Features & Game Systems

Flotillas Adrift is a free, persistent browser ocean strategy game — a real-time nation simulation about building and running a floating salvage-city. No download, no install, runs in any modern browser (and installs as a PWA if you want it on your home screen).

Salvage. Build. Feed your people. Balance the treasury. Weather the ocean. Negotiate or fight. Record a history worth remembering.

See it instead of reading about it. Explore a fully-built flotilla — no sign-up, nothing saved.

Try the demo →

City-building

Your flotilla is a real place, not an abstract stat sheet — you buy platform (deck space) and infrastructure (housing, capped to your platform) and place improvements across an isometric lattice of docked modules, rendered from what you've actually built and arranged with a drag-to-place editor. Ordinary buildings complete instantly; dedicated defensive improvements queue on a real-time build timer, so hardening your flotilla is a genuine decision, not a panic-buy. Production buildings can be leveled up for more output per copy. Wonders are the one-of-a-kind megastructures — buying one lays the keel, real tides pass before it graduates, and completing one starts a long cooldown before your next. Beyond dragging individual modules, you can pick your flotilla's overall structure shape — Diamond, Square, Hexagon, or Octagon — and the deck re-packs into that footprint, a silhouette other commanders see on your dossier.

Economy & the resource trade web

Every tide you collect a levy and pay bills — civic, military, welfare — against a Laffer-curve tax slider that punishes overreach, treasury interest via Banks, and honest, itemized breakdowns of where every dollar comes from and goes (day-to-day rhythm in the Guide).

Layered on top is an interlocking resource system: 26 base resources plus 11 bonus combinations, each pulling a real economic lever — income, happiness, build cost, military strength, and more. Own a few at founding, connect trade partners for others, and pool enough unique resources to unlock the bonus combos automatically. Two-party exchange deals let you trade directly with other commanders — offers are sent, answered, and settled, never stuck in limbo. Every deal has honest limits: per-transaction caps on how much infrastructure, platform, technology, or labor can change hands, and food/water supply contracts where you set the price — the market, not a formula, decides what a tide of provisions is worth.

Committed to the wrong build? Infrastructure, platform, and technology can be sold back to the market — at a steep 20% salvage rate, never more than half your stock at once, and if the sale unhouses citizens they don't trickle away: they leave in full on the next tide. Reshaping your flotilla is always possible, never free.

The treasury can borrow, too: float a war bond against future levies for instant cash, paid back as a coupon out of every tide's bills until maturity — several series trade off term, rate, and size, and stay issuable even while bill-locked, a real escape hatch (details in the Guide). Bill-lock itself heals on its own, chipping away old arrears on a net-positive tide, and new flotillas get a temporary founding relief package — extra income, cheaper platform and infrastructure upkeep — that fades as the colony grows, so early over-building doesn't sink you before you find your feet (Guide).

Population & health

Citizens, assimilating workers, slaves, disabled veterans, and prisoners of war are tracked as distinct groups with their own rations and fates. Food and water must keep pace with population or people starve; a shared infirmary bed pool triages the wounded first, and disease outbreaks are a genuine crisis, not a background number (thresholds in the Guide). Government, religion, family policy, immigration, labor, and conscription all shape birth rate, morale, and manpower in real, opposing ways — there's no single dominant strategy.

Every flotilla begins the same way: the command deck shelters the founding hundred (no flotilla ever falls below 100 souls), and over the first fifteen tides roughly two hundred drifters find their way to your new banner in small, irregular waves — each arriving with its own story, from kelp-blight refugees to a lone midwife and her daughter. Infrastructure houses the growth that follows: births, immigration, and whoever the tide brings next.

Misery has real teeth: a living Bilge Rats crime system tracks a "heat" level that rises with overcrowding, ration shortages, unpaid bills, and unhappiness, falling under whichever Justice Doctrine you fund — unmanaged, it produces real incidents, from a skimmed levy to a torched infrastructure section. High-pressure industry pushes back too: Industrial Accidents roll a small chance against any over-leveled production line, traded off against Govern's Safety Standards spend, and a severe one escalates into a real decision — flood the line, fight it, or seal it off.

Sustained deep unhappiness fills a separate, slower Unrest Ladder: a passive warning, then a real blocking strike (concede, break it by force, or wait out a stoppage), and — ignored long enough — a mutiny: a ground battle against your own militia, followed by a judgment on the captured ringleader. Recovery is fast once morale turns, and a new flotilla's Safe Harbor window shields it entirely.

Military & war

Combat is fought by the forces you actually commit, not your whole standing army. Ground assaults run raid / siege / overrun postures against a defender's fortifications and militia; standoff strikes cover helicopters, drone swarms, naval battles, submarines, and nuclear torpedoes, each with its own defenses and cooldowns. Wars are opt-in, bounded to a strength-ratio "war band" so you can't be blindsided by a mismatched opponent, and run a short, fixed campaign rather than dragging on (odds and timers in the Guide).

Ground battles take prisoners; what you do with them — ransom, swap, execution, enslavement, or parole — feeds a lifetime infamy score other commanders can see, and defenders fight harder against a known butcher. Mines and defensive improvements round out your options before a fight starts.

Submarines add a stealth option to the standoff roster — invisible to radar and anti-air, detectable only by a Sonar Array; detection is all-or-nothing, so a wolfpack's torpedoes land either way but a detected boat pays for it in heavy attrition. Blockade turns the fleet into a siege: run ships past the target's defenses (fail, and lose them for nothing) to establish a cordon taxing food and water every tide — the fleet is off the board while blockading, and the target can fight to break it loose (fleet size, fees, and timers in the Guide).

The living ocean

Random world events punctuate the daily loop: a storm to brace against, a salvage boom to gamble on, a refugee convoy to welcome or turn away, and a pirate fleet demanding tribute or a fight — a real engagement where a raider band sized to your strength crosses your minefield before facing your coastal guns, bunkers, garrison, and War Corvettes. The ocean has moods too: a global weather cycle (calm / chop / squall / fog) affects helicopters, drones, naval defense, and intel freshness, while a slower current-waters cycle drifts every flotilla through named waters, shifting trade, technology, birth-rate, and happiness — steerable for a limited window (see the Guide).

Daily flotsam guarantees something washes up on your deck. Weekly Shoal Season sends part of your population to trawl a shared fishing ground. Monthly, the Leviathan surfaces near you — tribute, harass, or hunt it. Wrecks of the old world are salvageable via real-time expeditions, sometimes yielding an archaeological artifact for your Lore Archive and, with the right wonder, an income bonus. The Harbor Master posts a fresh daily contracts board of small asks for a modest reward — a reason to check in on day 100 as much as day 3 (mechanics in the Guide). None of it's required, but all of it makes the ocean feel alive.

The world also keeps its own memory. The Drowned Meridian is a lore codex written in the voice of the fleet's Archivist — the deep history of the drowned world and the civilization that followed. Its pages unlock by playing, not by reading a wiki: grow past a population milestone, survive an outbreak, sign an alliance, and the Archivist adds the page those deeds earned. A handful of entries are dark, a few are strange, and the final page — reserved for commanders who recover all the rest — recontextualizes something you've been looking at the whole game. No spoilers here.

Alliances, diplomacy & the live world

Flotillas Adrift is a multiplayer game with a deep single-player core. Real players show up on the Radar and Flotillas boards with a LIVE badge and a scoutable country page, and direct player-vs-player war between real commanders is live — declared and fought through the same opt-in, strength-banded rules that govern every war. Stakes are live — a landed attack really costs the defender — and Peace Mode is the opt-out: a Peacenik cannot start a war, and while they can still be attacked, declaring war on one brands the attacker a Pirate and the Peacenik's trade partners help fund their recovery. A real commander's fleet composition is private, so attacking one is a decision made on intelligence rather than arithmetic: their size, wealth, buildings and ground defense are all public, but you need a Recon Sweep before Campaigns will tell you what a strike on their War Corvettes or Helicopters would actually do. Alongside the combat, the social layer is trade, messaging, and alliances — a shared fund, mutual aid, temporary shared improvements, leadership-posted charters, direct messaging, a global news wall with community voting, and full diplomacy. If you'd rather not keep checking in, opt into Signal Flags, a strictly opt-in, at-most-one-per-day push notification when something you set in motion completes.

When two real commanders go to war, the ocean gets to watch. War Correspondents puts a Campaigns in progress list on the News page; opening one shows both cities side by side with a running account of every engagement as it resolves — “a squall pinned their swarm to the deck, nothing flew.” The reports are deliberately redacted: they name what kind of attack it was and how it went, never how many died, what was destroyed, or which posture the attacker chose. Spectating tells you who is fighting and who is winning; it never does your scouting for you.

Tide Seasons give the live ladder a fresh start every couple of months: a named Season scores every commander purely on growth — souls, technology, wonders, artifacts, and (once live PvP carries real stakes) the net dollar value of everything your combat wins and loses against other real commanders. A single fight's two sides always net to zero, so trading wins with a friend scores nobody, and a lost war logs an honest loss. The Flotillas board’s SEASON tab shows the standings — self-reported and labeled a tester-era ladder until a server referee arrives. When a Season closes, the server (not any client) permanently writes its top three into the Hall of Fame, and every podium finisher carries a badge beside their name.

Above the alliance sits a wider allegiance: the Eight Currents. Every flotilla flies one of eight colors — a leaderless sphere of influence with no fund, no charter, and nothing to capture. A Current is simply the live sum of everyone who flies it, arranged on an octagon where each color sits across from its rival. The Compass of Currents on the /currents board draws the whole balance of power at a glance — each sphere sized by its members' combined strength, the strongest holding the sea that's currently in season. Your flag carries a ring in your Current's color everywhere it appears. You can seal a ballot for a new Current during a sealed-ballot window — the 3 days before each new moon — and it stays private until every sealed choice applies at once when the moon turns: a synchronized "turning of the Currents" when the whole map's standings redraw together.

Identity — flags, about pages, and charters

Every flotilla — and every alliance — can carry a real identity: a parametric flag builder (colors, patterns, and crests), an "about" blurb on your public country page, and (for alliances) posted charter documents. Custom uploaded flag images are supported too, human-reviewed before they go live. It's a small thing, but on a real social/ranking layer, a flotilla with a real flag and a real name reads as a real place.

In active development

Ready to command your own flotilla? Try the demo now, no sign-up required.

Try the demo →