When starting a new game, you get to rename your captain (main pirate) and world, as well as choose a mode. If you're just starting off, it should be immediately obvious what mode to play, unless you like having to restart every time you die or want to just fight off waves of pirates.



These questions explain themselves. Personally, I chose a sickening world, a great war and a brave father for the Falcon Blade. The Falcon Blade is pretty sweet, and I'm still using it 9 hours in.



As of the date this guide was first written, you cannot customize your character; you can only click the "Change Look" button to generate another character. The characters are hilarious, because they all look and sound like Tamagotchis.

As you can see, there's a box with the controls written on it. A and D to move the camera, Left Mouse Button to move and Spacebar to open the menu. You can also use Esc to open the menu. Q and E zoom in and out. Parrots are currently unimplemented, and even if you find one, you won't be able to tame it. In fact, you can't tame any animal (or I'm just too stupid to figure out how), so don't buy the Animal Capture skill.



Move to the right, and there will most likely be a big building with many people in it, as well as a few other ones. The large one is a tavern. Staying in the tavern will increase the morale of your pirates. If morale is low, pirates will stop responding to commands and eventually turn on each other and attack. Having a tavern nearby or keeping morale-increasing items in your inventory is incredibly essential to not dying, because sometimes pirates will not get off your ship to go to a tavern automatically or drink from a rum item that you've put onto your ship. These will likely be fixed soon, as I'm 99% sure they're bugs. The other buildings are shops. There will also be animals. Click on the animals to kill them. They do not swarm you altogether as soon as you attack one, so it should be pretty easy to kill them all. When you go into the menu screen, it also shows the health of you, your crewmates and any killable mobs.



After killing all the mobs, you will probably level up. If you don't, go into the menu, hit "Your Crew," click on you, then click on "Passive Equip." You can then click on any feathers a chicken may have dropped. As shown in the picture, feathers grant 100xp each. Levelling increases TP, which let you use skill books and increase your stats. Your attributes like damage, HP regeneration and ranged damage go up every 10 stat points. If you don't mind your ship being completely covered in poop for some time, you can use these points to round off your stats a bit. I recommend keeping at least 5 TP points, or else you will have to wait until you have enough TP to use a skill book.



Go to the shop that has bookshelves. Right now, I would buy Cleaning (your pirate picks poop and empty bottles up and dropkicks them off your ship) or Parry Basics (you have a chance to deflect a hit). For some reason, almost everything in the game knows how to parry. I have been parried by an angry crate, which bled after I killed it. Map Reading increases the amount of encounters you see on your map, which would otherwise show as Bad Map Reading question mark signs.



Quick Tips

• Always have a way to recover morale and hunger
  
• If an action never happens when you have the equipment to do it (e.g. fishing), you probably need to buy and use the correct skill book for that action first
  
• Try and keep around 5 TP or some levelling items in your inventory to learn skills with
  
• The orange buttons on the bottom are extremely useful and do not currently have keyboard shortcuts, so get to know them

To start, I would build a simple 3x1 line like so. It doesn't exactly scream masterful pirate vessel, or anything boat-related at all, but this is what some other places tell you to do and I don't see a problem with it. You can add some corner blocks if you're feeling fancy. Click the blocks to rotate them. Do not make any dark spaces if you don't have any lamps, or spider webs will appear. These spider webs spawn spiders, which are definitely not friendly to you.



To start sailing, get onto your boat and click World Map. Faces on a red background represent enemies. You can avoid them, with a success rate that's apparently 60%. Faces on a greenish background represent neutral sailors. You can avoid them with a success rate that's SUPPOSEDLY 100%. I have actually failed to escape from a neutral sailor once, which is guaranteed to be a bug. The big highlighted icons are legendary enemies: I have yet to face one. Go ahead and attack a pirate, they should be easy pickings. You gain XP while you sail.



It seems that I have been attacked by fishmen. Usually the enemies will be pirates, and you grapple onto the enemy boat and attack them head-on, or fire cannons if you have cannons, ammo and the Cannon Mastery skill. This is actually the first time I have ever seen a fishman.



The fishmen catapulted out of the water and back into it. They drowned or something, because I heard a squealing noise. Now I'm fighting a pirate, which is what I actually expected.



Grapple onto the enemy boat and click the bad guy. Fighting is automatic. If you have an ultimate skill (impossible at this point in this game, but just for reference), it will activate by itself when your HP becomes too low.



I won, so now I have two choices: I can either take this boat for myself, or plunder it for everything on the boat. If there is a chest on the boat, open it by clicking the middle orange button on the bottom of the screen, Interact. This boat looks pretty sweet and even comes with food (fruit and fish), so I'm going to keep it. Some foods, like fish require someone with the Cooking skill to process it first before you can eat it. Every crew member action except moving to a specific location is totally automatic. If you opt to plunder a boat instead, it explodes. Currently, plundering still looks wicked sick.



An old man is an event. Based on my experience, you get a big XP boost every time when you go to an event as a single person. If you go with multiple people, you always get blackmailed for some amount of money.



Unsurprisingly, I got this screen, a choice between a gigantic XP boost or 2 TP. Sadly, leftover XP does not carry to the next level, so your bar will go way up, and then go back to 0 once you level.



Small little tan boat-tree looking things are islands. Islands have various things on them, such as Tribal Hooks (apparently, they spawn 2-4 enemies), Totem Poles (grant a TP boost or spawns 3 enemies to attack you, all with the Brutalizer weapon), Campfires (restores the morale of your captain) or chests (obvious). There will often be many enemies, such as these hoboes. The white sign on the top of these mobs means that they will not attack unless you attack first, although hoboes still attack you anyways for whatever reason. The one that looks like a weird carrot also means this. I knocked one into the water, and now it is drowning. Any creature that goes into the water will drown and die, including your crew members. The only way to prevent this is to equip a Life Buoy. You cannot grapple onto your ship when you are drowning, or on a sinking ship.



There are so, so many enemies here, so I will use a very cheap method to get rid of some of them. If you grapple back and forth and hit once each time, it will be extremely difficult for enemies to hit you, as it takes around a second or so for them to notice you. If they are pressed up against the edge, they may be knocked into the water.

EDIT: This method is no longer very good against pirate ships, as they can now grapple to your ship.



Sadly, knocking an enemy into the water means that their loot goes with them. This method works all the way up to level 4 enemy pirates, at which point it will work more or less randomly. That is because at level 4, pirates and sailors have cannons. Cannons damage everything, including the teammates of whoever fired it. Currently, enemies will fire cannons at their own ships, so they will bring you down with them. If you grapple back to your ship when they fire their cannon, the cannonball will hit your ship and it may sink. Once you kill all human enemies, the game goes into slo-mo for a few seconds to let you reflect on how great a job you did. Now you can loot to your heart's content.

Quick Tips

• Place a lamp at any shadowy spots on your ship, or spiders and cobwebs will eventually spawn there
  
• Try not to make your ship too nice to lose; losing your ship can happen easily with enemy boat encounters level 4 and above
  
• Do not fight while near the edge of the ground, or knockback will take care of you
  
• If your character is not strong enough, do not try and take multiple enemies at the same time
  
• You can direct your characters individually in the menu by hovering over the "Move & Attack" button located next to their health bar
  
• Make sure you have the right equipment equipped before you try and fight - you don't want to be using a fishing rod instead of a Falcon Blade
  
• Tortoises are surprisingly strong
  
• To kill a crate, hit it until it dies

So you've done pretty well as a one-man army. However, what if you hit a roadblock that you can't get over with just one person, and you're too lazy to save scum? What if you want another person to take hits for you? This chapter covers this, and more.



To hire someone, go to a tavern and hit the spacebar. I don't think the jobs that are randomly assigned actually count for anything, as everyone you hire only comes with one skill, Basic Attack. I just hire whoever has the best point value for my money, or whoever is the best if I've got money to spend. This is a rarity, as skill books are pretty expensive, especially ones that teach ultimate skills (which are AWESOME).



I hired Devon Knights, just because I wanted to make sure that pirates really don't come with any special skills based on their job. His information is shown above.

As you can see, he is snarky, sickly and a fisherman. I don't know if being snarky actually does anything. Sickly means that his HP is lower than usual, as well as his strength. Another trait you may encounter is Fat, which makes the pirate's movement slower, but increases HP and possibly strength. Being athletic increases movement speed, and possibly HP and strength as well. I have no idea what being stalky would mean in terms of this game. Some pirates apparently do come with a skill based on their job, but this one didn't.



Now that I have a second crew member, I will have to have more food and morale items on hand. Buy some food and rum to place onto your ship. As mentioned previously, rum may not be drunk automatically, so you must still be careful with morale. If you do a lot of fighting, Ginger Beards are the best possible item to equip for morale, adding 4 morale per attack. You can also click "Pay Salary" on the crew member's info page to restore their morale fully. Food will always be eaten automatically. If you teach one of your pirates to cook, cooking will also be automatic. Food has more value the more servings it makes. This means that a single 13-serving soup item will cost less than 13 1-serving fruit items. You will be able to find better and more exotic items like soup the farther you travel.

Quick Tips

• If you don't like someone you've hired, ditch them as fast as possible
  
• Always make sure everyone is on the boat when you sail, or any crew members not on the boat will teleport into the water and die
  
• The best items for morale that I've found are the Ginger Beard and the Eye Patch, in that order
  
• Don't spend too many grindstones on an item: I stopped upgrading my Falcon Blade at 5 damage, 1.64 attack speed, 4 knockback and 0.02 range, because at this point grindstones had become almost useless on it

I'm going to go around on my regular save from here to get a level 4 pirate encounter, because I don't want to grind all the way to that point again when I can just do this. I like level 4 encounters because the pirates themselves are still relatively weak but with some careful maneuvering, you can grab their nice ships and cannons. On my regular save, my two characters were athletic and fat. The fat crew member had a huge amount of HP, so I used him as a sponge to soak up damage while my captain wiped out all the enemies. In a game as open as this one, there are many strategies to try and not fail at using.



This save has an excellent example of what I've decided to call extreme morale retardation, or EMR. Jason Allain, the unhappy red-face morale pirate simply refuses to do anything but play cards, eat and move around the ship when his morale is low. Even after removing the pack of cards from my ship, he will not drink rum or go down to the island to the tavern to obtain more morale. This makes him costly, a hefty 343 gold sum to make normal every now and then if I do not have any morale items in my inventory or manage to get him to a tavern in time. The other crew member, Debera Trollope also has EMR, but it appears to pop up randomly, as I have seen him (her?) drink rum on the ship. I have already sunk many resources into making the 3 pirates I have into unstoppable badasses with a huge library of skills, so I cannot afford to lose them now. If you find that a crew member has EMR, the first thing you should do is SELL THEM AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. Then, replace them. The longer you wait, the more money you will have wasted.



Anyways, back to what I was going to do before: find and murder some level 4 pirates. Optimally, you should have at least 3 crew members with over 60 hp that deal over 10 damage per hit. You likely will not win a cannon battle, unless you have more cannons and cannoneers than them. You have to rush onto the other boat and attack them head-on, preferably when they're halfway to loading their cannons. The best case scenario is that they're frozen at their cannons, unable to do anything because they're stuck trying to arm the cannons while your crew pummels them. They might fire their cannons. If you hear a click or see a shot, RUN! With a strong enough crew, the worst case scenario for this action is that all the cannons fire and everybody dies. If you run back to your ship quick enough, you may escape drowning with the enemies. Then, you can plunder their boat. It will be plundered under water. Otherwise, the worst case scenario is that you get overpowered by the enemy crew and slaughtered wholesale. Constantly monitor your crew to make sure they aren't close to death.

Remember: if you aren't strong enough, go back and grind some more.


Quick Tips

• If you have armed and fired cannons, wait a few seconds before heading out. Sometimes, cannons fire late, which can be very nasty.
  
• If you see level 4 encounters popping up when you are weak (less than 3 crew members, <50 HP per crew member, <8 damage per hit with slow hits), it's best to go back if you are short on healing items
  
• Speed is key when fighting battles where both people have cannons: slip in before they can fire them, and slip out when they do (at themselves)
  
• The Talisman of Hate and especially the Tribal Shield are fantastic for combat
  
• Use the menu to check out the fight's status and move your pirates around

Congratulations: you should now know of a way to reduce losing all the time! More importantly, you should now know how to play the game. This guide will be updated as I receive suggestions, as the game develops further and as I play the game more.

TL;DR

• Watch the morale of you and your crew
  
• Always have useful items on hand, such as ones that increase morale
  
• Use the menu to your advantage
  
• Don't stand near the edge of the ground during fights
  
• If you die a lot, go back and grind some more
  
• Leave some TP for skills
  
• Don't make your ship too valuable to lose, especially when ship encounters begin to be level 4 and above
  
• Don't take on more than you can handle

Some Ways You Can Lose

• Losing all of your HP
  
• Losing all of your hunger
  
• Losing all of your morale
  
• Being in water without a Life Buoy equipped
  
• Killed by a mutinous crew member (morale of crew member drops to 0)
  
• Drowned by being on a sinking ship (yours or theirs)
  
• Drowned by being whacked into the water (a very humiliating way to die is being killed by a chicken or other bad mob this way)