Thank you to everyone playing the demo and sending feedback! This update improves repairs, reputation, and the information available to your captain. We also owe you a catch-up changelog: the second section collects highlights from the updates shipped since the September 17 demo launch, not just changes arriving today.
In this update
- Port repairs now take time instead of instantly restoring your hull. A shipwright still repairs your ship underway when conditions permit.
- Reputation changes can affect related nations through alliances, rivalries, and subject relationships. Port residents can react to naval victories and piracy.
- Added guidance when an enemy first surrenders, explaining how releasing the ship can improve your standing. Pirate encounters have their own guidance.
- Added slim hull and rowing-stamina bars to the top HUD, so crowded waters cannot hide them. Hover for details; HUD readouts also open the relevant ship, ledger, crew, or chart screen.
- Hovering over a ship or settlement flag now identifies its nation.
- Improved mission directions, destination markers, and links from the journal to the chart.
- Opening the captain's menu now saves your voyage and shows the actual save result.
- Fixed overlapping surrender dialogue and incorrect hostility involving colonial defenses and patrols.
- Refined Mediterranean sources of iron, salt, and gunpowder, with accompanying localization updates.
- Added more playtester credits. Thank you!
Catch-up: improvements since demo launch
Starting out and finding your way
- Choose between two captains, with portraits, skills, and home ports, before starting a voyage.
- Improved introductory guidance, fishing and trading tutorials, and the debt-repayment flow.
- Relative keyboard steering is now the default: left and right turn to port and starboard. Pointer and touch steering remain absolute; the control setting is still available.
- Attack choices explain whether an attack would be piracy and warn when a target is significantly stronger.
- Added brief protection after leaving port and clearer provision-range warnings.
Markets and ship information
- Reworked market and loadout layouts to fit more choices, with less wasted space and clearer cargo quantities.
- Fixed clipped text and overlapping elements in ship information, cargo manifests, dialogue, and port screens.
- Clarified loadout bunk capacity, fishing yields, and ship supplies.
- Corrected shipyard material transactions, market accounting, precious-metal pricing, and trade-related reputation exploits.
- Improved trade feedback and positioned money-change popups at the doubloon counter.
Voyages, combat, and stability
- Improved NPC navigation and recovery when routes become invalid or ships stop making progress.
- Optimized port assaults and fire effects, and reduced port-scene loading hitches.
- Fixed quest encounter and save/reload issues.
- Improved explored-chart preservation and recovery for older saves, and repaired inaccessible delivery destinations.
- Fixed portrait layering and water showing through ship hulls.
- Legitimate-port residents no longer advertise pirate-haven trade; haven information is reserved for appropriate missions.
- Fixed repeated protection warnings and stale hails or dialogue targets.
- Hardened many player-reachable error paths so a recoverable layout or interaction problem does not end the voyage.
- Reviewed and improved nautical terminology and interface translations across all supported languages.
Please keep sending feedback, especially if a screen is difficult to read or an encounter behaves unexpectedly.