This page explains how money works in the game — what drives demand up and down, what you pay for, and where margin comes from.
It does not give you the coefficients. That is deliberate, and it is worth explaining why before you read further.
The single most important decision in this game is which trade lanes are worth sailing, and the way you find out is by paying for a survey. If the demand formula and the underlying port data were public, you could compute demand for every port in the game in an afternoon, and the survey — along with the entire question of where to expand — would be worth nothing.
So the model is server-side and stays there. The raw traffic figure behind each port is not exposed by the API at all; try to read it and the database refuses.
What you get instead is a guarantee: the model is consistent and physical. Bunker consumption comes from real ship figures, distances follow real shipping routes rather than straight lines over land, CO₂ is a real combustion constant. Nothing is fudged to nudge you toward spending. If an old steam-era hull loses to a modern one it is because the fuel numbers say so, and if a lane disappoints there is a reason you can find.
The bunker price is the one number that is synthetic rather than sampled: there is no live commodity feed behind it. What it is not is arbitrary. It moves the way marine fuel moves — drifting, reverting towards a long-run mean, occasionally overshooting — and the scale of those movements is calibrated against real fuel statistics. That is what makes hedging a genuine judgement instead of a coin toss. Bunker and the IMO quota covers the market and the contracts.
The rest is yours to work out. Run the experiment, read the forecast, keep notes.
Demand is calculated per lane, per day, per direction, and split across the three cargo classes: dry, reefer and project.
What pushes it up: how much trade both ports already handle. Big gateways trade heavily with other big gateways. This is why the busiest lanes in the game are the busiest lanes in reality.
What pushes it down: distance, gently. The long intercontinental lanes between major gateways remain some of the densest in the world, so the penalty for distance is mild.
What kills it: very short hauls. Below a few hundred kilometres, road and rail take most of the cargo, and a hop between two ports serving the same coast is worth far less than their size suggests.
Reefer and project demand grow with distance and with the size of both ports. Project cargo does not exist on short lanes or into minor harbours, no matter how large the cities — survey a short coastal lane and the Project column will read zero.
Everything on a ship is cargo. There are no passengers at sea in this game — the three classes are Dry, Reefer and Project, and the customer is always a shipper rather than a traveller. What varies between lanes is the MIX, not whether people are aboard.
Daily demand is shared between every sailing you run on that lane. Two departures a week each see half the market. Add enough frequency and the marginal sailing carries too little cargo to cover its own costs. Finding where that line sits is one of the better puzzles in the game, and it moves depending on the ship you use.
Every lane opens at its reference rate — the rate at which roughly 85% of your capacity sells. That is the number the sliders start at, and it scales with distance. Reefer pays not quite twice the dry rate; project cargo a little over three times.
Move away from reference and the holds respond. Raise the rate and you book less cargo; drop it and you fill the ship with freight paying less than it might have. The three classes are not equally sensitive: dry cargo reacts hardest to price, project cargo barely at all. Reefer sits in between.
Underneath the classes there is a second layer, and it is the one that decides whether a rate works. Your rate is not read by an average customer — it is read by five different kinds of shipper who happen to share a vessel. A rate hunter walks away from an increase that a loyal account never notices. A quality seeker will pay above the reference rate for a ship that deserves the cargo and will not book at all onto a tired hull. A loyal account is choosing you before they choose the sailing.
Which of them are on your lane is what the survey sells, and it is why the same rate fills a ship on one port pair and half-fills it on another. What you carry describes all five in detail.
You do not have to guess at any of this. The forecast beside the sliders is computed by the same code the server runs when you dispatch, so what it predicts is what you get. Move a slider, watch the fill and the result, and you will map the curve for yourself in about a minute.
Note that low rates cannot summon cargo that does not exist. The holds fill only as far as the market and your capacity allow.
Six things are charged against every sailing:
| Cost | Driven by |
|---|---|
| Bunker fuel | Consumption × passage hours × the market price when you departed |
| Emissions quota | Fuel burned × a real combustion constant × the quota price |
| Crew | Passage hours and the size of the ship |
| Maintenance | Passage hours and the size of the ship |
| Port fees | A call charge per sailing, plus a handling charge per unit carried |
| Cargo service | Units carried and distance sailed |
Canal tolls are the seventh, when they apply: if the shortest sea path for a lane threads Suez or Panama, the toll is charged as its own line, scaled by the size of the ship. A lane that avoids the canals avoids the bill — sometimes the longer way round is the cheaper one, and sometimes it is not. The cost sheet shows you which.
Passage hours are the sea time plus a fixed allowance for pilotage and harbour manoeuvring, and port time on top is measured in hours, not minutes. A short lane pays all of that over very few kilometres, which is why very short lanes struggle even when demand exists.
Port fees come in two parts. The call charge is paid per sailing and scales with the ship and how busy the destination is — it lands on you whether the holds are full or empty. The handling charge follows every unit across the quay. A big gateway is expensive in both parts, but a half-empty ship no longer pays for cargo it never carried. Small ports are cheap; they simply have less cargo to sell to.
Charter hire, offices and shore staff are company-level costs and are not charged per sailing.
At reference rates, a well-matched ship on a decent lane returns a healthy margin — considerably better than a real shipping line manages, because a game needs room for good decisions to compound.
It collapses in four situations, and every one of them is something you chose:
There is no hidden fifth thing, and no random penalty waiting for you. If a voyage disappoints, one of those four explains it.
Start your shipping line