Who sails with you, and what you leave behind

A minimum crew to work the ship at all. Water that kills in three days and food in three weeks. Morale that turns into desertion in port, and mutiny that can cost you a ship — one you can hunt down and take back.

Named officers with the same six skills you have, who grow alongside you and lift the ship only while stationed aboard. They have loyalty, they can be bought, and below a threshold they walk — sometimes with a ship.

Trade, Carpentry, Discipline, Survivalism, Exploration and Infamy — each earned by doing the thing, each with a tree of three branches and a lifetime budget that forces real choices. No respec. Six trees are live.

Remaining: the Battle tree ships with combat.

Buy hulls, put mates in command, give orders — follow, hold, sail to. Stances and engagement filters are in.

Remaining: their fighting waits on combat.

Seven crowns own the ports. Pledge yourself at creation, invest at a town hall to flip a port's allegiance, re-pledge at a palace.

Remaining: only Portugal has a written campaign — the other crowns are visible and locked as "coming soon".

The Portuguese line: an audience with the King, six parallel story arcs gated behind different skills, and per-nation standing that moves with what you do. The exploration arc is the one that carries you south to Australia — a continent this century hasn't charted.

Remaining: the other crowns, and the arcs that need combat.

Court by gift, marry, raise children who serve aboard as your officers, and on your death hand the ship to an heir who keeps the heirlooms and the skills they actually earned at sea.

Pull castaways aboard; they eat your stores and die if the casks run dry, and the Crown pays per man landed alive.

Nine earned, permanent traits with small perks, and the dockside titles that come with them.

Your Exploration level is half ports found and half fog burned off the open water. Nothing is handed to you — and because the world is the real Earth, a coastline you half-remember is a coastline you can actually use.

Map pieces bought as riddles, dug up by camping ashore where you think the answer is. No waypoint markers.

Twenty-four collectible valuables, four of them one-of-a-kind, worth little where they were made and dear far from home. A stranger at one port per game runs a hidden ten-errand line for a set of usable curios.