The Shipping Tycoon — Wiki

How the game works: what drives demand, what you pay for, and how to read a trade lane before you commit money to it.

What you will not find here are the coefficients. The demand model runs on the server and stays there, because working out which lanes are worth sailing is the game. The same goes for the shares each kind of customer holds on a given port pair, and for what any particular decision on your desk will actually do — those are things you find out by paying a survey or by deciding and living with it.

What is guaranteed is that the model is consistent and physical — real ships, real bunker consumption, real sea distances, no fudged numbers pushing you toward a purchase. The wiki publishes principles and trade-offs, not the arithmetic. The rest you discover at sea.

Pages

• Getting started — your first hour, on this page
• The economy — what drives demand, how freight rates behave, where costs come from
• What you carry — dry, reefer and project cargo, and the five kinds of shipper
• Trade lanes and operations — opening lanes, surveys, rates, canal tolls, slot charters, dispatching
• Fleet — choosing ships, stowage plans, fleet commonality and specialised tonnage
• Wear, hours and dockings — how ships actually age, and what the yard costs
• Bunker and the IMO quota — the market, the tanks, and hedging with contracts
• Ports, HQ and staff — office levels, moving the head office, shore staff and overtime
• Decisions on your desk — the judgement calls with no right answer
• Reading your numbers — satisfaction, complaints and what was really in the holds
• Ports — the port page, what a harbour's character means, and the World Games
• Awareness and campaigns — how shippers come to know you, and how port championships are won
• Result and cash flow — where each line of the income statement comes from, and why they differ
• The weekly schedule and competition — sailing while you are away, spot charters, seasons, streaks
• Facilities — the buildings that cut your costs, and how they wear
• The stock market — float, A- and B-shares, votes, selling your own stake, takeovers
• Ship reference — every type, generated from the live game data
• Image credits — the photographers whose work appears in the game

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Getting started

You begin with $300,000,000 and one home port. That is enough for roughly two feeder-size ships and a small handful of trade lanes, which is deliberate: the first decisions you make matter more than any decision you make later.

1. Pick a home port that suits how you want to sail

Your home port is where every ship begins and ends its rotation, and every trade lane you open must start there. Three things about a port decide what it is worth to you:

• Size — the 1–10 class shown next to every port. Bigger means more cargo on the lanes leading out of it, and higher port dues. It is a coarse hint, not a number you can calculate from.
• Water depth — a shallow harbour will never see a laden ultra-large ship, whatever you are willing to pay. If you intend to run deep-sea tonnage eventually, start somewhere with water to spare.
• Position — a home port in the middle of a dense trading region has many short profitable lanes. One on the edge of the map has fewer, but less competition for them.

The big Asian and European gateways are the forgiving choice. A remote home port is a harder game and a more interesting one.

2. Buy bunkers before you buy anything else

You cannot sail without fuel in your tanks. Bunker prices move every 30 minutes, and the spread between a good buy and a bad one is a large slice of your single biggest operating cost.

Buy IMO emissions quota too. You can sail without it — the uncovered emissions are simply bought on the spot at a hefty premium and added to that voyage's cost sheet. Nothing breaks; you just pay more than you needed to.

3. Buy one ship, not three

A single ship on a good lane earns more than three on bad ones, and you learn the game faster with a fleet you can hold in your head. Pick something modern: the cost tables in the ship reference are real, and a recent hull genuinely beats a 1980s one per unit-kilometre.

4. Open one trade lane and survey it

Opening a lane costs a fee that scales with distance and with how busy the destination is. Once it is open you can see it on your network, but you cannot see its demand until you pay for a survey.

That is not an inconvenience, it is the game. You cannot compute demand yourself — the model is not published and the data behind it is not exposed — so every survey is a bet on whether a lane is worth knowing about. A survey on a lane you then abandon is money burned, and that is the cost of finding out.

5. Set your rates, then plan the week

Every lane starts at the reference rate — the rate at which about 85% of your capacity sells. Move the sliders and watch the forecast: raising the rate above reference empties the holds faster than it fills your bank account, and dropping it below fills the ship with cargo that is not paying enough to cover the voyage.

Then place the sailing in the week grid. A voyage takes real time — a deep-sea leg is measured in days, and one departure a week on a lane is normal, not a failure. The money settles when the ship arrives; close the browser if you like.

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6. Let the schedule sail, but keep coming back

The weekly schedule sails for you while you are away, hour by hour. What it cannot do is react — to a demand peak, a rate war, or a rival opening the same port pair. The schedule keeps the line alive; being here is what makes it grow.

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The loop, in one paragraph

Buy bunkers cheap, put ships on lanes that suit them, price so the holds fill without giving space away, and put the profit into more ships, more lanes, and the facilities that make all of it cheaper. Everything else in the game — wear, reputation, surveys, the bunker market, the rivals on your port pairs — is a pressure on one of those decisions.

Start your shipping line