Oceans

Every island sits in an ocean, and an ocean is a square of sea you can sail to by its number. It holds settled shores and empty ones, and in most waters a few bare rocks nobody lives on that are worth more than they look. Learn what an ocean is, what stands in it, and what the water itself is telling you, and the chart stops being a picture and becomes a plan.

Chart & Navigation

Moving around the chart and reading the rings.

Taking Oceans

Putting an ocean to a vote and flying your flag over it.

Resources

The four ores that come only from the rocks.

The Lumen Rupture

What a storm over an ocean means.

Reading a bearing

Everything on the chart has a bearing of three numbers, Ocean:Region:Slot, with colons between them and nothing else. The first two name the sea: together they are the ocean, the square the chart shows when you pull back from an island, and the square an alliance can claim. The third is the berth inside it, the exact island or rock. Write a bearing the way the chart does; other punctuation may sit around it in a sentence, but the bearing itself keeps the colon form, so a friend can enter it and arrive.

What stands in an ocean

Most of what is drawn in an ocean is an island: your own, a rival's, one held by the Black Tide, or an empty shore waiting for a charter. The coloured rings that tell them apart are on Chart & Navigation. Not everything is an island, though. Bare rock breaks the surface in most waters, named on the chart, and nobody lives there: nothing to spy on, nothing to settle, nothing to trade with. What a rock carries is ore.

Rocks and their seams

Each rock carries one of the four ores, Ember Ore, Aegis Stone, Veilglass, Sunstone, and the coloured seam painted across its face says which: ember red, steel blue, pale violet or amber. That colour is a promise you can plan a voyage on, because the ores exist nowhere else and each one casts one kind of doctrine shot. Seams are not all the same size. The chart tells you which kind a rock carries when you look at it; how much is left in it is nobody's business until your ships tie up.

A seam puts its measure back every 12 hours on a plain-speed world, and a world running at five times speed refills it five times as often. The clock is the rock's own: it ticks whether anyone has touched the seam or not, and nibbling at a rock never delays its refill. A rock worked recently simply has less to give until the next window.

Prospecting

Send small merchant ships with the Prospect order and they work the seam until their holds are full or the visit's measure is taken, then sail home with the ore. Small hulls only: a large ship draws too much water to lie against the stone. The run leaves a report, and the ore lands in the storehouse like any other material.

Ships are the fence, not the cloth. A rock with a rival alliance's ships standing on it turns your merchants away empty when they arrive. A flag with nobody underneath it does not: you may work that seam, and the holders will hear that you did. A Governor with no alliance at all is turned away from any guarded rock.

Captain Thorne: Harbour read

Look at a rock before you send to it, not after. The order tells you whose flag flies and whether anyone is standing under it. A convoy turned away has spent a day at sea for nothing, and the holders now know your colours.

The flag and the garrison

An alliance can plant its flag on a rock by sending ships to hold it. Only small warships can lie against the stone, only foot soldiers can stand there, and every ship that ties up spends a length of Fine Rope, so a garrison of any size is something an alliance builds together rather than one Governor's afternoon. A rock holds only so much: its garrison is capped at 2,000 defence, the strongest hulls stand and the rest sail straight home with their rope unspent, and the order tells you which before you send.

The flag is the garrison. Claiming always leaves ships standing; call the last of them home and the flag comes down with them. A flag with nobody under it can be taken by any rival who simply garrisons over it, with no fight, and a Governor who leaves the alliance takes their ships with them, and the flag if nobody else stands there.

Taking a rock by force

Any fleet may attack a held rock, and the fight is an ordinary battle against the ships and soldiers standing there. Only wiping the garrison out takes the flag; a garrison that survives keeps it. After a win, only the small hulls stay to hold what they took, and any surplus above the cap sails home. The rock's ledger records the alliance that took it and never the Governor who sailed.

The rock's ledger

Every rock keeps a ledger, open to anyone who selects it, and it reads as a timeline: whose flag has flown and for how long, who tore one down, who reinforced a garrison, whose fleet was turned away and who worked the seam. All of it is named by alliance. The Governor behind a raid or a mining run is never named, only the colours they sailed under.

A flag on a rock and the ocean's claim

A rock flag reaches further than the rock. Any rival flag on a rock in an ocean, guarded or not, blocks that ocean from being claimed, and a rival flag raised on a rock while a vote is running cancels the vote. Holding the rocks is therefore the quiet way to keep an ocean out of another alliance's hands, and the first thing to clear before you put one to council. Rocks themselves pay no toll in claimed waters. The claim itself is on Taking Oceans.

Envoy Vale: Diplomatic read

An ocean vote lost to a rival flag on a rock is not lost to the voters. Clear the rock, by garrison or by force, and call the vote again. Or talk to the alliance whose flag it is; a flag comes down for less than a fleet costs.

Reading the water

The sea can change. When an ocean turns dark and heavy, with whitecaps, driving rain and lightning, one of the Risen is standing in it: a creature let through by a Lumen Rupture storms the water it stands in, and the storm clears when it moves on or dies, unless a second creature still stands in the same water. The storm is a tell and nothing more. It slows no ship, turns no fleet, and changes nothing about a voyage through it, so do not reroute a convoy around a dark sea; look for what is standing in it. You see the weather when you are looking at that ocean; the wide chart does not yet mark it.

Reference

Common questions