A port is a place, not a three-letter code. Click one — on the chart or in any list — and you get its page: who calls there, who the shippers there have heard of, and what sort of port it is.
The facts. Name, city, country, size class and channel depth. The depth is the hard limit: a berth dredged to 11 m will never take a loaded capesize, whatever you are willing to pay. The size class is a coarse 1–10 hint about how much cargo the port moves.
What you will not find is a tonnage figure or a demand estimate. Those exist, they drive the whole model, and they stay on the server. Working out which lanes are worth sailing is the game; a survey is how you buy the answer.
Your presence. Your awareness here, the lanes you run through it, your terminal if you have one, the shore staff load if it is one of yours, and any campaign you are running. See Awareness and campaigns for what those numbers do.
Who calls here. Every operator serving the port, how many lanes each of them runs through it, and whether it is one of their home terminals. Counted from lanes rather than from sailings, so computer-run operators appear too. What any of them earns is not shown, because it is not something you could find out by standing on the quay.
Who they have heard of. Awareness at this port, highest first. This is the one competitive number that is public, and deliberately so: a brand nobody outside the company can assess is not a brand.
The climate, in words rather than a score:
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Open | Nobody serves it. There is usually a reason — check the depth. |
| Quiet | One or two operators. The cargo is mostly theirs, for now. |
| Contested | A handful share it. There is room, and somebody will notice you. |
| Crowded | Six or more, or a very dense network. Money is made here, but not at list rate. |
This is derived from two counts anybody could make: how many operators call here and how many lanes they run. It is not a difficulty rating out of a model, and there is no number behind it to optimise against.
Some ports carry a visible label:
The label is public and it tells you which way the cargo mix leans. How far it leans is not published, and it is not derivable from anything on screen — it is part of the demand model, and a survey is still the only way to find out what a specific port pair actually holds.
A lane between two labelled ports carries both characters. Rotterdam to Shanghai is a trading lane and a transshipment lane at once, and it fills differently before Chinese New Year than after it.
Every six weeks a host port is announced, and the announcement comes fourteen days before the games open. During the week of the games, every lane with one end at the host carries 50% more demand.
The warning is the mechanic. Everyone is told at the same moment, in the same news feed. Whether you have a terminal within range, a spare ship, and the nerve to open a lane on the strength of an announcement is the entire decision. Nothing stops you from opening one on the last day either — you just catch less of it.
The skilled computer-run operators read the announcement too, and you will see them move. That is intentional: a world that does not react to its own news is scenery.
Start your shipping line