Port UI

In Naval Action, port is your workshop. The open sea is for sailing, fighting and running missions; almost everything else — buying and selling, fitting out ships, crafting, taking quests, storing your goods — happens while docked. That makes the port screen the busiest interface in the game, and at first glance it’s a wall of icons. It’s easier once you see the shape: the screens fall into things that affect all your ships and goods, things that affect your current main ship, and your personal captain details. This page is a tour of those screens and what each is for; the deeper economy and crafting strategy lives in its own sections.

How the port menu is organized

Think of the docked menu in three groups. Port activities are the wide-reaching screens — your fleet of owned ships, your storage, the markets, crafting, quests and outposts. Main-ship controls are a smaller set that act only on the ship you’re currently sailing — its equipment, crew and hold. And your captain’s details — rank and fortune, your DLC, flags and perks — round it out. Keep that split in mind and the menu stops feeling random: if it touches every ship, it’s a port activity; if it touches only the one ship you’re steering, it’s a main-ship control.

Navy: your ships and docks

The Navy screen lists every ship you own, across every port — it’s your whole fleet on one screen. Right-click a ship that’s in the port you’re standing in and you can set it as your main ship, tow it to another of your outposts, send it out as a fleet ship, return a fleet ship to the docks, or sell it directly to another player. Ships docked in a port other than the one you’re in are visible but can’t be acted on until you’re there or tow them in. There’s a limit to how many ships you can keep in your docks; you can buy additional dock slots, at a rising cost, and certain DLC adds more.

Warehouse & Shop

The Warehouse is your storage: equipment, materials, trade goods, upgrades, books and coin all live here. The catch is that it’s tied to having an outpost — in a port where you have one, your stored goods persist; in a port where you don’t, anything you leave behind is lost when you sail away (the game warns you first). Trading runs through the warehouse too: goods you sell are pulled from it, and goods you buy are deposited into it. You can drag and split stacks between the warehouse and any of your ships’ holds.

The Shop is the port’s market, all in reals. Here you buy and sell cannons, upgrades, consumables (repairs, medicine, ammunition), resources and books. Beyond buying off the shelf, you can place contracts: a buy contract that waits for goods at the price you set, or a sell contract that offers your goods to the market. Contracts cost a non-refundable tax up front, lock the relevant money or goods while they stand, and expire after a few days; you claim back whatever was filled (and anything unfilled is returned). How many contracts you can run grows with your rank. The mechanics of working the market for profit are in Trading & Contracts.

Buying & selling ships

The Auction is the player-to-player ship market. Ships are filtered by the rank needed to sail them, and by type and port; hover a listing to inspect what you’re really buying — its build woods and trim, its upgrade slots, and anything already fitted. To sell, list a ship and set a price; a tax is paid up front and isn’t recoverable, the ship sits on the market for a few days, and the game mails you when it sells, naming the buyer. To buy, the displayed price includes tax, and the ship is delivered to you with an empty hold and no cannons — budget for fitting it out. This is one of three ways to sell a ship; the other two are a direct player sale from the Navy screen and an instant fixed-price sale to the Admiralty.

The Admiralty

The Admiralty looks like another shop but trades in doubloons, not reals, and deals in the special end of the catalogue: particular pieces of equipment, upgrades or blueprints, special and conquest flags, and the buying or selling of captured conquest flags and Loki runes. The currency is the quick tell — if a counter wants doubloons, you’re at the Admiralty; if it wants reals, you’re at the Shop. The wider role of the Admiralty in conquest is picked up in Port Battles.

Buildings & crafting

The crafting screens let you produce consumables, cannons and whole ships, but only once you’ve put up the buildings that enable each: a workshop for consumables and components, a forge for cannons, a shipyard for ships. Well-chosen crafting also feeds the economy — some of what you make sells for a good margin. This guide keeps the port-screen description here and leaves the recipes, labour hours and quality system to Ship Crafting & Blueprints.

Outpost management

An outpost is your foothold in a port: it’s what makes the docks and warehouse there permanent, and it’s the anchor of your travel network — you can teleport yourself between your outposts for a fee that scales with distance. You can hold several outposts at once, in friendly ports and free towns, opening each for a one-time slot tax that rises as you add more. Closing an outpost has rules worth respecting: you generally need to clear out any ships beyond your main and fleet ships first (tow, sell or sail them elsewhere), or you’ll lose them, and any goods still in that warehouse are forfeit when you leave. The economy-side detail is in Outposts & Warehouses.

Port quests, journal & the reward chest

Port Quests is your gateway to missions, operations and events — you pick up work here, and completing it pays out in reals, doubloons, experience or special chests. The Journal tracks what you’ve taken and finished; you can read it at sea, but taking, cancelling or claiming missions happens in port. Rewards for completed work are deposited into your Reward Chest, which you open and empty at one of your outposts. Together those three close the loop: take a mission in port, run it at sea, collect from the chest back in port. The range of missions themselves is covered in Combat Missions.

Equipment, crew & hold

The last group acts only on your current main ship. Equipment is where you fit it out: view its characteristics, add or swap cannons deck by deck, install upgrades and ship knowledge, and apply paint if you own the relevant DLC. One distinction is worth remembering — knowledge can be removed and reused on another ship, but upgrades are permanent: to change one you destroy it, and it’s gone. Crew handles your complement, and Hold manages this ship’s cargo — the same hold screen you use at sea, where you check capacity, fix overloads and shift goods between ships. What to actually put on a ship — which woods, books, mods and perks — is in Mods, Books & Perks.