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. Want the exact numbers behind a single system, stage by stage? See the Deep Guides.

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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 Radar, Flotillas, and anyone's dossier of you. Choose with that in mind; it's public.
• Government — eight doctrines: Federalist (steady, balanced), Republic (elected, trade-friendly), Collective (shared decks, high cohesion), Salvage Junta (strongman, militarized), Free Port (commerce over order), Technocracy (the enginehall — efficient but sterile), The Admiralty (hereditary fleet command — loyal, legitimate order), or Drift Commune (no captain but the current — radical liberty). Each shapes income, manpower, birth rate, and morale differently — a real doctrine, not flavor text.
• Religion — six faiths: Secular (no state faith), Tidewright (engineers' creed — order and care), Saltborn (a hardship cult born to fight the sea), Deepwake (something woke in the deep), Gilded Wake (fortune favors the trading tide), or Sunwake (a festival faith — joy is the only tribute). Also real doctrines.
• Read the room. Your citizens desire a particular government and faith, and matching it grants a happiness bonus — but sentiment now shifts gradually (citizens warm to, or sour on, a change over ~10 tides, not instantly), and their preference itself drifts over time, telegraphed by murmurs in your feed a few tides ahead. Run a leadership style they don't want for too long and it stops being just a morale dip — the decks start to chafe (unrest). Keep an eye on Govern and adapt.
• 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.

Your first fifteen tides

Safe Harbor isn't just quiet water — it's also a truce with your own crew. Rather than dumping every screen on you at once, your command staff reports aboard one at a time as there's actually something for them to do, and each one opens the part of the flotilla they run. Your First Officer is at your side from the moment you cast off; the rest — your Quartermaster, Chief Engineer, Chief Physician, Harbormaster, Foreign Secretary, Head of Intel, and Fleet Marshal — fall in over those first tides.

• The sidebar shows what's still to come. A tab whose officer hasn't reported yet sits dimmed rather than disappearing — tap it anyway and it'll tell you who you're waiting on.
• "Show me." When an officer arrives, their card offers a short, hands-on walk through the actual controls at their station — not a wall of text to read and dismiss.
• Already know the ropes? "Man all stations," offered on that very first arrival card, skips every introduction at once and reports your whole staff aboard immediately.
• The truce lifts on tide fifteen — the same day Safe Harbor's shelter ends, your Fleet Marshal reports for duty and the last of your stations open.

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, The Bridge 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 under the Harbormaster's station — 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. (These used to sit on the Dashboard; the Dashboard is retired now — The Bridge is home, and the top-level numbers it used to show live on My Flotilla.)

Your command staff weighs in right there on The Bridge: each officer's own station leads with a compact Captain's Priorities read — the one or two things most worth your attention from that department today — a bill-locked treasury, a shortfall at the stores, an outbreak or a crowded infirmary, unrest on the decks, a war underway, a truce about to lift — each one voiced by the officer who owns it (Quartermaster Kestrel on the ledgers, Dr. Ward on the infirmary, and so on), with a button straight to the screen that fixes it. Nothing here is new information you couldn't find elsewhere — it's a roll-up, not a new alarm. Prefer less chatter? Settings → Command Staff lets you dial it down to warnings-and-worse only, or silence it entirely. Those same officers also greet you on their own screens — Medical, Build, Resource Routes, Campaigns, Diplomacy, and (for Head of Intel Ash) the Spy Ops screen — with a one-line read on their department, honoring that same commentary setting. Designed your own captain in the Captain Foundry? Settings → Command Staff lets you import that 256×256 icon to replace the generic captain badge on the Bridge — it stays on your own account's save and is never shown to other commanders.

Your command staff also join you gradually, as their departments start to matter — the First Officer is with you from the first tide, but the Quartermaster, Chief Engineer, Chief Physician, Harbormaster, Head of Intel, Fleet Marshal, and Foreign Secretary each report aboard only once there's real work for them (a shipment to argue over, a patient to treat, a war underway). The first time an officer reports in, you'll see their introduction; from then on, The Bridge — home the moment you sign in — shows every station at a glance — who's aboard with their current read, and who hasn't reported yet. Tap a manned station to open the cards that officer owns — Kestrel's ledgers and provisions, Voren's Harbor Bell/Auction/Contracts, Holt's on-hand forces, and so on; an unmanned station stays dimmed with an honest word on what it's waiting for instead of vanishing.

Every day the Harbor Master also posts a fresh Harbor Master's Contracts board on The Bridge, under his own station — 2 or 3 small, real asks drawn from your flotilla's own current situation (collect the levy, sow some mines, win a battle, field a few more units, and the like), each paying a modest cash reward the moment it's satisfied. There's no streak to keep and no penalty for letting one slide — an unfilled contract simply sinks with the tide and tomorrow brings a new slate.

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. There's also a second, event-driven kind that skips that daily limit entirely: you'll hear the instant you're attacked, a rival declares war on you, or an alliance signals you, with three checkboxes in Settings to pick exactly which of those reach you. Strictly opt-in, no streaks, no FOMO.

The ocean keeps secrets — commanders who see something odd should check Settings.

Brand-new flotillas also get a running head start: while your souls aboard stay under 3,000, a founding relief package boosts your income by up to 20% and discounts your platform + infrastructure upkeep by up to 40% — both strongest at the very start and fading out smoothly as you grow, gone entirely once you cross 3,000 souls aboard, leaving the numbers exactly as they'd be without it. You'll see it called out on the income breakdown and the bills breakdown (both under the Quartermaster's own Bridge station) while it's active; once it fades, those lines simply disappear.

The treasury can also borrow: the Quartermaster's Sovereign Debt card, on the Bridge, floats bonds against your own future levies — instant cash today, a coupon that bleeds out of every tide's bills (its own named line) until the bond matures, then the principal comes due in one lump. Miss a maturity payment and the shortfall folds straight into the same arrears/bill-lock consequence as any other unpaid bill — there's no separate credit score to wreck. (Exact bond series, rates, and early-repayment math are in Command Reference.)

Prefer to delegate the daily chores? Govern's Standing Orders card lets you arm a quartermaster automation deck — auto-pay bills, auto-collect the levy jar, auto-rent surge beds during a crisis, auto-restock the minefield after combat, and auto-renew your chosen healthcare budget tier. Nothing happens silently: every firing writes a feed line and an inbox receipt from "Standing Orders." (Exact per-rule fees are in Command Reference.)

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. Your very first two buildings, Drift Nets and Rain Catchers, are free to run forever (zero upkeep) — build those first with no risk to your treasury.
• Platform is your raw deck space — the ocean footprint you buy to build on. Infrastructure is housing for growth — your command deck already shelters the founding hundred (a flotilla never falls below 100 souls, even stripped of all its infrastructure — and if plague or an overwhelmed infirmary ever cuts that deep, volunteer medics answer the distress call: enough stay aboard to hold the line at 100, the sickness burns out, and the decks get the usual post-outbreak protection), so what you build houses the births and immigrants that come after. Every flotilla can build up to 400 infrastructure for free — no platform required at all. Only once you push housing past that free floor does your ceiling become double whatever platform you own. In other words: don't buy platform until your infrastructure is actually approaching 400 — before that point, more platform does nothing for your housing ceiling. Both are separate purchases in Build. Over-built? Each Expand card also has a sell-back: recoup 20% of the current price, at most half your stock per stat — and if a sale unhouses citizens, they depart in full on the very next tide, so cut housing with your eyes open.
• 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. Watch for a brief overcrowding dip somewhere around 1,700 souls aboard — a stretch where housing can struggle to keep pace and trigger a small wave of emigration; keep building housing ahead of that milestone and it passes without much notice.
• Infirmary beds. Wounded Marines and sick citizens share one bed pool (wounded triaged first, then citizens, workers, slaves, POWs) — My Flotilla's BEDS tile shows exactly what percentage of that pool is in use, right alongside food and water. Anyone in that count is off the working population while they're ill: they pay no levy and turn out for no militia, bed or no bed. Once it crosses 80% full you'll get a dismissible pop-up warning that untreated patients are about to start dying — the same popup returns on your next visit if it's still that crowded, so neglect can't go unnoticed. Expand Hospitals/Quarantine Bays or fund surge beds on the Medical screen to buy headroom back — keep growing bed capacity alongside your population, or a much bigger city outgrowing an unexpanded bed pool becomes a steady source of otherwise-avoidable deaths later on.
• Your founding head start. New flotillas get a real, if temporary, economic cushion for exactly this early period — see "Brand-new flotillas also get a running head start" above — so following the "grow into it" advice above is more forgiving than the raw upkeep numbers alone might suggest.
• Souls Aboard. Your population is more than one number. The "Souls Aboard" census on the Archives page (/growth) breaks the flotilla down into every cohort the simulation actually tracks: free citizens (with children and those currently in uniform called out), bought workers aging toward assimilation on the normal timer (each cohort shows its progress and, when recorded, which rival it was taken from), held prisoners of war by nation, disabled veterans convalescing, who's actually eligible for militia duty, and anyone away from the decks on an expedition, a shoal trawl, or escort duty. War captives — battle-capture spoils and enslaved POWs — are the exception: they stay enslaved on no timer at all until you resolve them (Free, Sell, or Keep/never decide). It's read-only — nothing there changes how the sim runs, it just shows you the real math behind the citizen count on My Flotilla.
• Below decks. Anyone you hold unfree takes a view of how they're treated, and Govern reports it as one flotilla-wide reading. Short rations, an industry-first labour policy, and what the ocean knows of your record pull it down; a welfare-first policy and a doctrine that minds how captives are used pull it back up. It moves slowly — a change is felt over a week, not a tide. Low loyalty costs you two things and only two: unpaid hands work slower, so the labour brings in less, and the bilges get more to work with, so crime pressure rises. Nobody escapes and nobody revolts. Feeding them, easing the labour policy, or freeing them outright are all real ways to move it.

Deck Days & celebrations

Almost every morale lever in the game is a penalty you're avoiding. Deck Days are the exception: the one button that spends money to make the decks genuinely happier, called from Govern. Three to choose from, and they don't do the same job:

Every one of them is a trade, not a purchase: each buys its lift by giving something else up for as long as it runs, and they give up different things — so the right Deck Day depends on what your flotilla can currently afford to lose.

• Feast of the Deep — the biggest morale lift, and the biggest gamble. The galleys eat noticeably harder and the decks are at the tables rather than the winches, so income runs lighter for the whole celebration. On a flotilla already short of food it will deepen the shortage and cost more than it buys. Throw it when the nets are full and the books are healthy.
• Lantern Vigil — a sombre night for everyone the sea has taken, and the only Deck Day that settles real unrest outright. It asks no extra rations and no coin beyond the cost — but a fleet in mourning fights worse, so troop morale drops while it runs. That makes it awkward precisely when it's most tempting: unrest is usually worst in wartime.
• Salvage Fair — the only celebration that pays for itself. Stalls down every walkway mean income runs heavier, not lighter, for the better part of a week. The price is the crowd it draws: strangers, stalls and light fingers push bilge crime up for the whole run, and five tides is a long commitment.

Your state faith keeps some of these days more warmly than others, and a festival its faithful keep earns extra morale. Only one celebration runs at a time, and the decks need a stretch to recover before another can be called — a Deck Day is a decision about timing, not a button to hold down.

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. It's a mid-game lever, not a founding one: tech doesn't grow your population capacity at all, so pouring your first cash into it instead of housing and provisioning is exactly the kind of ahead-of-your-people spending that sinks a new flotilla. Holding technology also costs a daily upkeep, and while it's progressive, like income-tax brackets — your first 50 points are entirely free to hold, the next few hundred stay cheap, and the rate only climbs in real jumps once you cross into the tiers where nuclear torpedoes and beyond unlock — it's still cash better spent elsewhere until your food, water, and housing are solidly ahead of your population. The Technology KPI's detail popup shows exactly what the next point would cost you per tide.
• Improvements — ordinary buildings: economy, housing, and defensive structures. Every improvement type shares ONE module-slot budget with your whole flotilla: you unlock a new module slot every 1,000 souls aboard (citizens, workers, slaves, and prisoners all count), and once you have a free slot you can build any improvement you can afford, in any order — no more waiting for a specific population milestone before a particular building unlocks. Each building type still has its own copy cap and a few still need a prerequisite already standing (a Drydock needs a Harbor, a Mint needs a Bank, and so on), and your treasury is still the real brake — bills scale with what you've built, so over-building ahead of your income is a genuine risk, not just a wait. Drift Nets and Rain Catchers are the exception: two cheap, small starter buildings you can always build without limit and without touching a module slot, and — being the newbie-safe first move — they're free to run (zero upkeep), so "build food and water first" is always safe advice. When your first real module slot opens up, Habitat Decks (around $700,000, +8% population capacity plus a food and water bump) is one of the strongest early picks — unlike a second production building or an income building you can't yet fill, it directly raises how many souls your flotilla can support, buying you room to grow before your next slot even opens. Most improvements 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.
• Arrange Layout — My Flotilla renders your island live: every module and wonder you actually own, scattered across the deck and joined by little walkways, not a stock backdrop. Hit " Arrange Layout" to rework it — drag any platform already on the deck to a new spot, or drag a building out of the palette tray beside the deck (your owned buildings, grouped by category, that aren't currently placed) to drop it in. Anything you buy after your last save sits waiting in that tray until you place it. "⤢ Fill all" drops every owned building back onto an automatic layout in one go, " Clear" empties the deck back down to just your command deck so you can start fresh, and "↺ Reset" abandons your custom layout entirely and returns to the automatic one. You can also pick a STRUCTURE SHAPE for the whole deck — Diamond, Square, Hexagon, or Octagon — which re-packs everything into that footprint. Whatever you save is public: it's exactly what other commanders see when they scout your flotilla's page.
• First Orders — new flotillas get a short rewarded checklist, on the Bridge under the First Officer's own station (feed your founders with Drift Nets & Rain Catchers, build your first improvement, collect your first levy, stand down to DEFCON 5, 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 same Bridge station 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.
• Captain's Almanac — on day 7, day 30, day 100, day 365, and every 365 days after that, the Ship's Chronicler marks the occasion with a letter that pops on screen (not buried in your mail) carrying your real numbers: souls aboard (with the honest change since the last reading, when there's an earlier one on record), wonders standing, campaigns weathered, and the treasury's size. Every letter offers a "Share postcard" button — a small visual recap of your flotilla (flag, island, and stats) you can copy or share as a link, no account needed to view it. The Archives screen keeps a "Snapshot" card showing your most recent letter at a glance, and every letter you've ever reached is re-readable any time from Settings → Guides. (What a veteran flotilla sees the first time this loads is in Command Reference.)
• Ship's Chronicle — the Mortality Ledger's triumphant twin, in the Archives. An auto-written logbook of firsts and feats — a first wonder raised, a war won, a population or technology threshold crossed, an artifact recovered, the Leviathan slain, an alliance joined, a trade settled with another commander, a war bond retired clean, an easter egg found — each logged the moment it happens with the real in-game day. "Share legend card" builds a snapshot of your flotilla's five best feats (flag, island, and a picked highlight per category) you can copy or share as a link. (How a veteran flotilla's backlog gets folded in is in Command Reference.)
• Ship's Commendations — medals struck for how you played, not how big you got (that second thing is the Chronicle's job). Thirteen of them, in three groups: valor (a first engagement won, fifty won, ten enemy submarines sunk, a thousand mines laid, a nuclear torpedo loosed), mercy (a thousand prisoners paroled, five thousand souls freed, five thousand of your own ransomed home, and "Clean Hands" — ten thousand prisoners taken with none executed, starved or enslaved), and standing (every bonus resource held at once, ten war bonds retired clean, trades settled with twenty-five different commanders). Unlike the Chronicle, your wall is public: it shows on your flotilla's page and on any live commander's you scout. Some medals are not compliments — "The Deep Fire" and "The Butcher's Bill" are on the wall too, and everyone can read them. A record, not a recruiting poster.
• Returned from the drift — come back after three or more tides away and the watch officer hands you a log of what happened while you were gone: the levy collected and bills paid, souls born and lost, the dead by cause, and the notable events of the span. It is a briefing, not a prize — nothing is awarded for having been away (the tide already leaves you a little extra flotsam when you return, and that is the whole of it).
• The Drowned Meridian — a lore codex kept by "the Archivist." 25 entries, each unlocked by a real milestone — some proud, some the kind of thing you don't put on a recruiting poster (your first executed prisoner of war opens its own dark page). Pages reveal a page at a time, in the order your own choices earn them; each freshly recovered page pops a short archivist's card on screen when it surfaces (not an inbox note), while a veteran flotilla gets everything it has already earned quietly on the shelf, no fanfare, the same courtesy the Ship's Chronicle extends. Every recovered page stays readable afterward — Settings → Guides → "The Drowned Meridian" keeps the full collection, recovered and still-unrecorded, right alongside Easter Eggs and Message Bottles, so a page is never a one-time read (the deep-link /meridian screen still offers the full one-page-at-a-time archive view).
• Deaths per Tide — the Archives also chart a day-by-day breakdown of who you've lost and why, right above the lifetime Population Loss ledger: disease, an overwhelmed infirmary, starvation, wounded Marines with no bed, a shoal pirate-skim, a bilge incident, a rival's counterattack landing — and now your own attacks, a world-event gamble, and Cast Overboard too. It tracks every cause the lifetime Population Loss ledger does except citizens who simply leave over crowding — that's emigration, not a death, so it's still on the ledger below but left off this chart's bars. (How far back it actually counts is in Command Reference.)
• Treasury Ledger — the Archives also keep a lifetime tally of every dollar that's moved, sorted into five buckets: Earned (levy, interest, rewards), Spent (purchases, upkeep, fees), Won (battle loot, ransoms, covert payoffs), Lost (tribute, misfortune, forced fees), and Found (flotsam, salvage, a good week's catch). Tap a bucket to see its individual sources. (How far back it actually counts is in Command Reference.)
• Captain's Log Overlay — the charts in the Archives pin small icon markers to the day a war was declared or ended, an outbreak began or was contained, a wonder finished construction, a world event resolved, or you joined an alliance — so "what the hell happened on day 210?" has an answer at a glance. A legend row lets you toggle each category on or off; a busy stretch with several markers close together collapses into a tap-to-expand count chip instead of an icon pile-up. (What happens for a flotilla's history before this shipped is in Command Reference.)
• Bilge Rats — a black market grows in the crowded lower decks whether you like it or not. A living crime heat rises with overcrowding, ration shortages, unpaid bills, a large slave/worker population still unassimilated, and general misery — and falls under a funded Justice Doctrine (Govern): lenient and cheap, the standard funded Tide Tribunals, or harsh Press-Gangs (cheapest of the two crackdowns, but conscripts convicts on sight and costs morale). Left to run hot, the bilges occasionally produce a real incident, each with its own honest inbox or feed receipt, never a silent deduction. (The exact incident list is in Command Reference.)
• Industrial Accidents — your leveled production lines (kelp farms, freshwater towers, net lofts, cisterns, desalination plants, canneries) run a small per-tide accident chance once they're upgraded past their base level. An accident knocks that one line down a level (recoverable — buy the upgrade back) and costs a few workers (citizens only if the workforce runs short), always with an honest feed line, a report from the Chief Engineer, and a Ship's Log entry on the Bridge. Buy the risk down on Govern's Safety Standards lever — it appears on Govern once your first line is leveled (the Chief Engineer announces it), since with nothing leveled there's nothing at risk — Rustbucket (no maintenance, highest risk, the default), Standard, Reinforced, or Gold-Plated — a real per-tide bill traded against a real per-tide risk, with the live percentage printed on both the Govern card and each production building's own card on the Build screen. (What a truly severe accident looks like is in Command Reference.)
• The Unrest Ladder — happiness isn't only a multiplier; SUSTAINED deep unhappiness fills a separate, slower meter (Govern shows the live reading beside Bilge heat). Left to run hot it climbs a real ladder — a passive warning, then a real blocking strike, and eventually a mutiny if you ignore it long enough. Recovery is fast once happiness turns around, and Safe Harbor shields a brand-new flotilla from the meter entirely. (The exact strike and mutiny mechanics are in Command Reference.)

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.

World events

On top of weather and the currents, any given tide might hand you a one-off crisis or windfall to react to: a storm to brace against or ride out, a refugee convoy to welcome or turn away, a salvage boom to cash in or gamble on, or a pirate fleet on the horizon. Your Immigration stance (Govern) doesn't just gate the passive daily inflow of open-borders arrivals — it also tilts how often the refugee-convoy event itself shows up: open borders draw noticeably more of them (and a bigger convoy when one does arrive), closed borders turn most away before they're ever a choice at all, so the stance has a felt effect even when your housing is already full.

A pirate fleet isn't a coin flip dressed up in flavor text — paying tribute is always the safe, guaranteed-cost way out, but choosing to man the defenses runs a REAL engagement against your standing defenses: the raider band (sized to your own strength, so it's never a non-event late-game or an unbeatable siege early on) crosses your minefield first, then whatever survives faces your coastal guns, radar pickets, bunkers, garrison, and War Corvettes. A well-defended flotilla can repel a raid with a "0 got through" receipt (plus a little salvage); a bare one takes real, if capped, losses. It's the same defensive building tree "Defending yourself" describes below, given a genuine single-player reason to exist.

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 Radar's week box is a real forecast, not an oracle: today through +3 tides are locked in, but the back half of the week is an outlook with a printed confidence figure — it can shift (or just be wrong) until the day draws close, exactly like the forecast on your phone.

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. Every message bottle you've ever collected stays readable afterward — Settings → Guides → "Message Bottles" keeps the full collection, found and still-adrift, so a bottle's fiction is never a one-time read.

The harbor auction

Once a tide a rust-flecked auctioneer's barge ties up alongside with one lot — a run of hulls, airframes or marine berths at a real discount off what your own yard would charge. Every commander in the ocean is offered the same lot on the same day, and it goes with the barge: pass on it and a different lot comes with the next tide. The discount is genuine, but it buys you a price, never a shortcut — auctioned units go through the ordinary training queue like any other order, so the barge is no help at all on the day a war breaks out. One lot per tide.

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. Outfitting comes in three presets — Light Cutter, Escort Flotilla, Battle Fleet — each committing a percentage of your CURRENT available forces (never a fixed number), so the offer scales honestly whether you're a young flotilla or a standing power; a preset never asks for a unit type you don't own.

A run goes in five beats. Announce — the day's one shared wreck appears on the Radar right at the tide boundary, tier and hazard already visible. Window — you get a fixed send window to outfit and dispatch (12h for a rookie wreck, 18h mid, 24h apex); miss it and it's gone. Outfit — pick a preset, pay the outfitting and dispatch fees up front. Transit — whenever within the window you actually sent, everyone who did resolves together at the exact same moment: window close plus a tier transit delay (3h/5h/8h), so sending on hour one buys you nothing over sending on the last one. Resolution — a single pass where your party and the wreck's own guardian defenses contest it at once, with the biggest committed force taking the largest share of both the loot and the risk. One thing worth knowing going in: the strength band that gates who's even eligible for a given day's wreck is absolute, not relative to you — it's the same band for every commander looking at that one shared object, so seeing your flotilla out of band today is completely normal, not a sign anything's wrong. A different wreck, possibly a different tier, is waiting at the next tide boundary. The full numbers — hazard by tier, the loot-split math, capture rules — live in the Wiki's Salvage Expeditions deep guide.

Win the biggest share of a contested expedition and, alongside the ordinary loot, you have a chance at bringing home an archaeological artifact — a collectible piece of the drowned world, rarer at the deadlier wreck tiers. Every artifact you've ever recovered lives in your Lore Archive (reachable from the Archives page once you've found something, your country page, or Settings → Guides → "Lore Archive" — same recovered-vs-locked grid, right alongside Easter Eggs, Message Bottles, and The Drowned Meridian, so a find is never a one-time popup). Build the Museum of the Drift wonder to put the whole collection on display — it reveals what's still out there to find (locked cards show their rarity, not their name — no spoilers), not just what you own — and its income bonus grows with how many unique artifacts you've recovered (duplicates give you bragging rights, not more money), capped once your collection is deep enough.

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 Marines — 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 does not cover other commanders — Safe Harbor is not a shield from PvP. What actually keeps a brand-new flotilla out of another commander's crosshairs is the same war band every declaration is gated by: nobody many times your size can touch you, because they can't declare on a minnow at all. It gives you real breathing room to get your footing before anyone can meaningfully touch you. The shield isn't just quiet water, either — over those first fifteen tides roughly two hundred drifters find their way to a new banner in small, irregular waves (a longboat of survivors one tide, a whole broken convoy another), each with their own story of why they left the water behind them. Build infrastructure early so the newcomers have somewhere to sleep when they climb aboard.
• The Harbormaster programme. Once Safe Harbor lifts, an established commander can offer a newcomer a berth: a one-time care package, priced off the newcomer's own decks, that leaves the sponsor's treasury and lands in theirs. The newcomer owes nothing in return — no tribute, no obligation, no claim on their flotilla — and the sponsor gains nothing but a pennant on both dossiers and a Harbormaster title that rises as the commanders they raised come into their own. One sponsorship per flotilla, ever; a sponsor can be raising only a couple at a time; and once a newcomer outgrows the programme the pennant becomes an honour rather than a live relationship, so veterans cycle through mentees instead of collecting dependents. If the offer is never taken up, the package comes straight back.
• All of this gets a genuine single-player workout from the pirate-fleet world event (see "The ocean's moods" above) — mines, guns, fortifications, garrison, and War Corvettes all engage a real raider band scaled to your own strength, not an abstract dice roll.

The Tide Council

Once a week the drowned parliament sits. Every commander in the ocean is shown the same shortlist of decrees and gets one vote; whatever carries binds the whole ocean for the following seven tides — including the commanders who voted against it.

• Every decree gives and takes. There are no straight upgrades on the ballot. Faster training comes with heavier bills; more food comes out of the takings; open decks draw more newcomers and more trouble. That is deliberate: if a decree were pure gain everyone would vote for the biggest number and the vote would be arithmetic instead of politics. A builder, a warmonger and a two-week-old flotilla should each look at the same slate and want different things.
• The count is sealed. Nobody can see which way the vote is going until the window shuts — not even by peeking at the data. So there is no bandwagon to jump on, and no reason to hold your vote back to see who is winning. When the term closes every ballot becomes public and anyone can check the arithmetic.
• "Let the water lie" is always on the ballot. If the ocean would rather not be governed this week, it isn't.
• A decree can't win twice running, so no bloc can farm the same policy forever.
• What a decree can and can't touch. Costs, rates, event odds and the mood of your people — never a battle. No vote can change combat odds, strike damage or casualties, because the moment a vote could decide a fight, brigading the Council would stop being about flavour. Magnitudes are deliberately small: a decree is texture, not tactics, and none of them can push a flotilla into a failure state on its own.
• Your Current is your campaign, not your ballot. Today every commander's vote counts the same. Once the ocean is large enough, each Current will get its own decree chosen by its own members — same shared question, eight different answers.

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 Radar sorts every 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.
• Only so many attackers at once. A flotilla can only be under a handful of active wars it didn't itself declare at any one time — a defender already fully engaged is off the target list until one of those campaigns runs its course, so gang-piling on one unlucky commander has a hard floor.
• Peace needs a moment to cool. The same two flotillas can't re-declare on each other the instant a war ends by mutual peace — a short cooldown has to pass first. A war that simply runs out its clock carries no such cooldown; the cooldown is specifically peace's price for an early exit, not a tax on every war.
• A stood-down fleet isn't a target. A commander who's been away long enough — no publish, no orders — stands down as a NEW-war target; anyone already at war with them fights on unaffected, but nobody can open a fresh campaign against a flotilla with nobody home. The moment they're back (any publish or order), they're declarable again immediately.
• 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, submarines, 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, their own post-launch cooldowns, and a hard first-day embargo — no nuclear release until a war's second day, so nobody panic-nukes on declaration day. Every detonation also adds a sliver of global ocean radiation that suppresses everyone's food and water collection until it dissipates — nuclear war poisons the commons, launch by launch.
• Submarines run silent — a submerged torpedo raid that surface radar and anti-air can't see at all. Only a target's Sonar Array and its Patrol Boats can find the wolfpack, and the odds are a straight detection roll, not a partial intercept: found or not, torpedoes already in the water still land their damage. Getting caught costs you boats on the way out (heavy attrition to the surviving hulls, and worse the more patrol boats are out there to hunt them); a clean run costs you nothing. (Unlock and commissioning specifics are in Command Reference.)
• Patrol Boats are the answer to all of the above from the other side of the water — a cheap armed picket you can actually put to sea. Each one adds to your chance of detecting an inbound submarine raid, and adds to how badly a detected wolfpack is mauled trying to leave. A Sonar Array is still by far the better sub-hunter per unit, so pickets complement the building rather than replacing it. They also fight as hulls in a naval battle: an attacker who comes for a flotilla with no warships at all now has something real to sink, and can lose to a big enough picket.
• Blockade is the 4th naval order — a standing siege instead of a one-shot strike. Commit a fleet past the target's shore defenses and, once the cordon holds, it starves the target's food and water production every tide it's up. (Fleet-size requirements, fees, and how it ends are in Command Reference.)
• Dispatches live under Campaigns now. Battle reports (both offense and defense), war-end tallies, and fleet intelligence file under Campaigns’ Dispatches card instead of the Diplomacy inbox — click a thread to expand it and reopen any attached battle report. The Campaigns nav tab carries its own unread-count badge for it, separate from Diplomacy's. Alliance notices (aid receipts, applications, join welcomes) file the same way under an Alliance Dispatches card on the My Alliance page, with its own badge on that nav tab, and covert-ops reports (spy op results, cell exfiltration) file the same way under a Spy Dispatches card on the Spy Ops page — so Diplomacy is left carrying only social correspondence with other commanders.
• War Correspondents — the ocean watches. A war between two live commanders is public. The News page carries a Campaigns in progress list, and 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, and never how many died, what was destroyed, or which posture the attacker chose. Watching a war tells you who is fighting and who is winning, never what a Recon Sweep would have told you.
• 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.
• Prisoner matters settle after the war, not during it. Swap, ransom, execute, enslave, and parole are all locked while you're at war with that flotilla — the Prisoner Exchange tile shows why and re-opens the moment the war ends. Against another real commander, exchanges are consent-based requests, not instant actions. (The exact request/lock rules are in Command Reference.)

War exhaustion

Wars cost more than money and casualties. Every tide your flotilla spends under arms wears the decks down — faster if you're fighting on several fronts at once, faster still when your own wounded are dying for want of beds — and that weariness becomes a real, growing drag on morale. It's capped, so a long war is expensive rather than fatal, and it drains only in peace: sue for peace and you can watch the meter come down within a few tides. A short punitive campaign is nearly free. A permanent war footing is not, which is rather the point. Campaigns shows where you stand and, once the fighting stops, roughly how long the decks need.

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. A route is a two-party proposal — you propose it from a commander's dossier, they accept or decline it from theirs, and either side can end it later. Connecting through a commander who's chosen Peace Mode (a "Peacenik") pays you an extra +10% on that connection's effect.
• Exchange deals. Two-party trade offers — you send an offer and the other side answers it. Declined or expired offers refund automatically; nothing is locked up forever.
• Every flotilla is a real commander. The flotillas you see on the Radar and Flotillas boards are real players, each with a scoutable country page. They're full participants in the multiplayer game: trade, messaging, alliances, and — within your war band — real war, declared and fought through the same opt-in rules (see "War basics" above). PvP stakes are live — a landed attack really costs the defender. Peace Mode is the opt-out: declare Peace and you can no longer start a war. You can still be attacked — the protection is consequence, not a wall — but anyone who declares war on a Peacenik is branded a Pirate, and a Peacenik's trade partners help fund the rebuild.
• What you can — and can't — see about another commander. A commander's fleet is not an open book: their War Corvette, Helicopter, Drone Swarm and Nuclear Torpedo counts are private, visible only to them. Everything else about them stays public, because a dossier is meant to be read — their size, wealth, technology, buildings, government, reputation, and the honest ground defense figure that tells you whether a landing could take their deck. So you can always judge an assault. What you cannot do is plan a strike blind: until you run a Recon Sweep on them (Spy → covert ops), Campaigns’ helicopter, swarm, naval and torpedo previews will say their fleet is unknown rather than guess. A sweep fills them in from what your operatives actually saw — a good estimate of the fleet you last laid eyes on, not a live feed, and it goes stale as they build. Against real players, scouting is no longer optional flavour; it is how you find out what you're shooting at.
• Intercept Comms. Against a real commander, this covert op never hands you a letter to read. What comes back is who they've been writing to and being written by, each letter's subject line and timestamp, and — across the whole intercepted batch — a short fragment of a few words drawn at random from those letters' contents. The letters themselves stay sealed.
• Tide Seasons. A fresh, named two-moon (~59-tide) window on the Flotillas page’s SEASON tab, scored on GROWTH DURING THE SEASON — souls gained, technology gained, wonders completed, artifacts recovered — so a brand-new flotilla can outscore a thousand-day veteran. Your own row opens into a full breakdown of exactly where your points came from. When a Season's window closes, its top three are written permanently into the Hall of Fame, and any commander who's ever podiumed carries a badge next to their name wherever it appears. The current season's name and countdown to the next also show as a chip in the Global News page's header row, with a tap-through popup listing the full cycle.
• Country pages. Every flotilla — yours or another commander's — shares one dossier page with a tabbed layout: Overview, Government, Military, Population, Financial, City, and Guestbook. Only the tabs that actually have something to show for that flotilla appear (your own page skips Government, another commander's skips Population), and the URL remembers which tab you're on. You can also hoist a custom flag image and a commander portrait (Govern → Identity) — both are reviewed by the harbormaster before they appear, and the portrait shows beside your flag on your dossier header.
• Harbor Guestbook. Visit a real commander's flotilla page and carve one line into their mooring post — a small, permanent, dated record of who's stopped by. One line per signer (you can edit yours later, marked "edited"), and the dock's owner can scrub any entry from their own page.
• Reporting and blocking. Every DM thread, country page, and guestbook entry carries "Report" and "Block" buttons next to a real commander's name. Blocking is mutual and immediate — neither of you can DM, sign each other's guestbook, send a sponsorship offer, or admit each other into an alliance while it's in place, and it's reversible any time from the same button. Reporting flags a name, message, flag image, or alliance for the harbormaster's queue — it never needs the other commander to be blocked first, and you can still send a report about someone after you've blocked them.
• 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. Founding costs a charter fee that rises as more alliances exist on the ocean — cheap early on, steeper once the water is crowded. Membership is capped at 25 commanders per alliance; an application to a full alliance just waits — the cap only bites when an officer tries to approve it. Fund aid must go to another commander — leadership can't grant aid to themselves. Alliance mail (aid receipts, application notices, join welcomes) shows up on the My Alliance page itself, not in Diplomacy — and any old alliance mail you've already received stays readable there even after you leave, so nothing you've read is stranded.
• The Eight Currents. The color you picked at founding is your Current — a leaderless sphere of influence above the alliance, shared with everyone else who flies it. There's nothing to run or capture: a Current is simply the live sum of its members. The Currents page (under STANDINGS) shows the Compass of Currents — the eight spheres on an octagon, each sized by its members' combined strength, with the strongest holding whichever sea is currently in season. Your flag flies a ring in your Current's color everywhere it appears, so you can read a commander's allegiance at a glance. You can switch your Current in Govern, but only during a sealed-ballot window — the 3 days before each new moon. Picking a color during the window seals your ballot privately; nobody (not even the standings board) sees your new color until the moon turns, when every sealed ballot applies at once — a "turning of the Currents" at the new moon. You can change or withdraw your sealed pick as many times as you like while the window stays open. Flying a Current also carries soft, capped perks: when the sea drifts into your Current's home water your decks ride that water's swing a touch harder, cooperating within your color pays a little (a resource routed through a same-Current partner earns a small bonus), and the Current that wins a Tide Season sails the next one with a small income tailwind. None of it is strong enough to let one color run away with the sea — they're gravity, not rules.

Everything above is what you need to actually play. Everything below is real and already in the game too — it's just the exact numbers, edge cases, and migration/limitation notes that only matter once you're deep into a campaign. Collapsed by default; open whatever you need.

Economy

Progression & records

City & unrest

War

That's the shape of it — the rest you'll learn by doing. Jump into a fully-built flotilla, no sign-up required.

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