Currencies

Two currencies move the whole economy. Reals are the coin of everyday life — you earn them constantly and spend them on nearly everything. Doubloons are the scarcer hard currency, earned mostly by fighting and reserved for the purchases the game deliberately gates. Knowing which is which — and not wasting the scarce one — is one of the first economic habits a new captain should build.

Reals

Reals are the common currency, the money behind almost every transaction in port. You pay reals for cannons, repairs, modules, books, raw materials, and for ships bought at the auction; you receive reals when you sell goods, deliver cargo, or auction a hull of your own. The largest reals sink most captains meet is building ships: since the August 2026 update a ship of the line runs past a million reals to craft, which dwarfs everything else on the list. Production buildings are the next tier down — a shipyard, workshop, or resource mine is bought outright in reals (the base shipyard runs on the order of 10,000–15,000 reals), and the ongoing raw materials they consume are paid in reals too, so a building is now roughly the price of the rounding error on the hull it produces. If a price is quoted without saying otherwise, assume it’s in reals. Because they flow in and out of almost everything you do, reals are the currency you’ll spend most of your time earning and the one to keep a healthy balance of for day-to-day play.

The shipyard is also the clearest illustration of the game’s deliberate two-currency design: you buy the base building in reals, but the capacity upgrades that let it build larger hulls are gated behind doubloons. Reals get you in the door; doubloons buy the reach. For live building costs and the full crafting-XP curve, see Buildings.

Doubloons

Doubloons are the scarce, “hard” currency. You earn them chiefly through combat — sinking and capturing enemy ships, and from patrol-zone and event rewards — and the game spends them on the things that expand your reach: outpost permits, storage and warehouse expansions, and other premium unlocks (see Outposts & Warehouses). Another core doubloon sink is slot expansion — buying additional ship and dock slots to grow your roster (which caps at 25 slots as of the 2026 build) and expanding outpost storage. Each extra slot costs more doubloons than the last, so a rising per-slot price keeps the scarce currency working against you the more you grow. A further doubloon store is the Admiralty Shop (the Bermuda Exchange), the marquee outlet for national flags, guaranteed-quality gear, and books — a national flag runs around 25,000 doubloons, for instance; its mechanics and full price list live in The Port Interface. You aren’t limited to earning them, though: doubloons can be bought and sold on the open market like any trade good, or exchanged for reals at a fixed rate, so a cash-rich trader can simply buy the doubloons a project needs — the mechanics are in Trading & Contracts.

The August 2026 update changed what doubloons are for. Where they once paid for a short list of one-off unlocks, every ship crafting recipe now consumes them, and so do the higher-calibre cannon recipes (see Ship Crafting). That turns doubloons from an occasional purchase into a running cost of doing business for any crafter, and it closes off a route that used to exist: a pure trader can no longer stay out of the doubloon economy altogether. Think of doubloons as the currency that converts fighting into everything durable — territory, infrastructure, and now the fleet itself — where reals convert trading into working capital.

How the two relate

The two currencies aren’t fully interchangeable, and that’s by design — it’s what keeps doubloons meaningful. Combat rewards tend to arrive partly as doubloons, which is the game’s way of making sure fighters can afford the things doubloons buy, while traders swim in reals. A pure trader will accumulate reals far faster than doubloons; a pure fighter, the reverse. The two are also stored differently, which trips up new captains. Reals live in a single personal wallet that follows you everywhere — you can spend them from any port without moving anything. Doubloons have no wallet: they’re held more like a stored good, sitting in a warehouse or your ship’s hold, so you need them physically where you intend to spend them. Neither balance is pooled at the clan level.

That storage rule bites much harder than it used to. Now that every hull needs doubloons, and goods cannot be moved between outposts except by sailing them, your doubloons must be sitting in the same port as the shipyard you want to build in. A crafter who keeps their money where they earn it and their shipyard where the timber is has a delivery run to make before anything gets built.

A word on “marks”

With the money itself understood, the practical questions are how to earn it and how to multiply it. For the ways to bring in both currencies, see Making Money; for the buy-low/sell-high trade that turns reals into more reals, see Trading & Contracts.