Sailing runs on a schedule. Every ship has a week grid — seven days by twenty-four hours — and every departure you place in it is sailed for you, hour by hour, whether you are watching or not. Come back after being away and the summary shows what sailed, what it earned, and anything that stopped.
There is no separate "manual" mode and no penalty for automation: a scheduled sailing earns the full demand it can win. The skill is in the plan itself. Cargo does not spread evenly over the week — factory freight books against weekday production, spot cargo appears when a shipper is caught short, and on long lanes there is refrigerated cargo that pays to leave the moment it is packed. Survey a lane and its Hours view shows the whole pattern: how much cargo remains to be won, hour by hour, after the competition and your own sailings have taken theirs — and, at the flick of a toggle, how much moves on the pair at all. The gap between the two numbers is the fight. Nights are thinner, but so is the competition — that trade is yours to make.
Suggest schedule fills a sensible generic week for a ship: weekday sailings, a lighter weekend, quiet nights. It is a starting point, deliberately unaware of any lane's real pattern — a schedule tuned against the Hours view will beat it. Place and remove sailings by tapping the grid; passage time and port turnaround are drawn so you can see when the ship is actually free.
Note that a voyage occupies days rather than hours. That is not an oversight — it is what makes a shipping schedule a different puzzle from an airline one. A ship you commit on Monday is gone for the week, so the cost of a wrong lane is measured in the sailings you could not make instead.
The game clock runs faster than the wall clock: a full game week passes in a few real hours, so seasons turn, fleets age and weekly bills arrive at a pace you can actually watch. Being away is safe — the schedule keeps sailing for a generous window — but a plan nobody tends slowly goes stale as bunker prices, seasons and rivals move around it. Tending the plan is the game.
Wear does not pause because you are away. Set the auto survey threshold on the schedule card and the ship is serviced automatically the moment it crosses it — at the yard's normal price, with the missed sailings reported to you. The craft is in planning ahead of the rule: a survey placed in the grid as a service block, in a natural gap in the week, costs the same money and zero sailings. The wrench icon is a weekly service appointment; the overhaul remains a manual decision, and its longer yard stay blocks the grid while it lasts.
From time to time a shipper will offer you a one-off voyage, outside your lane network, paid up front at about 35% above the normal rate. It might be a project cargo, a distressed parcel, or a trader moving a cargo somewhere you do not normally sail.
Spot charters expire within the hour. There is no way to plan for them and no way to catch one while you are away — the only requirement is that you happen to be here. That is the entire mechanic: a reason to look in.
To accept one you need a ship free at the loading port with enough capacity and enough range, and bunkers in stock.
Demand on a port pair is shared between everyone who sails it — but not as one lump. Each kind of cargo judges the operators separately: commodity shippers go to whoever is cheapest, time-sensitive cargo to whoever has the speed, the reliability and the young fleet, the contract-loyal to names they know. A tramp operator and a liner operator can share a pair almost without touching each other, while two operators fighting over the same segment will feel it. Your reputation still weighs in every segment — it is the multiplier on whatever position you have taken.
Direction does matter less than you might think: Rotterdam–Shanghai and Shanghai–Rotterdam are the same market in this model. Your survey shows the demand for the whole port pair; the share you actually win depends on how you price, equip and run the lane against the others on it.
Now and then the world does something. Some of it is economic — a commodity boom, a downturn, a crude spike that lands on every bunker bill — and some of it belongs to shipping alone: a boxship across the canal, dockers walking out along a coast, ports so congested that ships wait weeks at anchor. While an event is running, a banner at the top of Operations tells you what it is and how long it lasts.
Two of them repay careful reading. A health emergency is not a crisis in this industry, it is a boom — people stop travelling and start ordering, long-haul container demand surges and rates with it. Only project cargo suffers, because the big industrial schemes get postponed. Congestion is stranger still: demand rises and your ability to meet it falls at the same time, and reefer boxes waiting outside a full port eventually lose their cargo. Everybody wants to sail there and nobody can get alongside.
Events change demand on sailings, never on surveys. What you paid to learn stays the baseline; the event is a temporary multiplier on top of it. A player who is logged in during a peak can raise rates and take the extra revenue; a schedule left untouched sails straight through on last week's rates.
Logging in on consecutive days builds a streak, shown in the top bar. Every seventh consecutive day gives you 5 cargo tokens. Miss a day and it resets to one. It is the only way to earn tokens repeatedly, and it rewards coming back rather than playing for a long time in one sitting.
Start your shipping line