How to Play Flotillas Adrift

A real guide, not a marketing page — everything below matches what's actually in the game. Read it before you cast off, or keep it open in another tab while you learn. Fair winds, Commander.

Founding your flotilla

You start with nothing but a name and the will to keep it afloat. Founding asks you for a handful of choices, and every one of them has real, ongoing effects — there's no wrong answer, only a different kind of flotilla:

• Nation & ruler name — how the rest of the ocean knows you, on the World Map, Rankings, and anyone's dossier of you. Choose with that in mind; it's public.
• Government — Federalist (steady, balanced), Republic (elected, trade-friendly), Collective (shared decks, high cohesion), Salvage Junta (strongman, militarized), or Free Port (anything goes, commerce over order). Each shapes income, manpower, birth rate, and morale differently — there's a real doctrine behind each, not just flavor text.
• Religion — Secular (pragmatic, no state faith), Tidewright (engineers' creed — order and care), Saltborn (a hardship cult born to fight the sea), or Deepwake (something woke in the deep, and the divers have seen its lights). Also a real doctrine, not flavor.
• Three rolled resources — your flotilla starts holding three of the ocean's 26 resources at random. Each pulls its own economic lever (income, happiness, build cost, and more — see Economy & the resource web). You get to swap one resource every 30 days if the roll didn't suit you.

Once you've founded, the game shows you exactly what got rolled before you land on your bridge — a "charts drawn" moment, so you know your starting hand before you start spending it.

The daily loop

Flotillas Adrift runs in real time. A tide is one real day — the whole ocean rolls over together at 9 PM Central every day, whether you're online or not. When a tide turns:

• Your levy (tax income) accrues and becomes collectible.
• Your bills (civic upkeep, military upkeep, welfare) post and need paying.
• Population shifts — births, deaths, disease, assimilation of workers into citizens.
• Wars, construction queues, training queues, and the ocean's own cycles (weather, waters, flotsam, shoals, the Leviathan) all step forward.

If you fall behind on your own real-world days, the game catches you up the moment you return — every missed tide is simulated in order, not skipped.

Between tides, your Dashboard shows every timer currently running on the flotilla — troop training, construction, mine sowing, a wonder's keel, mothball/recommission transitions, the rudder, expeditions, readiness locks, all of it in one place — and an honest forecast of tomorrow's tide: the projected net, what's about to complete, tomorrow's weather, and your projected population change. No guessing what you'll come back to.

Don't want to keep checking back? Opt into Signal Flags in Settings for at most one push notification a day — when the tide turns or something you set in motion completes. Strictly opt-in, no streaks, no FOMO.

Feeding, watering, housing your people

Every soul aboard eats and drinks once a tide. Fall short and people starve or leave; keep them fed, watered, and comfortably housed and your population — and your happiness score — climbs.

• Food & water come from your open deck's own subsistence catch (population-capped, plus a small surplus per platform section), from built production improvements (kelp farms, fishing nets, canneries, freshwater condensers, cisterns, desalination), and from wonders. Technology scales how much each of those buildings actually produces — the same building yields more once you've researched further.
• Platform is your raw deck space — the ocean footprint you buy to build on. Infrastructure is housing, capped at roughly double your platform (buy more platform to raise your housing ceiling). Both are separate purchases in Build.
• Happiness is the big dial behind almost everything — it's driven by provisioning (abundance vs. shortage is one of the largest single swings), taxes, government/religion doctrine, health, war footing, and more. A happy flotilla grows faster and earns more; a miserable one stagnates.

Growing your city

Beyond food and water, three levers grow your flotilla's power over time:

• Technology — bought with cash, technology scales production across the board (your provisioning buildings put out more per copy as you climb) and factors into combat and defense math too.
• Improvements — ordinary buildings: economy, housing, and defensive structures. Most build instantly once purchased; the handful of dedicated defensive improvements (coastal guns, bunkers, radar, sonar, and similar) queue on a real-time build timer instead — no panic-building hardened defenses the moment a war breaks out. Six of the food/water production buildings can also be leveled up (1–10) for more output per copy, gated behind population and infrastructure milestones.
• Wonders — the big one-of-a-kind megastructures. Buying one lays the keel: it takes several real tides to finish building before its effects, tile, and any expiry clock actually start, and once it's complete there's a long real cooldown before you can start your next wonder — so wonders are a deliberate, spaced-out commitment, not something you stack.
• First Orders — new flotillas get a short rewarded checklist on the Dashboard (lay platform, build your first improvement, collect your first levy, and so on) that pays out real starting cash as you complete each one. It only shows up for genuinely new flotillas.
• Voyage Orders — once First Orders wraps up, the Dashboard card picks up a second act: six themed chains (a first campaign, a real supply surplus, your first wonder, a trade union, a standing corps, and reaching out to the wider ocean) that each walk you through a handful of sequential, real objectives with their own cash rewards — the game's way of introducing systems that would otherwise only come up by accident over your first few weeks. Existing flotillas that already know the ropes never see it.

The ocean's moods

The ocean isn't a static map — it has its own weather and its own wildlife, and every flotilla out there rides the same one, at the same time. None of it requires you to do anything; it's daily-life texture that occasionally hands you a decision.

Weather fronts

Every day the whole ocean shares one of four weather states — calm, chop, squall, or fog — the same for every player, so nobody's weather-lucky. Squalls blunt helicopters and ground drone swarms outright, and add a small toll to seaborne assaults crossing that day; fog degrades naval defense and blurs how fresh your intel on a rival reads. Deck catch (your food/water production) also varies a little with the front. Check the forecast strip before you commit to anything weather-sensitive.

The current waters

Separately, every flotilla drifts through a slow global cycle of eight named ocean waters — the Rustgyre, Coldmarch Strait, the Long Fetch, Glasswater Sound, the Salt Meridian, the Slackwater, the Deepwake, and Bloomreach — each lasting about ten tides before the tide carries everyone into the next. Every water gives something and costs something (trade income, tech-buy cost, birth rate, happiness, pirate/refugee/salvage-boom odds, even salvage-expedition yield) — there's no strict best water. You can pay a fee and wait out a real-time rudder turn to steer yourself into a specific water early for one cycle, then you drift back onto the shared clock.

Flotsam & message bottles

A guaranteed daily pickup — the tide always brings something to your deck: cash, a temporary resource-crate buff, or a message-in-a-bottle bit of lore. Miss a few days and you're never penalized; coming back after a gap just gives you one doubled welcome-back drop, not a stockpile.

Shoal Season

A weekly, shared fishing window — a shoal (lean, normal, or rich) appears on the Radar and you can send a detail of your own population out to trawl it for extra catch, optionally escorted against pirates. It's a real, finite pool shared with whoever else joins, and it settles with a "Trawl Log" receipt when the season ends.

The Leviathan

Once a month, something enormous surfaces near a flotilla — privately rolled per player, so it's your own encounter, not a shared spectacle. When it visits, you choose: pay tribute in cash, harass it to relieve some of the food/water toll it's taking, or hunt it outright for a cash reward and a trophy. It always takes a bite out of your food or water flow while it's around; how you respond decides how much.

Wreck expeditions

The wreck of the old world is still down there. Wrecks surface on the Radar as salvage contacts — send a detachment of your own military out to salvage one (real-time, they're away from home and can't defend you while gone) for loot, and sometimes prisoners, sometimes losses. It's optional risk-for-reward, not required progression.

Defending yourself

You don't need a standing army to not be defenseless. A meaningful share of your own population will fight in self-defense as militia even with zero soldiers — a bigger standing army just organizes more of that potential into an actual fighting force. Beyond that:

• Floating mines are a consumable density field, not a wall — they engage inbound raiders (ships, landing craft, infantry) with a chance per unit, scaling with how densely you've sown them, and they drift away unmaintained over time. Laying a new batch queues on a real 24-hour timer, so you can't panic-sow a minefield the day a war starts.
• Defensive improvements (coastal guns, bunkers, radar/intel arrays, the sonar array that specifically defends against nuclear torpedoes) queue on the same no-panic-buy real-time build timer as everything else defensive.
• Safe Harbor — every brand-new flotilla is shielded for its first 15 tides: bad world events are suppressed and disease outbreaks can't start. It gives you real breathing room to get your footing before anyone can meaningfully touch you.

War basics

War is opt-in and bounded — you can't be blindsided by a flotilla wildly stronger or weaker than you, and no war drags on forever:

• War bands. You can only declare on a target within a set strength-ratio band of your own flotilla — not an apex predator, not a helpless minnow. The World Map/Radar sorts every rival (and every live commander) by exactly that gap so you can see who's actually declarable.
• Fixed campaign length. A declared war runs a fixed, short real-time window (a few days), then it's over — no permanent grudge slog. Re-declaring later starts a fresh, rested campaign.
• Ground vs. standoff. Ground assaults (raid/siege/overrun postures, each committing a different share of your army and carrying different risk/reward) are fought deck-to-deck. Standoff strikes — helicopters, drone swarms, naval strikes, and nuclear torpedoes — hit from range with their own separate odds, defenses, and cooldowns. Nuclear torpedoes in particular carry a long real-time production timer before a bought warhead is actually usable, plus their own post-launch cooldowns — nobody panic-nukes on day one of a war.
• Prisoners & infamy. Ground battles can take prisoners. What you do with them — ransom, swap, execute, enslave, or offer parole — feeds a lifetime infamy reputation score. A cruelty-heavy record makes defenders fight harder against you in future battles; parole and freeing slaves are the redemption levers that pull your reputation back the other way. It's a real combat modifier, not just a stat for show.
• The captains remember. Every AI rival has an authored voice and a private grudge ledger — wars declared, battles won or lost, nukes landed, and how you've treated their prisoners all shape their attitude toward you, from cordial to a sworn vendetta. Check a rival's dossier for a read on who you're dealing with before you declare.

Trading and alliances

You don't have to go it alone, and most of the ocean's economy is built around not going it alone:

• Resource routes. You own 3 resources and can connect up to 4 trade partners (3 resources each) — pool enough unique resources together and you start unlocking bonus combo resources with their own effects on top.
• Exchange deals. Two-party trade offers — you send an offer, the other side (AI or a real player) answers it. Declined or expired offers refund automatically; nothing is locked up forever.
• Live commanders. Some of the flotillas you see are real players, not AI — shown with a LIVE badge on the World Map and Rankings, with a real, scoutable country page. They're part of the social layer (trade, messaging, alliances) but not war targets — Flotillas Adrift doesn't force PvP.
• Alliances. Join or found a real multiplayer alliance — a shared treasury, mutual aid, temporary shared improvements, and posted charters/documents for the group's own identity and rules.