4.3 Repairs

Damage in Letters of Marque is not permanent for the length of a battle. A ship can repair while the action continues, which turns survivability into something you actively manage rather than a fixed allowance you spend once.

Repairs arrived in build v0.5.13, announced on 26 August 2026. They were a roadmap item for most of the game’s development, so older developer posts — and older pages in this Guide — describe them as future work. Read those as history.

4.3.1 Opening the repair menu

Repairs are reached from the battle HUD, alongside the other bracketed controls such as the skipper, staysails, convergence and firing mode. The interface labels the control Repairs and shows the key that opens it. Opening the menu presents a choice between repairing the hull and repairing the sails, and an option to back out again.

Backing out costs nothing, so there is no penalty for opening the menu to check your state and closing it. There is an equivalent controller binding, so a repair does not require the keyboard.

4.3.2 What a repair restores

A repair does not return a ship to new. As published for v0.5.13, it recovers up to half of side armour and a quarter of the central structure.

Those are separate tracks, and the developer describes the repairs as progressing in parallel and independently rather than in sequence. Your ship carries protection on each side and a central structure beneath it, so a single repair works on what is damaged across those tracks at once rather than making you pick one.

The practical consequence is that repairs favour the ship that is hurt in several places over the ship that is catastrophically hurt in one. A quarter of the central structure is a meaningful reprieve, not a reset, and a ship that has been thoroughly beaten will not recover to fighting condition from a single repair.

4.3.3 How long it takes

A repair is not instant. It runs for about three and a half minutes, during which the interface counts down the time remaining. The work is audible as well as visible — the client plays carpentry while it runs — so you have a cue even when your attention is on the guns.

Three and a half minutes is a long time in a battle. This is the single most important thing to internalise about the system: you are not spending a button press, you are committing several minutes of degraded capability, and the enemy does not have to wait for you.

4.3.4 The penalty while repairing

A ship under repair fights and handles worse. For v0.5.13 the published penalties, in force for the duration of the repair, are:

This is the design’s real teeth, and it is easy to miss because nothing stops you pressing the button. Repairing in contact means your broadside comes round more slowly while your yards and sails answer sluggishly — in other words, you lose exactly the abilities you would need to survive the next few minutes, in exchange for damage you will not feel the benefit of until the repair finishes.

Repair when you have bought the room to do it, not when you most want the hull back.

4.3.5 The cooldown between repairs

Repairs are limited by a cooldown rather than by a stock of materials. For v0.5.13 the interval is fifteen minutes from one repair to the next, and that figure includes the three and a half minutes the repair itself runs — so once a repair completes, expect something over eleven minutes before another is available. The interface reports the cooldown and counts it down.

There is no initial cooldown. A repair is available from the start of a battle, so an early engagement does not have to be fought on whatever condition you arrived in.

This is what makes repair timing a real decision rather than a reflex. On a fifteen-minute interval most battles will not give you many, so a repair spent early on light damage is genuinely unavailable later when the damage is serious.

4.3.6 What a repair costs

Beyond the time, the cooldown and the handling penalty, a repair costs nothing. The interface asks for no materials, offers no quantity to spend, and reports no shortage.

This is worth stating plainly because the developer’s economic design says otherwise, and that design is often quoted. Ships are intended to carry repair materials as cargo, which is part of the reasoning behind separate military and economic holds in port. That intention is real, but it describes where the economy is going rather than what the current build asks of you. See The Economy: Design Vision, and treat a material cost as something to watch for in a later build rather than something to provision against today.

4.3.7 Using repairs in a fight

Repair from a position you have earned. The natural moments are after breaking contact, while running to reopen range, or behind an obstruction — somewhere the reload and handling penalties cannot be punished. Repairing inside effective range of an undamaged opponent usually hands them the exchange.

Judge the decision on the next four minutes, not the last one. Because the penalty lands immediately and the repair lands at the end, the question is not “am I damaged?” but “can I afford to fight badly until this finishes?”. A ship that starts a repair while still under fire often ends up worse off than one that took the damage and kept its guns.

Fix the problem that will kill you. A ship that is heavily marked but sailing well can often disengage; a ship with a sound hull and a ruined rig frequently cannot. With a fifteen-minute interval, spending a repair on the wrong track costs you the right one for the rest of the action.

Assume your opponent has the same ability and the same penalty. An enemy who breaks off may be buying repair time, and a ship that has just started repairing is reloading half again as slowly and answering its helm poorly — which is precisely the moment to close, not to let them go. Equally, when your own repair is running, that is when you are least able to absorb a mistake.

4.3.8 What is not yet established

• Whether the hull and sail options draw on one shared cooldown or track separately. The published note describes repairs progressing independently, but the interface presents them as a choice, so confirm it in a battle: repair one, reopen the menu, and see whether the other is available.
• Whether repair amounts, duration, cooldown or penalties vary by ship, rate, or crew, or are the same for every vessel.
• Whether leaks and flooding are addressed by the hull repair specifically, or recover separately.
• Whether any refit or equipment affects repairs. No repair-related modifier appears among the equipment modifiers documented in Refits & Equipment, so at present the answer appears to be no.

All of these are readable from the client by a captain in a battle, which makes them the natural things to confirm and add. Any number added here should carry the build it was observed in.