Project Seaborne

A whole ocean, and a ship to cross it.

You begin with a small hull, a thin purse, and a world that does not care whether you succeed. What you become — merchant prince, explorer, privateer, or a name whispered in the wrong taverns — is not chosen from a menu. It is what you did, written down.

Project Seaborne is an age-of-sail voyage across a fully circumnavigable globe, alone or with friends. Sail east long enough and you will come home from the west.

The sea is the game

The ocean is simulated, not painted. Waves build with the wind, your hull rides on real water and takes the swell on the bow or the beam depending on how you meet it, and every ship on the water leaves a wake that other ships feel.

You sail it properly. Set your canvas, read the wind, and beat to windward in tacks because you cannot sail straight into it. Weather turns over the hours — a clear morning becomes a slate afternoon becomes a gale that will shred flying canvas if you are too proud to furl. Night falls for real, and a passage under the moon is a captain's decision.

Twenty rivers run inland from the coast. Take a shallow hull upstream and trade where the deep-water ships cannot follow.

The water is alive. Dolphins ride your bow wave, whales sound off the beam, an orca pod hunts the cold latitudes, and flying fish scatter ahead of a fast hull. Under it all, the sea talks: water on the hull, wind in the rigging, timber working, gulls off the shore.

Powder and shot

Take the helm yourself. Run out the guns, raise the arc, and lay your battery along her waterline. Choose your shot — round to hole her, chain to cut her canvas and whip her rigging, grape to sweep her deck — and feel every gun kick the ship as it fires.

Damage is real and it stays. Holes below the waterline flood her. Torn sails rob her speed. Hits leave scars sized to the iron that made them. Kill enough of her crew and she cannot work her guns.

An enemy squadron does not queue up to die. When the flagship settles onto your beam her consorts leave their stations and work you as a line, and a ship beaten on her own account will break and run.

When she strikes her colours, you decide what she is worth. Board her, take her as a prize, and sail her home under your own flag. Plunder her hold and let her go. Or send her down and pick over the wreckage for what floats and who survived. The world remembers who fired first.

Sail in company

Host a voyage and invite your friends through Steam. Everyone sails one shared world: one economy, so the cargo your friend sells ahead of you really does move the price; one shipping lane, so the merchantman you both sight is the same ship.

Fight the same enemy from two decks. Every broadside is seen by every captain, your friend's consorts sail on your water, and her ship shows her true state on your screen — worn canvas, scarred hull, colours coming down. Friendly ships are never targets.

Then make port together, sit down across the felt, and play Liar's Dice for real gold.

Seventeen hulls, and every one a prize

Sloop, pinnace, fusta, galiot, galley, caravel, caravela redonda, barque, brigantine, fluyt, carrack, nao, nau, galleon, Spanish galleon, East Indiaman, and a junk from the far side of the world. Every hull the world sails, you can capture, buy second-hand at the quay, or have laid down at a yard big enough to build her.

The yard is where a ship becomes yours. Fit her guns, cut her canvas in your own dye and device, and keep her books. Paint your own house flag pixel by pixel and fly it from every masthead you own. Or sit at the drafting table, lay down a hull's lines yourself, and paint her from a shelf of period tins.

Trade that has a reason

Prices are not random. Raw goods are grown and dug in the places that have them, carried to the works that manufacture them, and sold onward as the fittings that build ships. Learn that map and you can see a profit two ports before you reach it.

Keep a price book. Buy the long, dangerous run instead of the safe shuttle. Take a warehouse in a town you trust and let stock sit until the market turns. Put a mate in command of a second ship and send her trading on her own judgement.

A crew, not a stat

Men eat, drink, and form opinions. Cross a hot latitude and the water goes faster. Run the casks dry and men die. Pay badly, sail badly, or sit in a cell too long and morale rots into desertion, and desertion into something worse.

Your officers are people with their own loyalties, their own skills, and their own price. Your sailing master, Hoppy, will teach you the ropes and the great guns in his own voice — and will have something to say when you meet an old rival.

The Captain's Chronicle

Seven callings — Trade, Battle, Carpentry, Discipline, Survivalism, Exploration, and Infamy — each with its own skill tree and three branches. You cannot have everything. The budget forces you to be a particular kind of captain, and there is no respec.

The docks will give you a name for what you did. Earn it.

A world with its own business

Traders run real cargoes between real ports and move the stock you were counting on. Patrols patrol. Corsairs weigh what you are carrying against what you can throw back before they commit. Crowns own towns, and towns change hands. Merchant shipping fights its own wars whether you are there or not — and a hunter will come looking once your name is bad enough.

Every port in the world has its own painted harbour view, with the whole life of the town behind its doors: trade house, shipyard, chandler, taproom and inn, the Society of World Affairs, harbour office, and a palace where there is one.

Things worth finding

Riddle-clue treasure maps bought from a chartmaker, dug up by going ashore and camping — no waypoint, no arrow, just the clue and your reading of the coast. Curiosities that are cheap where they were made and dear on the far side of the world. A stranger with ten errands and no explanation.

An estate of your own, granted by the crown acre by acre, worked plot by plot while you are away at sea.

And, in the end, a family: a marriage, children who serve aboard as your officers, and an heir who inherits what you built and the stats they earned at your side.

Project Seaborne is in active development. Wishlist to be there when she sails, and follow the voyage on the website linked on this page.