Manual Sailing

Out in the open world you can set a heading, trim the sails once, and let the crew mind the ship while you cross the map. In a battle that habit will get you sunk. The wind is the only engine a sailing ship has, and squeezing the most out of it — turning tighter, stopping on a coin, even sailing backward on purpose — means taking the rig off autopilot and working it by hand. This page is the how: the controls and the manoeuvres they build into. For the why behind the angles, read Wind & Points of Sail first.

Read the compass first

Almost everything you need while sailing lives in the compass in the lower-left corner of your screen: where the wind is coming from — shown as the blue line — your plotted or protractor heading as the red arrow, your current speed (shown as knots, and as a negative number when you are moving backward), the rudder’s position, your sail setting, and whether the staysails are depowered. Veteran captains glance at it the way a driver glances at a dashboard — learn to read it and the rest of this page becomes muscle memory.

One thing that blue line won’t sit still for: the wind moves. In the open world it rotates counter-clockwise on roughly a 48-minute cycle; inside a battle it shifts in a variable direction every ten minutes or so in the current build. That matters most to the manoeuvres taught here — a tack or a turn planned around the wind you have now can be half-undone by a shift midway through, so watch the blue line and be ready to adjust. The full mechanics are on Wind & Points of Sail.

The rudder — A and D

Hold [A] to turn left, [D] to turn right. Double-tap either key to lock the rudder hard over, and tap the opposite key to centre it again.

Three things about the rudder catch new captains out:

• It is not instant. The helmsman needs a moment to swing the rudder, and the hull needs another to answer it. Heavy ships are sluggish; light ones turn on a thought. Steer a beat ahead of where you are.
• It needs water flowing past it. The rudder is just a deflector in the current — the faster you go, the harder it bites. A ship dead in the water will not answer the helm at all, and turning always sheds a little speed.
• It reverses when you do. Once your speed reads negative and you are making sternway, the rudder answers the opposite way — steering while backing up feels backwards at first. Don’t fight it; watch the compass, and a little practice is all it takes to get the reversal into your hands.

Sail area and battle sails — W, S, B

Sail is set in steps. Tap [W] to add canvas and [S] to take it in; four taps of [W] from a standstill sets you to full sail. The compass shows both the step and the percentage. (The lateen-rigged xebec Le Requin is the odd one out — in a battle it has only three steps: stop, battle, and full.)

More canvas means more drive, but the ship still needs time to build speed, and taking sail back in is slow — so plan changes early. The shortcut you will use most is [B], which drops you straight to battle sails: a reduced setting where the yards pivot faster and the sails and masts shrug off damage better. It is the standard combat trim — tighter turns and quicker handling at the cost of top speed. Crucially, with far less canvas exposed, battle sails take much less damage from chain shot (the ammunition enemies fire to shred your rigging). When you expect a captain to loose chain at your sails, drop to battle sails before they do.

Auto skipper vs. manual skipper — F

By default your crew trims the yards for you. This is Auto Skipper: the rig is kept balanced so the sails pull you forward at the best speed for your current angle without dragging the bow off course. It is the right mode for plain sailing.

The instant you nudge a yard by hand you drop into Manual Skipper, and the rig is no longer balanced for you — which is exactly the point. An unbalanced rig can swing the ship with the sails alone, no rudder needed, and that opens up every advanced manoeuvre below. When you are done, press [F] to hand the yards back to the crew and recover best speed.

Working the yards by hand

The yards are split into two stacks you control independently: the front yards on the foremast ([Q] left, [E] right) and the rear yards on the main and mizzen masts ([Z] left, [C] right). Hold a key to ease the yard round, or double-tap to throw it to its maximum angle. Heavier ships swing their yards more slowly.

Manual yard work buys you four things the rudder alone can’t:

• Turning by the sails — unbalance the rig and the ship pivots without the rudder, or turns far tighter when you combine the two. This is what carries a square-rigger’s bow across the wind in a tack.
• Speed control without touching sail area — angle the yards to spill wind and bleed speed, then snap back to Auto Skipper to recover.
• Cutting the heel — flattening the yards reduces the sideways force that leans you over, which matters when heel is tipping your guns off the target.
• Combinations — trading a little speed for a turn while managing heel, all at once. This is the deep end, and it takes practice.

A rule of thumb: turning with the yards costs speed, and it bites hardest — most usefully — at low speed. Battle sails make those yard-turns tighter still.

Depower the staysails — T

The staysails are the fore-and-aft sails strung between the masts (the ones up by the bowsprit are the jibs). [T] is a toggle that quickly furls them without touching your main sail setting; press it again to reset them. The compass flags when they are depowered.

Depower does two jobs: it sheds or regains speed in a hurry, and it knocks down the heel fast — handy when you are leaning too far to lay the guns where you want them. One catch: staysails pull hardest on a beam reach and do almost nothing dead upwind or dead downwind, so how much depowering changes your speed and heel depends on your point of sail.

Depower is also key to going astern: when you want to back up quickly, back the main sails to drive the bow backward and press [T] to furl the staysails, so they aren’t still pulling you forward (more on this manoeuvre just below).

Putting it together

The controls above are the alphabet; here are the first few words captains spell with them.

Tacking — crossing the wind

Tacking is swinging the bow through the dead zone to get onto the other side of the wind. Carry as much speed in as you can. A fore-and-aft ship with enough way on can often come about on the rudder alone. A square-rigger usually can’t — its square sails push backward in the dead zone and kill the rudder before the turn finishes — so you throw the yards over to haul the bow across.

Stopping and slowing

Reefing sail to stop is too slow in a fight. Instead, depower the staysails and press both yard controls the same way at once to swing the yards parallel to the wind — they stop catching wind and the ship coasts down (this also flattens the heel). For a small trim, just press both yard pairs together for a moment.

To stop hard — or to deliberately sail backwards — back the main sails: angle the yards so the square sails catch the wind from in front and push the ship astern, and press [T] to furl the staysails so they aren’t pulling you forward. Keep the square sails as near perpendicular to the wind as you can, where they push hardest. Backing up on purpose is a real tool — it tightens a turn, buys a moment to line up a broadside, or shakes a boarder — and remember the rudder reverses while you make sternway. Tap [F] to re-balance and accelerate the moment you’re set.

Crew focus affects all of it

None of these manoeuvres happen at full speed if your crew is spread thin. Crew is split across focuses — sailing sets how fast you trim sail and swing yards, alongside gunnery, survival, and boarding. Run short on the sailing focus and every sail change and yard swing slows down. The details of dividing crew live in Crew Management. Turning and handling can also be sharpened outside the moment — Manoeuvrability perks (the seamanship and turning family) tighten how the ship answers in the current build; see Mods, Books & Perks for how those slots work.

Manual sailing rewards practice more than reading — the in-game Sailing and Special Manoeuvres tutorials are built for exactly this, and they cost you nothing to repeat. Get these controls under your fingers there, then take them into a real fight and read Battle Sails & Wind Shadows to see how the wind keeps shaping the duel once the guns open up.