October 4 — more helpful battles and smoother navigation

This patch brings the changes made since the previous October 4 build to the full game and demo, with more tutorial guidance and fixes from playtester reports.

Learn the ropes

• The sailing tutorial explains crew count as part of its HUD walkthrough.
• Each defeated practice canoe gets its own short tip: ramming with your bow, deck fire from archers, crossbowmen and arquebusiers, then completing the encounter.
• Deck fire uses the same combat rules as a voyage. Practice keeps your own crew safe, and the canoes sink rather than surrender.
• Options includes a confirmed reset of onboarding reminders. It leaves your voyage untouched; you can still replay the sailing tutorial whenever you like.

Historical battles

• Inspect HUD readouts with mouse, touch or controller tooltips.
• Your flagship has five times its usual hull strength, giving you more room to manoeuvre. Other ships keep their normal strength.
• Mediterranean galleys and galleasses take 25% less self-damage in bow collisions; turtle ships take 50% less. These protections also apply in voyages and duels.

Navigation, performance and reliability

• Visible NPC ships use local sailing, wind, tacking, channel and river movement. Offscreen routes resume from their actual departure position, not an old estimate.
• River-mouth transitions retain their rail until completion; stale route snapshots cannot incorrectly finish a waypoint or dock a visible ship.
• Reduced replacement-chart river work, temporary curve-probe allocations and first-time animated-flag preparation, preserving flag pixels, outlines and wind poses. These are CPU-cost improvements, not a promise of a particular frame rate on every machine.
• Removed repeated authority-ledger validation from political score lookups.
• Fixed overlapping money-change notifications and a missing port-recovery icon.
• A failed voyage archive preserves the existing save and reports its original error.

Text and layout

• Bitmap fonts use authored integer cell advances rather than platform-dependent shaping metrics. Default text remains pixel-perfect; High legibility stays smooth.
• Long realm names, shipyard document categories and whale waypoints fit more reliably.
• Reviewed campaign, nautical and institution translations, corrected composed trade labels, and included external mountain-discovery names in every supported language.
• Strengthened diagnostics for internal text reaching the screen and numbers displayed with more than two decimal places.

Thank you to everyone testing the game and reporting these issues!