Four numbers decide whether a ship belongs in your fleet, and they are all shown when you order one.
Range must cover the lane. There is no partial credit: a coaster will not cross the Pacific, and the game will refuse the departure rather than let you find out mid-ocean.
Draft must fit the water at both ends. A laden ultra-large ship needs a deep harbour, and a shallow feeder port does not care how much money you are willing to spend on dredging. That lane does not exist for that ship.
Bunker burn per unit is what decides profitability, and it is why the ship list in this game is not cosmetic. Consumption alone is misleading — an ultra-large container ship burns several times what a feeder burns, but carries many times the cargo. What matters is cost per unit-kilometre, and the ship reference ranks every type by exactly that.
Price is the smallest consideration of the four. A cheap old hull that loses money on every voyage is more expensive than an expensive new one that does not.
This game deliberately contains tired 1980s tonnage alongside the modern order book. The old hulls are cheap to buy and they will lose you money, because their fuel burn per unit is genuinely 25–40% worse than a modern equivalent.
That is a correction of the most common complaint about tycoon games, where obsolete tonnage somehow out-earns new ships. Here, an old hull loses to a new one because the real consumption figures say it should. If you buy one, buy it knowingly.
A ship has a number of slots, not units. Slots convert to cargo units at different rates depending on class:
| Class | Slots per unit |
|---|---|
| Dry | 1 |
| Reefer | 2 |
| Project | 4 |
A ship with 194 slots carries 194 dry units. Fit 16 reefer units and you spend 32 slots on them — power, plugs and monitoring take space — leaving 162 for dry cargo.
The hold bar in the game shows this directly: the width of each block is the slots consumed, so you can see what specialised capacity costs you.
Reefer capacity is genuinely scarce — plugs, reinforced deck and power — which is why a reefer box costs two slots rather than one. It still earns more per slot than dry cargo, or nobody would carry it.
Specialised cargo earns far more per unit. Reefer pays not quite twice the dry rate while taking twice the space, so it earns meaningfully more per slot — when it sells. The catch is in that last clause, and the reference rates in the game show you the ratio directly.
Reefer demand is a modest share of the market — larger on long lanes between big ports, small on short coastal ones — and project cargo only exists on long lanes between major gateways. Fit forty reefer plugs on a short coastal run and most of them sail empty while still costing you the slots.
Survey the lane first, then build the holds to the demand you actually found. A modest share of slots in reefer is a sane starting point on medium and long lanes, and none at all on short thin ones, but the survey is what should decide it.
The layout is not fixed at purchase. A berthed ship can be refitted — same slot rules, 2% of the list price, and a day in the yard while the holds are rebuilt. Sailings scheduled during that day are missed, so plan it like a maintenance stop: in a quiet gap in the week, and preferably before you move a ship to a lane whose customers want a different layout.
Ships here do not age in years. They age in hours under way and in port calls — one call being one arrival and one departure — because that is how ships actually age, and because it makes how you run a vessel matter as much as how long you have owned it.
Two identical ships bought on the same day can be in very different condition a month later, and the one that spent the month hopping between coastal berths is the tired one. Calls punish the hardware — mooring, cargo gear, thrusters, hull cycling in the approaches — so a coaster making a call a day wears faster than an ultra-large ship making a handful a month, despite covering a fraction of the distance. The game weights the two according to what the ship was built for.
Every voyage adds hours, one call and some wear. Old hulls pick up wear faster than new ones, so age costs you twice: once in bunkers and once in maintenance.
This one catches people out, because it is the only cost in the game that depends on your fleet as a whole rather than on the ship you are looking at.
Every additional ship class you operate raises the maintenance cost of everything you own. Every additional model within a class raises it too, by less. The reason is the one that drives real lines to order sister ships: separate spares, separate tooling, separate engineer training, separate manuals.
A line that buys whatever the sale-and-purchase market offers this week pays a premium on its entire fleet, permanently. A line that picks a class and stays inside it pays the least. The factor is capped, so variety never becomes ruinous — but it is large enough that a mixed fleet needs to be earning something for the trouble. Before ordering from a new class, work out what it does to the ships you already have.
The fleet page shows your classes and models as a number for exactly this reason. It is a cost you can only see by looking at everything at once.
You can name a preferred yard and take a discount on newbuild prices and maintenance in exchange for committing to them for a period. It is a clean trade: a real saving now against a loss of flexibility later, and the flexibility matters most exactly when something goes wrong.
Two thresholds, both shown in the fleet list:
| Stop | Cost | Out of service | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Maintenance stop | Priced by the size of the ship and how worn it is | Hours | Wear back to zero |
| Dry-docking | Several times a maintenance stop | Days | Wear back to zero and hours taken off the hull |
This follows the real pattern. A maintenance stop is a working visit alongside — worn parts replaced, systems serviced. A dry-docking lifts the ship out of the water and takes it apart down to the hull — expensive, slow, and the only thing that makes an old ship young again.
The decision is when, not whether. Running to 89% squeezes the most sailing out of each stop but pays the rush surcharge the whole way; servicing at 50% wastes money on downtime you did not need.
Reefer ships, heavy-lift vessels and ro-ro carriers are a category of their own in the ship list, not small container ships. They cost far more per slot to buy and to run, and their reward is that they take cargo nobody else can take: a reefer ship is all plugs, a heavy-lift ship carries turbines and cranes that will not fit a box, and a ro-ro drives its cargo aboard on wheels.
Treat them as a specialist tool. They will not fill themselves — the lanes that pay for them are the ones where reefer and project demand is genuinely thick — but on the right pair they earn per slot what no dry-box ship can.
The catalogue also carries gas tankers (LNG, LPG and midsize gas), car carriers, chemical and product tankers and general-cargo ships with their own cranes — the last of which reach the small ports that have no quay crane at all.
A slot in this game is a unit of revenue, not a physical box, and for specialised tonnage the two are not the same thing. A pure car and truck carrier really does take seven thousand cars — but a car deck earns roughly a third of what a container earns on the same leg: three to four hundred dollars against nine hundred to twelve hundred for a TEU. The game has one tariff per slot, so the ship is listed at the number of slots its cargo is actually worth.
The same conversion is why the gas tankers look small for their size. Their real deadweight is unchanged and is still what the bunker model burns fuel against; only the revenue side is restated. Without it, a car carrier would have been the most profitable ship in the game by a factor of four — purely because a floating car park is far lighter per slot than a container ship and burns a third of the bunker. That advantage is real. Being paid container rates for it was not.
The chemical tankers are the same conversion running the other way. A 25,000 dwt IMO II tanker with duplex stainless tanks shows 75,000 tonnes of capacity, because a parcel of chemicals pays about three times what a tonne of grain or ore pays, and the game has one tariff per tonne. It is the only reason anyone would pay fifty-five million for a small tanker instead of thirty for a bulk carrier twice its size.
Ships are registered automatically as your line code plus a sequential number: SK-001, SK-002, and so on. The number is assigned when the ship is bought and does not change.