## New
- **Player nameplates.** Other captains' ships now fly their player name over the masthead once
you sail close enough — no more guessing which rival is which in a brawl. (NPC ships stay
anonymous.)
- **World map wind arrows and legend.** The full-screen map now draws wind-direction arrows
over any water you've actually sailed through this match, plus an always-visible legend
explaining every marker on the chart.
- **"Hold full!" warning.** Trying to pick up cargo your hold doesn't have room for now pops a
clear warning instead of silently leaving goods behind.
- **Armored Hull upgrade.** A new 2-level shipyard upgrade (300g/600g) that flatly reduces
incoming cannon damage. Chain shot to your sails ignores it — armor plate doesn't stop rope
from fraying.
- **Rum runners.** Pirates and bounty hunters now carry rum in their hold and spill their whole
manifest when you sink them. In Deathmatch, ambient rovers drop rum too, and forts will now
buy it back off you, not just sell it.
- **Deathmatch victory screen shows kills.** The winner screen now ranks Deathmatch by kills
instead of gold, which was never the actual win condition.
## Changes & Balance
- **Schooners cost gold again.** We tried making the schooner free in v0.6.1 — it made the
first upgrade decision in every match a non-decision. Schooners are back to 150 gold in
every mode. Ship choice also moved entirely in-game: there's no more ship picker in the
lobby, everyone starts in the Sloop and buys up from the shipyard once the match is live.
- **The schooner got a full rebuild.** A new hand-modeled hull — long, low, and barely half
the old beam — with ten deck guns behind open-top gunports, a proper bulwark, raked masts,
and all four sails re-cut to the new rig. It's not just a look: the slimmer hull is
genuinely harder to hit, so expect schooner fights to run a little longer while we watch
the balance.
- **Chain shot now also hurts your steering.** Chain shot to the sails already cut your top
speed; it now cuts your turn rate too. A ship with fully shredded sails turns noticeably
sloppier, not just slower.
- **Brigantine square sails show proper billow.** The foresail stack was reading as flat white
panels up close — they now show the same visible camber every other square sail in the fleet
does.
- **Twin Forts' batteries got teeth — and crews.** Fort guns now outrange even a fully
upgraded galleon by 20%, and the old placeholder gun is replaced with a proper
cannon-and-carriage piece at imposing scale, manned by a gun crew that swings with it as
it tracks you.
## Fixes
- **Settings panel collapse: the other half.** v0.6.1 fixed the pause menu's half of this bug,
but the settings sub-panel could still open collapsed in exported builds. The sub-panel now
re-asserts its own layout every time it's shown.
- **Deathmatch can no longer desync from Twin Forts.** Leaving Deathmatch could previously
leave the map stuck on Twin Forts, and nothing stopped a mismatched mode/map combo from being
forced through directly. Both directions are locked together server-side now.
- **Other captains' sail upgrades no longer read stale.** The upgrades readout could show an
out-of-date sail level for another player's ship; it now stays in sync.
- **Fort guns' muzzle flash now fires from the muzzle, not from halfway down the barrel.**