Open-World UI

The open world is where you actually sail — a single shared Caribbean you cross in real time — and its interface is intentionally quiet. Most of the time it’s just your ship, the sea, and a compass. The work happens in two screens you call up: the world map, for working out where you are and where you’re going, and your ship’s hold, for what you’re carrying. This page walks through both, plus the fleet panel and the small markers that appear on the map as you travel.

The world map

Open the map with M (see Keyboard & Controls). It’s drawn from a historical chart of the West Indies, so it looks the part, and it’s your main tool for orientation: where you are, where a port or mission sits, and the line between the two. Scroll the mouse wheel to zoom in and out. The map is more than a picture — it carries live information about every port and a few tools for planning, all covered below.

Plotting a course

There’s no autopilot to a destination; you steer by heading. To work out that heading, open the map and turn on the protractor (the course tool, available only when you’re at sea, not docked). Double-click your starting point, then right-click your destination, and the tool draws the bearing between them. Close the map and that bearing appears as a red arrow on the compass at the edge of your screen — steer until your bow lines up with it and you’re on course. For long hauls you’ll re-check the map now and then, since wind and coastline push you around.

Reading ports & finding them

Hover the cursor over any town on the map and a tooltip tells you what you need to know before you commit to sailing there: which nation owns it, the controlling clan, the region, the local taxes, when you last visited, and any port-battle information. That last point matters — it’s how you spot a port that’s contested or about to be fought over before you sail into it.

To find a specific port, use the search field and type the first letters of its name; the map narrows to matches. Clicking the small circle beside a port’s name centers the map on it, which is the quick way to jump your view across the Caribbean without scrolling. The map also has a trader tool: enter a good and it can list ports by selling price from nearest to farthest, so you can weigh a longer voyage against a better margin — handy when you’re sitting on captured cargo and deciding where to unload it. Trading strategy proper lives in Trading & Contracts.

Fleet control

You can sail with more than one ship. The Fleet panel shows your main ship, and you slide between the others to inspect them — in the open world you can command a small fleet of additional ships alongside the one you’re steering. From this panel you can look over each fleet ship, move cargo between their holds, and re-crew a ship that’s short-handed (provided you have spare crew, or medicine, in a hold to do it with). The same panel surfaces your captain’s details — rank, experience, fortune in reals, days at sea, time in game — and your selected perks.

The ship’s hold

Click a ship’s Hold icon to see and manage what it’s carrying. This is where you check your cargo at sea, and where you fix an overload — a ship carrying more than its capacity is sluggish, so you can split a load and shift part of it to another fleet ship, or, if you must, dump some of it overboard to lighten up. The hold is also how you trade with another player on the open sea: right-click their name to propose a trade, and once they accept, a trade window opens for the two of you to exchange goods and reals straight from your main ships’ holds.

Your position & wind boosts

Two small markers are worth knowing. If you’ve taken the Sextant perk — commonly the first perk a new captain runs — a marker shows your own position on the map, which makes orientation far easier on a featureless stretch of sea. And as you sail you’ll see wind-boost icons appear once you’re close enough; sail into one and you catch a temporary surge of speed that lasts a few minutes. They’re free distance — on a long crossing it’s well worth nudging your heading to clip through one.