The ship's log

• ~25%of the game across
• 6systems finished and checked
• 45automated test harnesses

Being redesigned rather than ported: the campaign, prologue and missions.

Recently finished

1. 7 Oct · The game has a voice

   The whole sound bank came across — 44 tracks, 84 recordings. Nine sea beds crossfade by sky, wind, shore, night and depth; thunder follows the flash; canvas is audible as it is let fall and as it takes the wind.

2. 7 Oct · Furled sails are actually furled

   Taking in canvas used to shrink a sail to a sliver and then delete it, so a ship at anchor had bare yards. The roll is now modelled from the cloth that left the flying sail — a course furls fat and a topgallant thin — with creases and gaskets bedded into the cloth.

3. 2 Oct · Her battery fires

   Every gunport on the draught becomes a gun with its own arc, reload clock and opinion about whether it can reach the mark. Shot flight, sighting and smoke with it.

4. 29 Sep · A wake, and a sea worth looking at

   The sea trial scene had never actually been lit, and the sun's path on the water was being clipped to flat white before tonemapping. Both fixed, and a true Kelvin wake went in the same week.

Percentages are the share of the first version's code in each area that now has a working counterpart, judged part by part and rounded to the nearest five. Hull figures are diffed automatically against the original and agree to one part in 10,000.

Project Seaborne · Development log · 7 October 2026

Changing your colours

• Fly the faction's colours and you sail for the faction. Its wars are your wars and its alliances your alliances. Its towns are home, and your crown's towns become foreign quays.
• Blame for every broadside lands in the faction's name. Coin spent at the Society turns towns to its colours. Your fleet flies them too.
• Your crown's wars stop being yours while its flag is down. Run your crown's colours back up and you sail for the crown again.
• The switch is in the pause menu, under Your Faction. Your own faction's ships and towns never turn on you, and colours cannot be changed mid-fight.

Royal envoys

• The crowns court the towns. A crown's royal envoy sails out of its capital with a chest of gifts for a foreign town's council, and enough landed gifts flip that town's flag without a shot fired.
• Only crowns holding fewer ports than average send envoys — the further behind, the more they send.
• She reads ROYAL ENVOY through the spyglass. Hail her for her business.
• Stop her and the gifts never land: sink her, take her, or lift the chest before she makes the quay. One sunk or captured stalls her whole crown for a week — no gifts land, no new envoy sails — and doing it again runs the stall longer.
• They sail the whole world, not just yours, landing gifts on the calendar whether or not you are within a thousand miles of it.
• The Society shows a town's envoy progress, your own crown's ports included, and says when one is expected. You hear whose envoy landed where, and which towns have been bought, in taverns and from ships you hail.

Sailing

• False colours — a flag locker on J holding your crown's, your faction's, taken ensigns and black flags. Fly false to close unseen; be seen through, or fire under them, and you are marked a pirate everywhere.
• The Star-Reader's gift — chart the whole sky and every sextant sighting steers you truer for a day. A standing reward rather than a one-off.

A wife in her own harbour

• Come home to her. Make port where she waits and she takes you home for the night — ten days' rest in one, and the only way a child is made.
• Births happen wherever you are. Children crew for you from birth and grow into their own skills, and the first sight of one born while you were at sea is staged as a scene.
• Wives can die — childbed, or fever while you are at sea. The news arrives at your next port in a black-edged letter, and her replacement barmaid is a new face and name.
• A new tune plays at her hearth, "Queen of the Deck."

A house ashore

• Cottage → Townhouse → Manor, fitted out room by room and built up in real game days.
• A household under one roof — bring a wife to any settlement you founded. Two under one roof may accept it, go cold, leave, or worse.

Titles — what the docks call you

• The wedding names are updated. Marry the Torta and the docks call you TORTA TAMER. Marry a Smoking Hot barmaid — not merely Hot — and it is LUCKY BASTARD. Yours for as long as she is.
• Outlive a wife and you keep THE WIDOWER for ever after.

The corners of the screen, redrawn

• New glass in both bottom corners — wind, speed, sail plan and compass bottom-left; crew, morale, hull and sails as four ring gauges bottom-right. The old rotating compass card is gone.
• Key hints know what you can actually do: chips only show keys that work right now.
• A coach walks a new captain through the wheel — a short first-time strip, then gone for good.

Controls

• Every sea key is yours to rebind — Settings → Controls, two slots per action, right-click to clear or reset all.
• An Xbox controller plays the whole game: analog steering and trim, right stick to look around, and on-screen prompts that switch to match.

An heir takes the deck

• Your career can end, and go on. Lost at sea or hanged, a child of age may take the deck. With no heir, only the title screen is left.

Project Seaborne · 16 September 2026

The shipyard

• The yard is a building you walk into. Its own front room, trades written down the left as words: Build, Buy Used, Repair, Remodel, Sail Maker, Flag Maker, Sell. Before this every one hid behind a gold pin somewhere on the ship in the basin, and you had to know it was there.
• Along the bottom, the ship you're standing beside — class, burthen, guns, crew, and the burthen chart off the drafting table. Up the whole time, because every door asks the same question about her a different way.
• Repairing and selling are plain desks. Mending is a transaction; a carrack rolling at anchor behind two numbers was a view, not information.
• The second-hand quay is a clerk's board — every hull at once, what she is, how worn, what the yard asks. You used to cycle them through the basin behind arrows, comparing a price to one you were trying to remember.
• The sail maker chooses cloth against a drawn suit of canvas — courses and topsails in the actual dye, cut and device — not a twenty-pixel chip. What you're picking is how she reads at two miles.
• A remodel may not re-cut her frames. Rig, battery, carving and cloth are the yard's trade; her lines aren't. Draw a different ship at the table.
• The drafting table opens inside the building shed, so laying down a hull no longer drops you out of your voyage.
• Her ledger keeps two questions apart: what her class is worth at the books, and what this yard will pay for this hull.

The drafting table

• Her readout says less in much bigger type, on ruled rows — what she measures, how she sails, what she's built for, trade figures as bars. The fine print lives on the tooltip.
• Her guns are weighed apart from her rig. A captain may land a gun; he cannot land a mast.

The quay

• The counter keeps three books on every good: what the town would eat, what its own lanes land, and standing orders it's never been able to fill.
• Your cargo lands into those orders first — only the surplus reaches the shelf.
• Distance from where a good grows is now the whole of whether you can buy it. That's why there's no pepper on a London quay.
• What you can sell is clamped to what the counter will really take.

Gunnery

• Hull and rigging hits rebuilt from nothing — the smash, timbers opening, debris coming down; a parted stay, a spar taking it, canvas going.
• A hit no longer arrives quieter than the broadside that fired it.
• The old hits were mostly infrasound — over half their energy below 90 Hz, which laptops, TVs and phones don't reproduce, and that inaudible weight was setting the loudness.

Standing with the crowns

• Put down a pirate and all seven courts think better of you at once. The only deed that pleases everybody, and the road back for a captain who's made enemies.
• Small per hull, paid seven times over — a slow honest climb, not a shortcut.
• A corsair carried off beats one sunk: a hull under your flag is proof.

Your fleet

• Cut a consort loose at sea — the third way out, and the only one that doesn't end at a quay.
• Struck from your books, lying to with hands, stores and cargo aboard. No clock on her: sail back a year later and she's on the same water, canvas furled.
• Anyone who comes over the horizon may have her. She flies a bare staff.
• Her mate returns with her purse. You must be alongside — boats have to go across.

The taproom

• Crew morale is on the tavern counter where it can be mended. A number you can only watch is a status bar; one with a button beside it is a decision.

Sailing

• The wind is never quite steady — shifts and puffs continuously between the four-hour changes. No two careers gust in step.
• The camera keeps out of your own planking. Every shot was written in metres against the starting sloop, so on a galleon "thirteen metres astern" was inside her timbers.
• Two ringed key chips bottom-left — F fleet wheel, B captain's belt. Held keys with no button anywhere else.

Sailing together

• Steam going down mid-voyage no longer costs a restart — a drop is caught in seconds and stands itself back up in place.
• An invite reaches you wherever you are: a card with one button that autosaves and joins on the spot.
• Invite and Join are one press each, from Sail with Friends — which stands open even while Steam is down.

Comfort and heat

• Cool Running preset — a thermal tier, not a quality one, and the only preset allowed to touch your frame cap.
• Foliage stops at 4 km instead of 9, with the last kilometre a fade rather than a line.

This notice

• Tater reads the list once per update, and not again until the next.
• Reopen it any time: Escape → Change Log.

Project Seaborne · Build 25173726 · 7 September 2026

The sea has a voice

Under way you now hear it. Four wave beds mixed by what the sky is doing (a fair-weather wash, the working sea, a gale crash), plus surf that only swells when there is actual land nearby — a ring of water probes reads the displayed coastline, so shore wash never fires over open ocean. Gull colonies by day on the same gate; birds sit out a gale. Two wind beds handing over as it freshens, an eerie night layer that comes in only after dusk and only once the wind is worth hearing, rain riding the existing rain amount, and a hard duck to the deep when the camera goes under the surface.

Thunder came with it. The takes are dry — no rain baked into them — so they layer cleanly over our own rain and wind. A strike is either the near crack or one of the far rolling rumbles, with the report delayed off the flash by distance, and the whole draw is seeded so two captains in company hear the same storm. At full gale that's a flash roughly every 22 real seconds.

Working the gear is audible too: sails let fall and sails filling draw from banks of takes rather than one clip replayed six times up a mast. There's hysteresis on the drawing factor so a ship worked along the edge of the no-go cone doesn't rattle the same clip off on every degree of wander.

Ambient sound: ~70% complete. The beds are in and on their own bus with a slider. What's left is a real mix pass by ear — the levels are first guesses and nothing has been balanced against the music — plus creaking timber and port murmur behind the paintings.

The squadron goes to quarters

A hostile voyage's followers used to keep their passage station right through an action, filing down the inside of their flagship's wake with their guns masked. Now the moment the flag settles onto her broadside ring, the squadron breaks up: each follower works a fighting ring of her own around you, the same way round as the flag, each berth staggered further out so no two hulls foul the same water. While they're merely closing, the cruising wedge still stands — they bear down in formation and open out as the guns come to bear.

Beat one of them badly enough on her own account and she falls out of the line and runs downwind with the fight still going. Focused fire on one ship visibly pays now. Fixed in passing: a follower promoted to flagship after her leader sank never inherited the leader's right to pick her own tacks.

Guns that kick, canvas that cracks

• Per-gun recoil. Each discharge rocks the firing hull a fraction of a degree about her roll axis, away from the muzzle and signed by bearing — a bow chaser barely twitches her, a full broadside rolls the deck. Staggered down the ripple, so a battery firing in sequence rocks her gun by gun. Ballistics already flatten hull tilt out of every launch, so the kick can never bend a shot. Same constants drive player and NPC decks.
• Chain shot whips the rig. A chain ball going home kicks a violent decaying thrash into the struck ship's canvas — the crack is sharp and the settle takes about a second and a half — scaled by how much canvas is actually set. Full strength through the rigging, half for a pair that found timbers instead. It fires on every machine that can see her, so a friend's broadside whips the same rig you're watching.

Sea combat Milestone 1: ~85% complete. Boarding by force is live end to end (grapples, the party pulled off your own books so your guns slow, a tug-of-war with casualties both ways, and every ending). Per-gun accuracy cones and the infamy charge for firing first landed earlier in the week. What's left: pricing the endings — boarding, plundering, sparing and sinking still cost you nothing beyond the one diplomacy charge for opening fire — plus gouged strakes as a distinct low-hull read and more spectacle in the sinking itself. The battle skill tree is deliberately unwritten until combat feel settles.

The boats are working

Four passes turned the ship-to-ship transfer panel into real fleet logistics:

• Hands row between decks. Hired hands move between the flagship and any ship alongside, counted in berths rather than tons — this is how a prize finally gets manned and a stripped hull gets her people back. No manning floor is enforced on purpose; undermanning is already a penalty the game speaks, and a hard stop would forbid the honest cases. The panel warns instead. Mates never ride the boats — a mate is posted to a command. And the books stay honest: the wage bill counts hands berthed out in the fleet, so rowing men across before payday buys you nothing.
• A rail to heave things over. Jettison, per hold, straight into the sea without ferrying anything across first. Typed amounts go at once; emptying a holding asks first, because the sea gives nothing back. A lone flagship gets the rail too. Lighten ship, or put contraband where no searcher will find it.
• The whole squadron loads the prize. Plundering no longer bottlenecks on the flagship's hold. A "Load into" picker points the boats at any of your ships in reach — escorts in company, and any hull lying to near the prize. That last case is deliberate: the prize you took ten minutes ago and ordered to stay is exactly the empty hold you want the next one's pepper in. Gold and willing hands still go to the flag.
• Fresh purchases can be manned. The hands row was clamping on raw crew capacity, which read zero on any hull never given an outfit split — so the boats would move supplies to a newly bought ship but refuse to crew her.

Fleet & logistics: ~80% complete. Missing: a reason to keep several holds beyond convenience, and the balance pass that makes prize crews cost something real.

The ship builder

Standing section. The builder is the shipyard itself — your own ship afloat in the basin, in three dimensions, with her working parts labelled: click her stem, masts, guns or hull and the matching bench opens on that part.

Where Tier 1 stands: essentially finished, and it is a real purchase, not a preview. Burthen is genuinely spent — every placed fitting's weight plus crew berths counts against the hull's tonnage, and whatever's left becomes her actual cargo capacity. The buy writes a full ship definition: speed, turn and upwind efficiency derived from the rig you actually stepped, guns set from the guns you actually placed, the whole thing baked into one scene so she looks built, saved out so she survives a reload, and carrying her own recipe so "refit her myself" puts her back on the bench as movable parts. A refit charges only the increase over what she was already worth.

It barely moved this week — one fix to how the bench recognises a wheel already fitted. The yard around it grew a proper sell-her-on flow: the full reckoning read back — price, what comes off her, who walks off her deck — before you sign, the books closed while she still exists to close them over, then she's struck from the fleet and your own ship goes back on the blocks.

In flight, not reachable yet: the hull-shaping half. A working lofting engine now draws a hull from three curves — half-breadth from above, the sweep of the deck line, and the bottom's depth through forefoot, hold and deadwood — plus a bow rake, with the player owning every control point. Mirror mode is true by construction; no asymmetric hull can even be expressed. Every new keel starts from the same blunt blank, so a bow exists because you pulled one out of it. It is not wired into the yard, so no captain can open it yet.

Ship builder: ~55% complete. Tier 1 kit-bash ~90% — what's short there is a balance pass, since the fitting weights, prices and the rig performance table are all placeholders. Tier 2 hull shaping has an engine and no door. Tier 3 is not planned.

Sea, sky and shore

• Foam dies young. The wake trail's clock came down from sixteen effective seconds to two — a ship's length of white at full sail, half that at cruise — and what's left is cut into flakes rather than washed on. The acceleration flicker is dead twice over: the per-hull speed read is low-passed at source, and the grain is frozen at each hull's rated speed now.
• Gales come in three weights, rolled per shift like the sky: a mild blow, the regular gale, and a severe one that swells the sea and alone opens the rogue-wave gate. Rogues ride in on their own denser field, so a monster looms in out of the fog line instead of popping up beside you — and the damage code reads the very same crest. Storm murk crushes sight to a couple hundred metres, lightning tears it open for a beat, and a spray sheet hangs the near water.
• The shore calms the sea. Chop and swell both shoal away over the last stretch to any coast, mirrored bit-for-bit between the shader and the buoyancy read so hull and eye agree. Running aground now bills the hull: impact energy off the way the ground took, capped by the way she carried in, plus a grind while she's pinned.
• The day is ten times longer — a 30-minute day, up from three minutes.

Ocean & weather: ~85% complete. The remaining share is the wake against its new target (broad, bright and torn, still plainly there three ship lengths astern) and a mix pass on heavy weather. Sails: ~75% — belly depth and leech bow are within a couple of percent, but triangular sails still carry a luffing crease at full draw. Land: ~70% — crowns picked up lobed shading and a storm bend this week, but the dominant-peak silhouette, discrete offshore islands and the foliage pass are all still open.

Ashore

Every harbour in the world is painted — all 104 of them. That was the largest single content grind on the board and it is done. The inn folded into the taproom's one painting, every town opened a shipyard, and captains can talk across the card table.

Ports ashore: ~80% complete. What's left is menu streamlining — testers found some screens confusing, and the answer starts with asking them which ones, not guessing.

Next up

Pricing the endings so a boarding costs something. The balance audit, still untouched: distance pays nothing, starting gold dwarfs the early game, expenses run under 1% of income, and every captain but the owner starved on ordinary voyages in the playtest. The sailing HUD that would let you see that happening. A mix pass on the new audio. And the fleet we don't have — three hulls is the ceiling on all of it, which is exactly what the lofting work is aimed at.

Project Seaborne · Devlog · 25 August – 1 September 2026

• Godot 4.6engine
• 30 June 2026in the repo since
• 128commits
• 115ports in the world
• 3sailable hulls
• 5 of 115port paintings done

What the game is

Project Seaborne is an age-of-sail game about captaining a ship on a circumnavigable globe — a 2:1 world that wraps east to west and is walled north and south by polar ice. You sail a real ocean under real weather, trade between 115 ports flying seven crowns, fight ship-to-ship with iron and canvas, build a fleet crewed by named mates, and — if it goes well — found a dynasty that outlives your first captain. One nation, Portugal, has a full campaign; the others are locked at creation as "coming soon," and that's stated up front rather than hidden.

The design pillar, held from the start: sailing and fighting are the game, and they must look genuinely good. Everything else — trade, ports, character progression, the dynasty — is connective tissue. The second pillar is the split personality: fully 3D and simulation-driven at sea, where the game lives, and a painted backdrop with menus ashore. The seam between them is deliberate and gets strengthened, never blurred.

The voyage so far

1. Jun 30 · The keel

   The repository opens with the core already sailing: the FFT-simulated ocean, the volumetric sky, day/night, the world map with its real coastlines, ships that heel under sail, and the bones of trade and ports. Everything since builds on that hull.

2. Jul 21–25 · The deep-systems sprint

   Five days that gave the game its economic and social depth: the player fleet with mate captains running independent trade routes, a three-tier production-chain economy (raw goods → manufactures → naval works), tiered warehouses with upkeep, per-mate wages as a loyalty dial, dynamic weather where the sky drifts and the wind follows, the gun deck's ratings and ammunition economy, a per-port price book fed by tavern gossip, NPC traders moving real stock, hostile ports that jail you, collectible curiosities, and the full dynasty arc — gifts, marriage, children who serve aboard, and succession. Two dedicated bug-sweep commits fixed 33 issues along the way, including an infinite-gold exploit.

3. Jul 25–28 · Ashore, in pixels

   The Quinta — a farm granted by the King, acre by acre — went from a menu to a walkable, hand-laid pixel-art farm in three days. Riding that momentum, Peniche became the first fully walkable 2D pixel port, then all 115 ports got walkable towns, gambling dens, snow biomes past the polar line, and lamplit nights. Keep reading — this one has a twist.

   The same stretch landed the Captain's Chronicle: six full skill trees (Trade, Carpentry, Discipline, Survivalism, Exploration, Infamy) wired live in a single day, plus dockside errands, a secret ten-errand questline paid in curios, earned sea-story epithets, a procedurally rolled Rival, and the complete sea-combat design document.

4. Aug 7–13 · The ocean and sail pass

   A week almost entirely at sea. The ocean was rebuilt against a measured visual target with a playtest baseline to judge it by. The sails were rebuilt the same way — new cloth simulation, billow, flutter, and luffing — alongside a rigging builder, and then came days of pure rig correctness: bracing the yards round to actually catch the wind, bagging the canvas to leeward, making the flag and the wind agree on which way the wind blows. Unglamorous commits, but this is the difference between a ship that looks rigged and one that looks sailed.

   August 13 was a big day: co-op multiplayer landed — "Sail in Company" off the title screen, two captains on one shared ocean with one shared economy, a synced sea clock, ship-to-ship barter, and a card table at the inn.

5. Aug 12–13 · The hard cut

   The walkable pixel ports — all 115 of them, built and dressed just two weeks earlier — were scrapped. The pixel art clashed with the modern stylized 3D sea, walking between buildings amounted to "a menu with footsteps," and 115 generated towns all read the same. Ports are now a painted backdrop with a menu, unified under one dark-and-gold UI language. The walkable Quinta survives as the one place you stroll on foot, deliberately. Three planned hulls were struck from the register the same day. Cutting two weeks of work fourteen days after building it is the least fun and most important discipline in the project.

6. Aug 15–23 · Combat becomes a thing you can play

   Sea combat stopped being a design doc. First-person helm view, running out the guns, per-gun reload clocks, hull damage pools, sails that lose speed as they take holes, flooding and foundering, NPCs that shoot back and maneuver, striking the colours, boarding, and prizes — all landed in the working tree and came aboard in one large haul on August 23, alongside a character creator and the shipyard rework. The same day: world vegetation streaming (forests planted everywhere a sailor can see them, and nowhere else) and a performance pass that taught every frame to earn its keep.

Where every system stands

Statuses are honest. "Landed" means built, tuned, and holding. "Playable" means you can play it today but named gaps remain. "Partial" means the foundation is in and the finish isn't. "Content gap" means the system works and the world hasn't been filled into it yet.

• The ocean

  Landed

  An FFT-simulated sea rendered on compute shaders, with GPU-driven buoyancy — four wave probes per ship drive bob, pitch, and roll from the actual water surface. Ships carve an analytic Kelvin wake (the real V-pattern), layered with a three-lifetime foam-and-disturbed-water system measured per hull, and a bow-impact splash that fires when the bow actually meets a crest. The signed-off open water is frozen: foam and wake keep being tuned, the wave simulation and shading do not get touched. The wake is mid-retune against a reference photo target adopted August 13 — broader and brighter than the current build.

• Sky & weather

  Landed

  A raymarched volumetric cloud sky where cloud types are blended by weather profile, a sun whose HDR disc genuinely seeds its own bloom, and a dynamic weather system: the sky drifts on a slow clock, the wind follows it, storms shred canvas left set, and a gale closes visibility to around 300 meters with spindrift, squall curtains, and clock-synced lightning. Clouds physically dim the sun. Rain reads as weather in the distance, not drops on a lens. One shared sky lights both sea and port — landfall is a camera move, never a fade.

• The world

  Landed, one silhouette gap

  A circumnavigable 2:1 globe: sail east long enough and you come home; north and south end at polar ice caps. Coastlines come from a signed distance field over real geography (at roughly 1:950 scale), with 115 ports authored onto them. The land itself just finished a full material pass — ground painted from climate through lithology, landform, and grain, giving sand, shingle, and rock coasts, turf, bedrock with visible bedding, scree, and alpine snow. Vegetation streams in around the player with billboard impostors past 2.6 km, so whole forests exist only where a sailor can see them. Ship-versus-land collision is a nine-probe hull solve against the exact displayed terrain — no physics bodies, no tunneling. The one named visual gap: island silhouettes want a dominant peak, and that fix reaches deep enough that it's still being weighed.

• Ships & sailing

  Strong, sails mid-rebuild

  Three hulls — sloop, caravel, carrack — each with measured sailing stats, heeling as a real state layered under wave roll, an auto-helmsman that tacks and gybes for best velocity-made-good, sail handling in six ordered rates, damage-tracking canvas, player-painted house flags flown at every masthead, and hull livery. The shipyard was rebuilt so the yard is the builder: you step masts, hang canvas, mount guns, and set the wheel on the ship herself, in one screen. The sail rebuild is measured against a visual spec and scored by blind critics: square sails are most of the way there; triangular sails (jib and lateen) still carry a wrongly placed crease family at full draw and are the one substantial shape gap left.

• Sea combat

  Playable — Milestone 1

  You take the helm in first person, run out the guns, and fight: per-gun reload clocks read off the aiming arc, accuracy from each gun's own cone plus a shared battle-wobble curve, hull damage pools rated per ship, sail damage that robs speed, flooding that rides a ship lower from 70% hull and founders her below 25%, and hull scars where the shot struck. NPCs return fire and maneuver against you. A beaten enemy can strike her colours — boarding is what accepts the surrender — and then it's plunder, prize, or mercy. Opening fire carries a diplomatic price; defending yourself is free. Still owed to Milestone 1: chain and grape shot (the guns are already shaped for them), crew casualties, enemy squadrons that fight as a line rather than keeping station, real costs on the endings, combat sync in multiplayer, and the presentation bar — drifting powder smoke, recoil, visible holes in the canvas, a sinking worth watching.

• The living world

  Landed

  NPC ships are not spawned scenery: every sail on the horizon is a voyage with a goal, simulated abstractly across the whole world and rendered only when near. Pirates run an actual ledger — they attack only when the prize beats the danger of taking you on. Naval hunters need a war or a proper reputation for infamy before they come for you. NPC merchants move real stock that moves real prices.

• Co-op multiplayer

  Sailing shared, combat not

  Two captains on one ocean: host-authoritative world, each captain flying their own ship, one shared economy, a synced sea clock and weather, captain-to-captain barter at sea, and Five-Card Draw at the inn between voyages. The named gap is combat — guns aren't synced yet, so two captains cannot fight the same enemy together. That's on the Milestone 1 list.

• Economy & trade

  Deep, unbalanced

  A three-tier production chain in named works ports, 18 luxury commodities, tiered warehouses that pay their own upkeep or get seized, a per-port price book that ages, crown trade commissions, dockside errands, treasure hunts solved by riddle and shovel rather than waypoint, and 24 curiosities including four legendaries. The honesty clause: the balance audit is untouched. Starting gold is still a placeholder 50,000, distance pays nothing over short shuttles, expenses run under 1% of income, and ship speeds are still set at twice their intended final values. The systems are deep; the numbers are not yet a game.

• Ports ashore

  Systems done, 5 of 115 painted

  Every port is a painted backdrop with doors — tavern, market, shipyard, town hall — each opening a full-screen panel in one dark-and-gold UI language. The tavern is an isometric diorama where gossip comes from the drinkers, never the barkeep. Hostile ports let you land and then turn you away or jail you. The system is finished; the art is not: 5 of 115 ports have their painting, and the rest honestly show a plain gradient. Dropping in one image per port is the entire act of finishing this — the single biggest lever on how complete the game feels ashore.

• Captain & crew

  Six of eight trees live

  Six fame stats earned by doing (Infamy is wired to being the aggressor — defending your ship costs nothing), Chronicle skill trees with three branches each and a two-of-three budget — six live, with the Battle tree deliberately waiting for combat feel to settle and the Dynasty tree designed but unbuilt. Mates carry their own stats and loyalties, can captain fleet ships, defect if neglected, and can be family: the dynasty runs gifts, marriage, children who serve aboard, and succession with heirlooms. Crews get thirsty, hungry, mutinous, and cold — climate is computed from latitude and season, and a hot drink genuinely helps.

• Campaign

  Portugal only, by design

  Portugal's campaign runs stat-gated story arcs up to King Manuel I himself, alongside crown commission tracks and merchant special jobs. The other six crowns exist in the world — you trade with them, fight them, fly their colours — but their campaigns are locked at creation and labeled honestly.

Dead and buried

A devlog that only lists what shipped is advertising. These were built — some fully — and deliberately killed:

• The 2D walkable pixel ports. All 115 of them, dressed and lamplit. Scrapped two weeks after completion for clashing with the 3D sea and reading identical town to town.
• The 3D walkable port and first-person tavern. Pulled down once nothing opened them anymore.
• Four tavern gambling games (Twenty-One, Hazard, Primero, Hold'em) — replaced by one: captain-vs-captain Five-Card Draw at every inn.
• Three planned hulls, struck from the register to keep the fleet honest.

What's next

In rough order of intent, not promise:

• Close the visual gaps at sea — the wake against its new brighter target, and the triangular-sail crease fix.
• Finish combat Milestone 1 — chain and grape shot, crew losses, enemy line tactics, priced endings, synced multiplayer combat, and the smoke-and-splinters presentation bar.
• More hulls. Three ships is the content ceiling on everything — every enemy hull is also a capturable prize, so each new one multiplies combat, the yard, the economy, and the fleet at once. Wanted: fluyt, frigate, East Indiaman, xebec, galleon, fishing craft.
• Port paintings — the 110-image content grind.
• The balance audit — turning deep systems into a fair game.

The honest summary: the systems layer of Project Seaborne is broad and largely built — sailing, combat, weather, a living NPC world, trade, progression, dynasty, co-op. The gap is content and finish: three hulls, five port paintings, a handful of measured visual targets not yet met, and an economy that hasn't had its numbers pass. That's a very different place than "half a game" — it's a whole game that needs filling in.

Project Seaborne · Devlog No. 0 · June 30 – August 24, 2026 · 128 commits