Maps & Harbours

Introduction

Two large sailing regions ship with Early Access, and both are built from real height and depth data rather than hand-drawn approximations. Rügen covers roughly sixty by one hundred and twenty kilometres of the German Baltic, taking in the approaches to Stralsund, Sassnitz and Greifswald. The Strait of Dover is the larger of the two at roughly one hundred and forty kilometres square, spanning the channel between England and France with Dover and Ramsgate as its main hubs. Between them they hold more than forty harbours, around twenty of which offer radio-menu mission tasking, plus thousands of real-life seamarks and obstacles with functioning navigation lighting. Offshore wind farm and oil platform areas support logistics and firefighting work, dense commercial traffic fills the shipping lanes, and a tile-based map system is designed to accept future regions and scenery add-ons.

Regions at a Glance

Regions & Harbours

Core Mechanics

Each region plays to a different skill. Rügen is the friendlier of the two: coastal transits are relatively short, the harbours are numerous, and there is enough open water to make mistakes recoverable while still offering confined berths for practice. The Strait of Dover is the shipping-lane map, where the challenge is not the water but the traffic — dense commercial movement in defined lanes means collision avoidance stops being theoretical, and the AIS and CPA workload rises sharply. Around twenty harbours across both regions issue mission tasking over a radio menu, which turns geography into an economy: your choice of base determines which contract families are conveniently available and how much empty transit you eat between jobs.

Advantages

Real survey data is the feature that makes these maps worth learning. Approaches, shoals, channel widths and depths behave the way the charts describe, so time spent studying a harbour genuinely transfers into a better first attempt. Seamarks and navigation lights are placed to real-world positions, which means night navigation is a test of chart literacy rather than of memory. The tile-based structure means the world is designed to grow, and because there are two very different regions available from launch, you can move between the forgiving Baltic coast and the demanding channel without buying anything extra. That economy of location is easy to underestimate until you notice how much of a session is spent repositioning.

Challenges

The map size is a double-edged feature. Long transit legs are genuinely atmospheric the first few times and then become pure overhead, which is exactly the problem Fast Travel exists to solve but which still shapes how you plan a session. Dense AI traffic in the Strait of Dover is unforgiving: a captain who is still learning collision avoidance will find the channel stressful rather than exciting. Offshore areas and scenic detail are also still developing in Early Access, and the more specialised installations are better suited to the logistics and firefighting mission families than to casual exploration. Planning around it is straightforward once you accept that Fast Travel exists to remove empty legs rather than to skip content.

Frequently Asked Questions

Quick Tips