesses pull the economy in different directions. One captain builds long trading chains, another develops favorite colonies, and a third distributes spoils among familiar ports. Instead of memorizing one correct route, players receive a set of interconnected systems from which they can build a strategy of their own.
See you in the diaries to come!
What we do — we do for you :jollyr:
A little bit of extra material — new New Game screen