Devblog #7 Battle Scars & Honest Broadsides
Battle Scars & Honest Broadsides
Ahoy, captains! This one is all about the fight itself — what your hull shows after a brawl, how the enemy actually shoots, and what you find in the wreckage.
Battle Scars That Stick
Cannonballs now tear real holes in the hull. Hits wrap onto the planking exactly where the ball struck, ride the ship through every wave, and stay until the hull is repaired. A mauled ship finally LOOKS mauled.
Broadsides walk the hull. Enemy volleys spread along your side from bow to stern instead of hammering one magic point.
Honest Broadsides (NPC overhaul)
Bots now fight with the ship they actually sail — no more phantom firepower:
Their guns are real. An NPC sloop fires the 4 cannons its broadside actually carries — from the real gun mounts, with muzzle flash and recoil on the right barrel. Damage, range and damage falloff come from the same cannon items you buy in port.
No more sniping from beyond reach. NPCs can't fire past their own cannon's range — and they close in to fight inside it. The guard that used to shell you from the horizon now has to sail into your guns.
Chain shot flies like chain shot. A chain volley arcs high through your rigging — if it rips your sails, that's because it actually passed through them. Watch the trajectory and you'll know what's coming.
Bots chain each other too. Guards cripple a fleeing pirate's canvas and run him down — fights between ships you meet at sea play out like the real thing, holes, torn sails and all.
Ram Them Amidships
Hulls now break on impact. Collide at speed and BOTH ships take hull damage — the harder you hit, the deeper it bites, and armour blunts the blow like any other hull hit. A slow bump is still just a bump.
You'll hear it. Every real collision lands with a heavy wooden crash — and if it's your own hull, you'll feel the camera take it too.
It works on everyone. Ram an NPC and the damage counts toward your share of its loot; NPCs grinding into each other pay the same price. Between players, ramming respects the PvP flags — peaceful traders can't be bumped to death in the harbour queue.
Rain Without the Storm
New weather on the schedule: plain rain. Gray skies, wet decks, rings on the water and the hiss of a steady downpour — but no lightning, no storm seas and no reefed sails. Storms stay the main event; rain is the mood between them.
The port weather forecast lists it like any other weather, and the skies got livelier overall: clear weather now shares the schedule with overcast, rain and storms.
Loot Worth Opening
Chests are a catch, not a checklist. A wreck now yields a random selection of a few kinds of goods from the ship's cargo — every chest is different, and the rare finds finally feel rare.
The Gun Line: 6, 8 and 12 Pounders
The cannons grew honest names and an honest ladder:
Cannons are now rated in pounds — the 6-pounder, the 8-pounder and the 12-pounder. Heavier gun, heavier punch: 25 / 30 / 45 damage a ball.
The whole ladder scales. Bigger guns reload slower (9 / 10.5 / 12 s) but shoot straighter, keep more of their damage at long range — and punch through armour: a 12-pounder ignores a galleon's plating entirely, while a 6-pounder loses a third of its bite against it.
One cannonball fits every gun. No more juggling ball types — the gun's calibre decides the damage. Chain shot stays the sail-ripper (and grape shot and bombs are on the horizon).
The ammo menu (B) now picks the SHOT TYPE — round or chain — and every gun loads its own; the tooltips show each gun's full card: damage, range, reload, arc, spread, penetration and crew.
Every hull has a gun class now. The starter sloop carries up to 6-pounders; bigger hulls take bigger guns. The ship panel says which class your hull mounts, and guns too heavy for it show up in the install menu greyed out with an honest "too heavy for this ship" — no more cannons silently missing from the list. (Heavier guns already mounted stay aboard until you remove them.)
The Captain's Codex
The game finally has a book. Open the Codex from the menu for a full handbook of the game: getting started, wind and sails, weather, combat, ammunition, armour, crew and provisions, ports, the workshop, the shipyard, flags and PvP — six chapters, all in one place.
Short, practical articles — including the mechanics from the recent updates that never got a manual: gunners, hunger, armour, chain shot.
Fully localized: English, Russian, Ukrainian.
Deck Life: a Friendlier Ship to Run
A pass over the everyday controls — less clicking, more sailing:
The salvage window grew up. Hold F for just one second to inspect a chest (was two). Inside: one click takes the whole stack, right-click picks an exact amount, and a Take All button grabs the lot. The footer shows the chest's weight, what your hold will look like after — and how much speed the extra cargo will cost you. Rows stay put as you take things; every item shows its quantity and weight.
Outfitting cannons is a breeze. Empty slots show a clear [ + ] chip right at the gunport — outside the hull, easy to see and click from any angle; occupied slots show the installed cannon's icon. The install menu is now a compact popup that opens NEXT to the slot you clicked (nothing covers your ship), marks the installed gun, greys out what the port has none of, and shows how many gunners each cannon needs.
Tooltips got a proper card. Hover anything — cargo, cannons, ship stats — and you get a clean card: icon, name, category, description and neat stat rows instead of a wall of text.
The reload arc now watches your aim. The ring around the ammo icon shows the readiness of the broadside you are LOOKING at — swing to the other side and it flips to that side's guns. It also sweeps after every volley, not just on ammo switches, and slows down honestly when your crew is short-handed or hungry.
Gunners hold the line. Crew losses from enemy round shot are halved — a lost fight should cost you a few hands, not the whole gun deck.
Quick slots by the wheel. The ship dial grew a four-slot bar. One click on the repair slot sends the crew patching — and the slot pulses while they work; the ammo slot shows your loaded shot with its reload sweep and opens the ammo menu on click. R and B still do what they always did, and two more slots are reserved for what comes next.
The port ship panel explains itself. Hover any row — Durability, Integrity, Defense, Crew, the new cannon-class line — and a tooltip says what the stat means and what to do about it; rows that react to a click now say so.
A Console on the Quarterdeck
Press F1 anywhere — in port, at sea, even in the main menu — and a developer console drops down: the full game log with timestamps, plus a command line.
It knows its own commands. Start typing and it suggests them with a short description of what each one does; Tab completes, the arrow keys walk back through what you typed before, and the ? button prints the whole list.
Set the scene. Force the weather to clear, overcast, rain or a full storm on your own screen (everyone else keeps the sky the sea gave them), pin the time of day, or cap your frame rate — handy for screenshots.
Made for bug reports. client.info prints your build, hardware and ping in one block, Copy puts the whole log on your clipboard, and Log folder opens the folder with the log file. If something goes wrong, one paste tells us everything we need.
Fixes
Storm rain no longer bunches into a single curtain of drops in the middle of the screen at certain headings — the sky now rains evenly all around the ship, and heavier too: the drops that used to die high above the mast now reach the deck.
Your FPS limit from the settings now applies the moment you enter the world — no more fiddling with the slider to wake it up.
Sinking now properly clears the deck: the ship HUD and the loot pickup prompt no longer linger over the death screen.
Tooltips no longer hide behind popup windows.
Sail damage no longer plays hide-and-seek after login: the ship could sail slow with holed canvas while the stats swore the sails were at 100%. The numbers now always arrive.
Rain in port used to keep pouring over the spot where you docked from — it now follows you ashore.
The gunner-hire window no longer opens half off the bottom of the screen.
Port panel polish: rows no longer tuck under the title strip, and the shipyard tracking panel lost its empty tail.
Fair winds — see you on the water.