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.

Angling is not a wall, though, and the August 2026 penetration pass sharpened that point. A hull held at 45° turns away most fire at ordinary range, but at point-blank guns bite through steeper angles than that — how much steeper depends on the gun. Angling buys you the most where the range is longest; up close it buys you less, and against a ship that has laid itself alongside you it may buy you nothing at all. That is a reason to keep the distance you want as carefully as you keep the angle.

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.
• Fit for it. Modules that raise sail hitpoints got materially better in the August 2026 update, which is worth a slot on any ship that expects to be chained — and with chain now reaching as far as guns do, that is most ships. See Mods, Books & Perks.

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.

Since the August 2026 update, how likely you are to catch in the first place depends on the state of your armour: a battered hull ignites more readily than a fresh one. Fire is therefore not an even risk across a fight but one that climbs as you take damage, which is another argument for angling early rather than trusting to repairs later. Once your planking is well beaten in, every further broadside is more likely to start something you then have to put out.

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. A sensible current-build baseline is at least ~5 of each type before you sail, and more for a long cruise or a fleet fight where you expect to burn through several repair cycles. 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. It is not instantaneous: in the 2026 build the patch plays out over a duration (roughly two minutes) during which you are still exposed and taking hits, so start it from a position of relative safety, not with the enemy’s guns run out beside you. The August 2026 update doubled what it gives back — a hull patch now restores about half a side’s armour where it used to restore a quarter — and doubled the wait between patches to match. Fewer repairs, each worth far more.
• [2] Sail (rig) repair — restores your sails, spending rig repairs. Unlike the hull patch this applies effectively instantly — as long as no mast is down (see the mast caveat below).
• [3] Heal crew — brings back a chunk of your crew, spending medicine. Medicine restores crew roughly one-for-one in the current build (about one medicine per crewman), which is why a big crew wants a large medicine stock — it is especially valuable mid-boarding, where casualties decide the fight.
• [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.

What you can and can’t mend at the opening

You no longer sail into a fight with a full repair kit ready to hand. Since the August 2026 update, hull and crew repairs start the battle already on cooldown — entering the instance sets their timers running, and neither becomes available until that opening wait has elapsed. Sail repair is the exception: it can be used from the first moment, and its cooldown and the amount it restores were left alone.

That reshapes the first minutes of a fight. Damage you take in the opening exchange has to be carried, not patched, so the way to survive it is the same as it ever was — angle, keep your distance, and don’t trade flat broadsides — but there is now no safety net behind those habits. It also puts a premium on the rig: your sails are the one thing you can still fix while everything else is locked, which makes early chain damage more worth answering than it used to be.

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 repair runs on a ~20-minute cooldown as of the August 2026 update — doubled from the ten minutes it used to be, in exchange for restoring twice as much. Over a long fight that means roughly half as many hull patches, each of them worth waiting for.
• Sail repair still runs on its own ~10-minute cooldown, untouched by that change. Hull and rig are on separate timers — they once shared one — so patching your sails never locks you out of patching your planking. Watch both clocks; they now run at very different speeds.
• 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, and the August 2026 update made that far more valuable than it was. The Combat Repairs perk now takes a large bite out of the hull cooldown — enough to bring a twenty-minute wait down to a few minutes, where it used to save you eight — which makes it close to mandatory on any ship that expects a long fight. Its kill bonus changed shape too: where sinking an enemy once knocked a flat few minutes off your timers, the reduction now scales with how much of that ship’s damage was yours. Kill something big on your own and you take the whole benefit; share the kill five ways and you take your share. Chipping in a broadside at the end of someone else’s fight no longer resets your clock. The Bravery perk now also boosts how much each repair restores (alongside a handier turn rate). Beyond those, a Survivability line improves your repairs and bailing, and component-strength perks (Hull, Sail, Mast, and Crew Strength) harden the very things this page teaches you to protect. Which of these to actually slot — and how many slots you have — 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. He can patch hull and rig on separate timers, but those timers now run at very different speeds. Since the August 2026 update his sails come back roughly twice as often as his planking does, so chain damage he can answer within ten minutes while hull damage sits on him for twenty. His masts mend only slowly and only once his sails are whole, and lost crew comes back just once on a long cooldown.
• Count his hull patches. A twenty-minute wait is long enough to plan around. Watch the moment he commits one — that is the beginning of a window in which any armour you strip off him stays stripped, and it is the best chance you will get all fight to force the issue. Whatever else you do in those minutes, do it on the side he just mended least.