Every trade lane starts at one of your ports. The opening fee scales with distance and with how busy the destination is — a berth into a major gateway costs several times what a small harbour costs, before you have carried a single container.
Distances are sea distances, not straight lines. A lane from Rotterdam to Singapore is measured the way a ship would actually sail it — through the Channel, Gibraltar and Suez — and if the shortest path threads Suez or Panama, every sailing on the lane pays the canal toll, scaled by the size of the ship. The toll appears as its own line on the cost sheet, so you can see exactly what the shortcut costs.
You can open a lane you cannot yet sail. Nothing stops you buying Helsinki to Singapore on day one; the game will simply refuse every departure until you own a ship with the range and the draft to make it. Opening lanes ahead of your fleet is a legitimate strategy if you expect the fee to rise as you grow, and a waste of money if you are wrong.
A new lane shows no demand at all. To see it you buy a survey, and the price scales with the size of your company — information costs more when it is worth more to you.
This is the central economic decision in the game. You cannot compute demand yourself; the model and the data behind it live on the server and are not published. So every survey is a bet: you are paying to find out whether a lane is worth sailing, and sometimes the answer is no and the money is gone.
Some things you can reason about before paying:
None of that is precise enough to replace a survey, which is the point.
Rates are set per class and persist until you change them. Every lane opens at its reference rate, and the forecast beside the sliders updates as you drag.
Beside each slider is a rate band: the range the market on that lane expects to pay. The band is not a rule and the game will happily let you price outside it. What the band tells you is where you stop being a normal carrier on that lane and start making a statement — well under it you are a discount operator whether you meant to be or not, well over it you are selling something the shippers have to be able to see.
Which customers you keep when you move depends on who is on the lane. Spot shippers leave over a small increase that a loyal account never registers; time-critical shippers do not appear at all below a certain standard, whatever the rate. The five groups are described in What you carry, and the survey is what tells you their shares on this particular pair.
The forecast uses the same code the server runs when you dispatch, so it is not an estimate — it is the answer, given the ship, the survey and the current bunker price. The only thing that can change between forecast and outcome is the fuel market and how many other sailings you run that day.
A practical method: set the ship you intend to use, then walk the dry-cargo slider from one end to the other and watch the result figure rather than the fill. Peak profit is usually a little above the reference rate on thin lanes and a little below it on dense ones, but the shape depends on your hold layout and your ship, so find it yourself.
Pick a ready ship berthed at the lane's origin and dispatch. Three checks run on the server before the sailing is accepted:
Then the outcome is computed and locked in. The voyage takes real time — passage hours based on the ship's service speed plus an allowance for pilotage and harbour manoeuvring — and pays out when it arrives. A deep-sea leg is measured in days, and one departure a week on a lane is a perfectly normal liner service.
You do not need to be online when it arrives. Everything that came in while you were away is settled the next time you open the game, in one go. Closing the browser costs you nothing.
Lines in the same alliance can charter slots from each other. Put your name on a partner's sailing and you sell space on a ship you do not operate; let them do the same on yours. The operating line still sails the ship and still carries the cost — what changes is that the lane reaches customers who would otherwise never have seen it.
This is the cheapest way to reach a market you cannot serve, and the cheapest way to give a partner access to yours. It is also a commitment: a slot charter is worth having only if the partner runs the lane properly, because your name is on a sailing you do not control.
Bunker fuel is deducted from your tanks at departure, so you must buy it in advance. Run dry and the departure is refused.
IMO emissions quota works differently: if you do not hold enough, the sailing still departs, and the uncovered emissions are bought on the spot at 75% over the market, charged to that voyage's cost sheet. A standing auto-buy order cuts the premium to 15% — cheaper, but still dearer than covering yourself at a price dip. Either way nothing breaks and nothing is refused; you just pay for not planning.
Prices for both move every 30 minutes. The spread is wide enough that timing your purchases matters and narrow enough that it cannot win the game for you.
Start your shipping line