Ship Protection & Repairs

Ammo & the Damage Model is the story of how a ship comes apart. This page is how you keep that from happening to yours. Half of staying alive is never giving the enemy a clean shot — angling your armour, hiding your waterline, shielding your rig — and the other half is working the repair kit and the survival crew so that the damage you do take doesn’t compound into a sinking. Good captains lose far less than they should, and it is almost never luck.

Angle your armour

The most important defensive habit in the game costs nothing: don’t show the enemy a flat, square hull when he has a broadside loaded. A hull turned toward incoming fire presents thicker effective armour, and shots that would have bitten into a square side instead glance off into the sea — the same bounce mechanic that wastes your broadside when you fire on an angled target.

So the fundamental duel is a dance: angle your bow or stern toward him while he fires, then swing parallel to return your own broadside, then angle away again before he reloads. You eat his shot on thick, sloped armour and pay him back when his guns are empty. A captain who just sits broadside-to-broadside trading flat hits is in a damage race he can lose; a captain who angles is taking far less for the same return.

Shield your rig and masts

If the enemy loads chain, he is coming for your sails and masts to take your speed away — and a slowed ship can’t angle, can’t run, and can’t dictate the range. You can shrink the target before he fires:

• Drop to battle sails ([B]) — less canvas exposed means far less for chain to cut, and the rig shrugs off more damage at reduced sail.
• Depower the staysails ([T]) — furls the fore-and-aft sails that chain loves to slice.
• Turn your sails edge-on to his fire — with manual sailing you can orient the yards so the sails present a thin edge to the incoming broadside instead of a broad face, so most chain passes through empty air.

Masts are the harder loss: knock one down and the sail it carried is gone, and masts are slow and conditional to repair (see below). Protecting the rig is mostly about denying the shot in the first place — the full interplay of sail settings, wind, and damage resistance is covered in Battle Sails & Wind Shadows.

Fighting floods and fires

Leaks and fires can sink or destroy a ship whose hull is otherwise sound, and both are fought by the same survival crew. Managing them is a race against the clock.

Leaks and flooding

Waterline hits open leaks, and enough flooding will sink you with your planking and structure still intact. The first defence is to hide your waterline while he fires — a few seconds of anticipation with manual sailing (depowering, squaring the sails) can roll the vulnerable strip of hull away from his guns. If you are leaked anyway:

• Slow down — less speed means less water forced in through the holes.
• Heel the holed side up — leaning the ship can lift below-water leaks clear of the surface so they stop flooding, though it can dip the other side’s holes under, so use it deliberately.
• Keep the pumps alive — survival crew pump the water out, and a destroyed pump (a critical hit) turns a manageable leak into a death sentence; repair it urgently.

This is especially dangerous when you are the downwind ship and the enemy is upwind of you.

Fire

When your ship catches fire, survival crew automatically turn to firefighting. If you have enough hands on it and you stop taking fresh hits, the fire burns out and you live. If the crew can’t keep up — or the enemy keeps hitting you to reignite it — the fire grows until fire shock freezes the whole crew and the ship is seconds from exploding.

If a burning ship (yours or an enemy’s) is close, an explosion will hurt every ship nearby. Pull away, drop to battle sails to protect your rig from the blast, and brace ([F10]) to cut how much the explosion guts your crew. Note also that turning survival off sends a burning ship toward its own explosion on purpose — a desperate captain’s way of taking someone down with him.

The repair kit

Repairs are not free or infinite — they are supplies you load in port and burn through in battle. Sail without them and there is nothing to fix your ship with, so stock your hold before you leave: hull repairs, rig repairs, and medicine (rum) for the crew. When you run out, you fight with what the hull has left.

In battle, open the repair menu with [5] and choose what to mend:

• [1] Hull repair — restores planking and structure, spending hull repairs from the hold.
• [2] Sail (rig) repair — restores your sails, spending rig repairs.
• [3] Heal crew — brings back a chunk of your crew, spending medicine.
• [4] Urgent repair — fixes a crippled rudder, pump, or magazine.

Launching one of these repairs no longer pulls hands off your other jobs — a recent change means you can patch the hull without your guns falling silent — so what you manage isn’t a crew cost but the cooldown on each repair. Don’t burn one topping off a scratch when you’ll want it whole a minute later.

Cooldowns and timing

Every repair runs on a cooldown, and learning their rhythm is what separates a captain who survives a long fight from one who runs dry at the wrong moment. By default:

• Hull and sail repairs each run on their own ~10-minute cooldown. These were recently separated — where the two once shared a single timer, you can now mend hull and rig independently, so patching your sails no longer locks you out of patching your planking. Use both, but watch each clock.
• Healing crew is on its own ~20-minute cooldown — the longest of the lot, so spend it wisely.
• Urgent repairs (rudder, pump, magazine) run on a short ~5-minute cooldown and can be fired off almost immediately when something critical breaks.
• Masts are special. They are mended only by a rig repair, and only after all your sails are fully repaired — and a downed mast can’t be brought back in the first several minutes at all. Losing a mast usually means living without it for a long stretch of the fight.

Those base timers can be shortened. The Combat Repairs perk cuts repair cooldowns, and as of recent patches, sinking an enemy immediately knocks several minutes off your hull and sail repair cooldown — a real reward for finishing kills in a melee. The Bravery perk now also boosts how much each repair restores (alongside a handier turn rate). Which perks to slot is its own decision, covered in Mods, Books & Perks.

Crew is the bottleneck

Everything on this page runs on crew. Survival — the focus that pumps leaks, fights fires, and makes urgent repairs — is managed with [8], competing with sailing, gunnery, and boarding for the hands you have. When you are flooding or burning, you can feed survival by switching off gunnery or sailing for a moment; the crew shifts over (not instantly, but steadily) and clears the danger faster. (The timed hull and sail repairs themselves no longer draw crew, so firing one won’t silence your guns — but pumping and firefighting still do.) Balancing those focuses under pressure is the core skill of damage control — see Crew Management for how the allocation actually works.

Reading the enemy's repairs

Defence cuts both ways: the enemy is repairing too, and his choices open windows for you. Watch his status panel and punish the gap:

• When he repairs his hull, hit his masts and sails — rig damage can’t be undone quickly, so what you do to his rig now sticks while he’s busy patching planking.
• When he repairs his sails, stop wasting chain — it’ll just be mended as fast as you inflict it. This is the moment to switch to ball and pound his hull and crew.
• Hit what he can’t easily undo. With hull and sail repairs now on separate timers he can patch both, so planking damage is the least durable. His masts mend only slowly and only once his sails are whole, and lost crew comes back just once on a long cooldown — so rig and crew damage sticks far better than hull damage he can simply repair.