The Compass of Currents
Two octagons sharing one page: the Eight Currents you fly a color for, and the Eight Waters your flotilla actually drifts through — how each works, how they're paired, and how to steer.
The Eight Currents
A Current is a color you fly — Teal, Verdant, Amber, Rust, Crimson, Rose, Violet, or Slate — not a document, an alliance, or a thing anyone leads. There is no captain of a Current and nothing to seize: its entire standing is a live sum over every commander who flies it right now. Pick one at founding, and switch later through the sealed ballot below.
Each Current's board rank is driven by prestige: the total strength of everyone flying that color, plus a heavier weight on the ocean's current Season score (a strong showing near a Season's close moves the board more than the same strength sitting idle). A color with nobody flying it still shows on the board, at zero, rather than disappearing. Alongside prestige, each Current carries a one-word character read off its members' average infamy and how its prestige compares to the rest of the field: Feared once average cruelty crosses a threshold, Prosperous for an above-the-median showing, Rising otherwise, and Empty with nobody flying it at all.
Per the owner's own ruling on this system, the eight colors carry no authored lore or culture of their own — what a Current "is" is entirely the commanders who fly it, not a backstory this page can hand you.
The octagon
The eight Currents sit on a fixed ring in this order: Teal, Verdant, Amber, Rust, Crimson, Rose, Violet, Slate — and the order itself is the geometry. The color directly opposite yours on the ring is your rival face; the two colors beside yours are your neighbors. Every other color is neutral to you. The ring order never changes — reordering it would silently reshuffle every existing rival/neighbor pairing.
Each Current is also paired with one of the Eight Waters below as its home water — a cosmetic pairing (Rust↔the Rustgyre, Teal↔Glasswater Sound, Verdant↔Bloomreach, Violet↔the Deepwake, Slate↔the Slackwater, Amber↔the Salt Meridian, Crimson↔the Long Fetch, Rose↔Coldmarch Strait). Home-water pairing plays no part in who holds a water: whichever Current has the single highest total strength across the whole roster right now is shown holding the water currently active on the global cycle, home pairing or not.
Switching Currents — the sealed ballot
Your founding pick is free and immediate. Changing your Current later — a card on Govern — goes through a sealed ballot, open only in the 3 days before each new moon. Pick a new color during that window and nothing changes yet — your ballot is sealed for the coming moon, and your published color (so every other commander's view of you) stays exactly as it was until the moon actually turns, at which point the change applies for everyone at once. You may re-seal a different choice as many times as you like while the window stays open; only the last one sealed counts. Picking your current color again while a ballot is pending withdraws it instead of doing nothing. One change is allowed per moon — having already changed for the coming moon locks the window until the next one opens.
The window is tied to the real Moon, the same lunar calendar the rest of the Ocean Clock runs on — it is not the last three days of a Gregorian month.
The Eight Waters
Separately from the color you fly, every flotilla in the ocean drifts through one of eight named waters on a single shared, deterministic cycle — everyone in the same water at the same time, the same fairness rule the weather system already uses. The clock advances one step through the cycle every 10 tides, wrapping forever. Every water gives something and takes something — there is no strict best-in-slot water, so steering (below) is always a real trade-off, never a free upgrade.
| Water | Character | Notable pull |
|---|---|---|
| The Rustgyre | A slow gyre thick with sunken hulls | + salvage yield, more booms — income down |
| Coldmarch Strait | A cold strait that chews up convoys | + salvage yield — more pirates, income down |
| The Long Fetch | Open ocean, punishing swells | + salvage yield — more pirates, births down |
| Glasswater Sound | A preternaturally still channel the traders love | + income, fewer pirates — tech costs slightly more |
| The Salt Meridian | The great trade crossroads | + income, cheaper tech — more pirates |
| The Slackwater | Becalmed doldrums | + births, more booms — income down |
| The Deepwake | A black, silent trench current | + births — fewer booms, tech costs more |
| Bloomreach | A bioluminescent bloom current | + happiness — income down slightly |
Every water can also nudge how often storms, pirates, refugee convoys, and salvage booms show up — never the storm weight itself, which stays Weather's own lever.
Steering — Set Course
By default your water is whatever the global clock hands out — the same one everyone else not steering is in. Set Course, on the Radar screen, lets you pay to leave the shared cycle for one water of your choosing: a real-time 48-hour rudder turn, then roughly 10 tides living in the water you picked, before you automatically rejoin the shared clock wherever it's gotten to. A 5-tide cooldown follows before you can set course again.
The fee is a flat base plus a share of your own income — steering costs a wealthy flotilla more than a struggling one, and is capped so it never becomes unaffordable outright. Every course change is recorded in your Drift Ledger, a compact logbook of your recent moves.