Facilities are shore installations you own at company level. They do not sail anywhere and they do not appear on the chart — what they do is make everything else cheaper. Each one has five levels, and each level costs half again as much as the one before it.
| Facility | What it does | Per level | Level 1 costs |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bunker depot | Raises how much bunker fuel you can hold | doubles the tank | $4,000,000 |
| Dry-dock | Yard time for surveys and overhauls | 1.5% | $6,000,000 |
| Training centre | Crew cost on every voyage | 3% | $5,000,000 |
| Lashing gang | Cargo handling cost on every voyage | 3% | $3,000,000 |
| Key account office | Perceived service, for premium and loyal shippers only | +4 | $7,000,000 |
| Reefer terminal | Lets you carry perishables at all, and cuts handling | 2% | $5,000,000 |
| Revenue desk | Brackets the profit-maximising rate on the price band | 5% | $5,000,000 |
The bunker depot gives you no discount at all. It doubles your storage per level — 20,000 tonnes at level zero, 40,000 at level one, 640,000 at level five. The base is set by what a ship actually burns: a Triple-E takes 4,500 tonnes to reach Shanghai, so a depot that held a few hundred tonnes would be a button you could never use. That is the whole mechanic: a bigger tank is what lets you buy a season's bunkers on a bad week for oil and sail on them for months. A passive percentage off every purchase would have been a button you press once and forget; a tank is a decision you take on a particular Tuesday, with a view about where the price is going.
The drydock does not discount the yard's price — it shortens the stay. Less time out of service is sailings you do not miss, felt most on the overhaul's long visit. The other discounts are visible in the forecast on your lane cards — the simulator uses exactly the same numbers the server does, so what you are shown is what you get.
Every sailing you settle adds half a percentage point of wear to all your facilities. This is the part that makes them a decision rather than a purchase.
Maintenance costs 8% of what that level cost to build and resets wear to zero immediately. There is no downtime — the facility keeps working while the work is done.
The practical consequence: a large operator running hundreds of voyages wears its facilities down fast and has to budget for upkeep. A small one can build a bunker depot and forget about it for a long time. Neither is wrong, but ignoring the condition bar is how a discount quietly turns into nothing.
There is no single answer, and that is deliberate. Bunkers are the biggest single line in most cost breakdowns, so the depot pays back soonest — but only if you actually watch the price and buy when it dips. If your ships are old or hard-worked, the drydock earns its keep, because shorter yard stays mean fewer sailings lost to maintenance. The provisioning unit only matters when you are carrying a lot of units; on thin lanes it is close to noise.
Look at your own cost breakdown on a lane card before spending. The game will not tell you which one is right for your network, and that is the point.
Start your shipping line