Reports & Dispatches

The Governor's Desk is where the island stops whispering and starts keeping records. Strikes, spy voyages, shipments, world notices, and approaching fleets all pass through it, but not with the same urgency.

Combat

How engagements resolve and what battle reports contain.

Espionage

Reconnaissance missions and the intelligence they produce.

Fleet

Shipments, garrison movements, and delivery records.

The Daily Chronicle

The morning paper, its four pages, and the fourteen-day Almanac shelf.

Who writes to you

One voice per island. A dispatch about one of your islands (full stores, finished works, hungry people) comes from that island's steward, or from Master Quill until you seat one. Everything else, and every report, is signed by Master Quill. The one exception is a reply to a problem you reported: it comes from the game's maker, by name, and its title carries your report's number.

Four tabs, four kinds of attention

The Desk separates what needs your eyes now from what belongs in the realm's memory.

• Desk: your dispatches, the personal notices and reports. Battles, raids, espionage, colonisation, trade, transport, sealed letters, storage warnings, friend requests, world decrees, and replies to problems you reported arrive here.
• News: World News, the public record of the realm. It carries battles, alliance movement, rankings movement, arrivals, notices, and proclamations, and keeps the Daily Chronicle's back issues.
• Events: the larger struggles, where wars between the same sides gather into a running ledger.
• Tower: the Watchtower, live warning for incoming attacks on your islands, drawn from the Watch-Tower. No tower means no advance warning. A red dot on the Tower tab means a fleet is inbound on one of your islands right now.

Dispatches are the personal pile

Dispatches merge personal notifications with formal reports. A battle report can sit beside a transport notice, a sealed anonymous letter, a storage warning, or an official decree. Pinned world notices stay near the top while their seal is still fresh.

Reports in the dispatch pile open into the full parchment. Notifications that point at a report lead to the same record, so the Desk avoids showing the same event twice when the report is already present.

A Harbour correction filed on the Desk is a plain written notice. Its detail keeps the explanation, and Read the correction opens that particular leaflet on the Chronicle shelf. It waits for a Governor's attention rather than unfolding on arrival. In the Underworld, the notice keeps the complete explanation without a path to the unavailable Chronicle.

Some attacks also create a sharper surface warning. The Island Attacked alert remains tied to that specific attack notice until it is opened.

Sorting the pile and keeping what matters

Recent holds only the last two days and whatever you have not yet read. The Showing line above it reaches further back. Pick a kind first, Battles, Raids, Espionage, Prospecting, Cargo or Warnings, and the Desk searches your whole record for it, not only the last two days. A direction narrows it again: Incoming gathers everything done against you (attacks, raids, plunder runs and spies sent at your islands, blockades, ambushed convoys, the tower's warnings); Outgoing gathers your own strikes, including the ones turned away before they landed. Raids and Incoming together is every raid on your shores. The order can run newest first, oldest first, or unread first.

A report worth keeping can be starred from its footer, wherever your own report opens: on the Desk, from a report link, or in an island's Intelligence ledger. Starred reports wear a gold frame in the pile and wait under Starred however old they grow, long after Recent has let them go, listed in the order you starred them. Starring is your own mark: a teammate's shared report cannot be starred, and a teammate reading a report you shared never sees yours.

Like reports fold into one

A night of prospecting would bury the Desk under a dozen identical hauls, so reports of one kind that land close together share a single card: 12 hauls came home, with what they brought and from how many rocks. Hauls, cargo and raids fold when each lands within two hours of the one before; battles, spies and warnings within half an hour.Warnings fold per island, so two shores under threat never share a card. A report you have not read never joins a card you already have: new reports fold among themselves, and join the older card only once read. A card of your own raids or attacks names the islands it struck.

Open the card from the bar along its foot, or tap it, and every report is listed oldest first, each opening as it always did. Opening the card reads them all at once. A loss never folds. A battle you lost, a raid beaten off, a spy caught, an island razed: each keeps its own red row, even in the middle of a run of hauls. A starred report stands alone too, and so does every letter written to you: each says something of its own. Folding only changes how the pile is drawn; a kind filter still finds every report inside a card.

Master Quill: Read the red first

A folded card is routine by definition. If something went wrong in the night, it is the red row beside the card, never inside it.

Desk Notices: what reaches you

The bell beside the Desk filters opens Desk Notices. Fold similar reports sits first, on until you turn it off; off returns the pile to one row per report. Below it, routine word can be quieted: prospecting hauls (a run turned away, or one that finds the seam empty, always speaks), cargo arrivals between your own islands (cargo sent by another governor, and any failed delivery, always comes through), marketplace sales and garrison movements.

One alarm can be quieted too: Black Tide sightings. Off, the Tide's approach is filed quietly, with no phone alert and no light on the Desk, but your Watch Tower still shows the fleet, and the battle report still comes when it lands. A warning of a governor's fleet always sounds.

Quieting never throws word away. A quieted note is still written, read already, and waits under Showing: Quieted; it simply never lights the Desk or reaches your device. Battles, raids on you, spies caught and any governor's fleet have no switch at all.

World News is public memory

World News is not chat. It is the public record of what the realm will remember: who arrived, which banner moved, where major blows landed, when rank changed, and which decrees were proclaimed.

World News has two tabs. Live is the running record, newest first, and it opens on the latest every time; fresh news slides in at the top while you read. The "Showing: All" line above it narrows the record to the waters around your own islands, to your alliance, or to ocean politics, and can rank it by what matters most instead of what came last. Chronicle holds the Almanac shelf, where the printed editions of The Daily Chronicle are kept from previous mornings. Harbour Board leaflets stay there too: correction cards carry their version, date, title and short explanation without an engraving. Reopening a leaflet from the shelf does not mark pending notices read. Conflicts have their own tab, Events, where larger struggles between the same sides gather into a running war ledger.

Blows that belong together share one card: wave after wave against one island by the same attacker, one raider's run across many islands, the Black Tide breaking on one shore, an alliance raising or losing its sea rocks, a run of new arrivals within a couple of hours. Open the card to read each blow in the order it landed. A raid on an island nobody holds only counts inside such a run; it never earns a card of its own.

Your alliance's own chat gathers harder: every blow one attacker lands on any of your alliance's islands shares a single card, until they have been quiet for twelve hours. An attacker the realm cannot name keeps one card per island.

A battle card tells what the blow cost. A raid run carries off a total in plunder and names the harbour it sailed from; a raid on a single island names that island and the Governor who held it. A siege counts its waves, the fallen and what was seized. Open the card's rows from the bar along its foot: each blow shows its island, its Governor and its haul. Tap the card for the losses on each side and the plunder by resource.

Every battle reaches World News, whoever fought it. A Governor's Attacks and raids row in Alliance Feed Sharing (Alliance, Operations, Feed, Configure) decides only what their own alliance hears of their raids.

Ranked by Top, the record puts the heaviest news first: a fallen harbour or a freed shore outranks a routine raid, and a card sinks as it ages, so yesterday's great siege gives way to this morning's. Latest orders cards by their newest news, so a siege that takes another wave comes back to the top.

Tap a card to open it. It names the Governors and the island it is about, with a button to each, and a way to its shared report, its vote or its war where it has one. You can react from there too; the chips under a card count each reaction and mark your own, but never say who else reacted.

A public card tells only what the realm could see. An attacker who sailed unmarked is "an unknown force", with no name and no home harbour, though what was taken and who fell still show, and a card never lists who stood in a garrison. Those details reach only the alliance the battle concerned. When the fighting widens into a true war, the conflict ledger keeps the long score: sides, fallen, structural damage, recent harbours struck, participants, and battle log.

When no urgent dispatch or watch warning is demanding attention, the Signal Desk can broaden into a slow Chronicle ticker above the chart. Opening it leads to the entry being shown.

Reports answer what actually happened

A report is the durable account behind a mission or delivery. Reports are stored by type and can be filtered when the archive grows heavy:

• Battle: outcome, losses, plunder, and structural damage from siege engines.
• Creature strike: a report of its own kind for a fleet that landed on one of the Risen during a Lumen Rupture. It measures the hurt against the mark, names the ships lost, says what came home unspent, and tells you what to bring next time. The killing blow opens its report from the notice.
• Raid: stores seized from unclaimed islands, ships lost, and raiding pressure.
• Colonisation: founded settlement, razed holding, liberation, or failed charter.
• Espionage: mission outcome and intelligence gathered from spy work.
• Trade and transport: marketplace exchanges, harbour dues, shipment delivery, and storage overflow.
• Prospecting: what your merchants dug from a sea rock, or why they were turned away. These are titled Prospecting but sit with trade and transport when you filter.

A battle or raid you won lists the haul one resource to a row, with the total underneath. Under it the report says whether your holds were full and how much was left on the shore, or how much room they had to spare. If your home Storehouse cannot take the haul in, it warns you: whatever does not fit will spoil.

Opening a report marks it as read. New reports are highlighted in the list while they remain unopened, even after the Desk has already been consulted for the day.

Watching the battle

A battle report can be played out on the water: the fleets' approach, any patrol that barred the way, the landing, the siege and the outcome, round the island itself. Press the play mark beside Share at the foot of the report; drag the bar to move through it, Again plays it from the start, and Speed runs it at two or four times. The ending always matches the report: every count finishes on its numbers, and ships go down only where it records losses. In a large fleet one ship on the water stands for several, and the manoeuvres in between are the painter's. The battle was decided by the strength of each side, not by aim or luck, so the replay shows how it ended, never a way it might have gone differently.

Every fought battle can be watched: an attack, a raid, a colonisation, a combined attack from several of your islands, an alliance operation, and a patrol's fight with a blockade. A combined attack's fleets sail in from each island they left. A plunder run and a spy mission cannot be watched; there was no battle to show.

Any battle can be watched, not only your own. A Desk report about one carries a Replay mark that plays it, a news card a play button (on a card that gathers several blows, each opened row has its own), a war's battle timeline shows Watch beside each battle, and News and the Desk can be filtered to With replay.

A replay shows only what its reader may know. Your own battle plays from your copy of the report: a beaten attacker sees the defenders they felled, never those still standing, and an unmarked fleet flies no flag. A battle you were not in is drawn from what the harbours say: no names the news would not give, no counts, and the fleets only roughly their size.

Some moments are worth seeing even without a battle. When a colony ship founds a colony on an empty island, its replay is the christening: the islanders gather under the pole and your alliance's flag climbs it. Take an island that was held, and the christening follows the battle. A Governor without an alliance raises no flag; the harbour fires a salute instead. A Watch Tower's warning that the Black Tide is coming carries a Watch mark in the Desk that shows its black sails crossing a night sea.

When reviewing a specific island on the chart, its Intelligence gathers everything known about that shore. The Ledger tab narrows the archive to earlier spy, raid, and attack reports against it. Consult it before ordering another fleet; it preserves when the island was last scouted, stripped, or struck, and opens each report for the full account. Its two filters divide the same record: your own reports, and the alliance activity your comrades have shared against that shore.

The Operations tab holds the alliance's standing order on that island. Any member may set one (attack, raid, defend, watch, or leave it alone) with a note saying why. The order shows on the chart and on the island itself for every member. A mark is counsel, not command: a "leave it alone" order warns whoever opens the attack orders, but never bars the fleet. Re-marking replaces the order; clearing it stands down any coordinated attack still gathering against that target.

Raid logs punish lazy optimism

A raid report should answer one question quickly: did the voyage pay for the risk. The important lines are:

• Sent, fallen, returning: measures the true fleet cost of the strike.
• Plunder: shows what actually made it into the holds after protection and carrying limits.
• Raiding pressure: shows when repeated strikes on one shore have thinned recoverable stores.

A good raid carries pain and profit together. If losses climb while pressure remains high, shift targets and let that shore recover.

As a rule of thumb, raiding pressure on an unclaimed shore clears after 12 hours without a successful raid. A settled harbour remembers longer, 72 hours, so a shore you plunder daily keeps paying less until you leave it alone.

Master Quill: Margin note

A single raid report can mislead. Compare several from the same shoreline before deciding whether to commit another wave.

The Watchtower changes the horizon

The Tower tab shows live incoming attacks across the islands where a tower can see the sails. Without a Watch-Tower, the horizon is blind. Once constructed, each tower reveals incoming threats against its island, and higher levels reveal more detail:

The Watchtower also improves defence against espionage. Each level increases the chance of intercepting enemy spies before they gather intelligence.

Master Quill: Margin note

A blind harbour is a dead harbour. Build the tower early, upgrade it often, and never let an enemy fleet arrive unannounced.

Common questions