Ships

Introduction

Nine commandable vessel classes ship with Early Access, and the differences between them go far beyond top speed. Displacement governs how much inertia you have to manage, hull form decides how strongly bank and squat effects bite, and equipment fit determines whether you even have the systems a given mission expects. The tier ranking in this section expresses handling difficulty rather than quality: an S-tier tugboat is not better than a C-tier LNG tanker, it is simply the hull on which a new captain is least likely to make an expensive mistake. Every ship page covers what the vessel is for, how it behaves at low speed, which systems it carries and which mission families it is the natural answer to, so you can decide both what to buy first and what to leave until your licence tier and your patience have grown.

Ship Classes by Handling Difficulty

Class Breakdown

Core Mechanics

Ship behaviour in this simulation comes down to four numbers you should learn to feel rather than memorise. Displacement sets how long you need to stop; the developers model inertia seriously enough that a loaded bulk carrier takes a berthing approach measured in kilometres of planning rather than metres of braking. Hull form and draft determine squat and bank effect, which means a deep-draft hull in a narrow channel behaves differently from the same hull in open water. Thruster fit decides how much of your low-speed manoeuvring you can do without a tug, and equipment fit decides which systems you can actually operate. The result is that the honest way to learn a new hull is to take it somewhere open, feel its response to the telegraph, then bring it into a harbour you already know well.

Advantages

Working through the ship classes in order gives you a natural difficulty curve, and because the smaller hulls are the ones you can actually afford early on, the progression the game nudges you toward also happens to be the one that teaches you properly. Each class also has a clear speciality, which means a small fleet is more useful than one big ship: a tug for harbour work, a trawler for fishing income and a transport hull for the long hauls covers most of the mission board. Finally, because the sim tracks hull damage and flooding, learning on a forgiving vessel is genuinely cheaper — a mistake in a tugboat costs credits, the same mistake alongside a quay in an LNG tanker costs the whole contract.

Challenges

The obvious drawback is that the interesting hulls are locked behind progression, and the licence tiers that gate them take time to climb. Large vessels also demand more of the bridge systems you may not have learned yet, so a captain who rushes the ladder will find a container ship unfriendly rather than impressive. There is also a real gap between official documentation and how a hull actually feels: the store page lists nine classes, the developer feature list splits several of them more finely, and handling notes beyond that are almost entirely community-sourced. Treat any single number as provisional and test the hull yourself before committing credits.

Frequently Asked Questions

Quick Tips