Currencies

Two currencies move the whole economy. Reals are the coin of everyday life — you earn them constantly and spend them on nearly everything. Doubloons are the scarcer hard currency, earned mostly by fighting and reserved for the purchases the game deliberately gates. Knowing which is which — and not wasting the scarce one — is one of the first economic habits a new captain should build.

Reals

Reals are the common currency, the money behind almost every transaction in port. You pay reals for cannons, repairs, modules, books, raw materials, and for ships bought at the auction; you receive reals when you sell goods, deliver cargo, or auction a hull of your own. One of the largest reals sinks a serious captain meets is production buildings — a shipyard, workshop, or resource mine is bought outright in reals (the base shipyard runs on the order of 10,000–15,000 reals), and the ongoing raw materials they consume are paid in reals too. If a price is quoted without saying otherwise, assume it’s in reals. Because they flow in and out of almost everything you do, reals are the currency you’ll spend most of your time earning and the one to keep a healthy balance of for day-to-day play.

The shipyard is also the clearest illustration of the game’s deliberate two-currency design: you buy the base building in reals, but the capacity upgrades that let it build larger hulls are gated behind doubloons. Reals get you in the door; doubloons buy the reach. For live building costs and the full crafting-XP curve, see Buildings.

Doubloons

Doubloons are the scarce, “hard” currency. You earn them chiefly through combat — sinking and capturing enemy ships, and from patrol-zone and event rewards — and the game spends them on a deliberately short list of higher-value purchases: outpost permits, storage and warehouse expansions, and other premium unlocks (see Outposts & Warehouses). Another core doubloon sink is slot expansion — buying additional ship and dock slots to grow your roster (which caps at 25 slots) and expanding outpost storage. Each extra slot costs more doubloons than the last, so a rising per-slot price keeps the scarce currency working against you the more you grow. A further doubloon store is the Admiralty Shop (the Bermuda Exchange), the marquee outlet for national flags, guaranteed-quality gear, and books — a national flag runs around 25,000 doubloons, for instance; its mechanics and full price list live in The Port Interface. You aren’t limited to earning them, though: doubloons can be bought and sold on the open market like any trade good, or exchanged for reals at a fixed rate, so a cash-rich trader can simply buy the doubloons a project needs — the mechanics are in Trading & Contracts. Think of doubloons as the currency that converts fighting into territory and infrastructure, where reals convert trading into working capital.

How the two relate

The two currencies aren’t fully interchangeable, and that’s by design — it’s what keeps doubloons meaningful. Combat rewards tend to arrive partly as doubloons, which is the game’s way of making sure fighters can afford the things doubloons buy, while traders swim in reals. A pure trader will accumulate reals far faster than doubloons; a pure fighter, the reverse. The two are also stored differently, which trips up new captains. Reals live in a single personal wallet that follows you everywhere — you can spend them from any port without moving anything. Doubloons have no wallet: they’re held more like a stored good, sitting in a warehouse or your ship’s hold, so you need them physically where you intend to spend them. Neither balance is pooled at the clan level.

A word on “marks”

With the money itself understood, the practical questions are how to earn it and how to multiply it. For the ways to bring in both currencies, see Making Money; for the buy-low/sell-high trade that turns reals into more reals, see Trading & Contracts.