1.1 What is Letters of Marque?

Letters of Marque is a free-roaming sailing MMO set in the Mediterranean in 1812. You take the part of a privateer captain in a shared world: sailing between ports, seeking prizes, and fighting tactical ship battles against players and computer-controlled opponents. Its two scales are deliberately connected. The overworld gives each voyage and encounter a reason; the battle instance is where seamanship and gunnery decide the result.

1.1.1 A privateer in 1812

A privateer is a privately operated fighting captain authorized to prey on enemy shipping. That premise gives Letters of Marque room to combine naval warfare, commerce, and opportunism without casting every player as a fleet admiral. A voyage might lead to an enemy warship, a vulnerable trader, a contested objective, or a fight that began with somebody else and grew as more captains joined.

The Mediterranean setting is not merely scenery. Ports, regional trade, national allegiances, and the distance between destinations are intended to create the circumstances in which battles happen. The developer has consistently described the world as connective tissue rather than an excuse for hours of uneventful travel: economic and territorial systems should generate decisions and conflict, while the act of fighting remains the center of the game.

1.1.2 Two scales, one game

The game is organized around two closely related layers:

• The persistent overworld is where captains hold accounts, sail the Mediterranean, enter ports, encounter other ships, and choose when to engage. It supplies position, risk, ownership, and consequence.
• Instanced battles are where ships maneuver and exchange fire. The sailing model accounts for forces, drag, sail handling, heel, waves, wind effects, collision, armour, leaks, and projectile behavior. These systems matter because they create tactical choices, not because the game expects you to calculate the physics yourself.

Moving a fight into an instance lets the combat simulation remain detailed without reducing the overworld to a loading screen. Where you meet, who can join, what each side brings, and where the survivors emerge all connect the battle back to the shared world.

1.1.3 You command the ship

Letters of Marque aims for an authentic feeling rather than a literal reconstruction of every job aboard a warship. You play an experienced captain. Information and routine skills that a trained crew would already possess can be handled for you, leaving you to make decisions that are interesting at the helm: how to approach the wind, when to turn, which battery and ammunition to use, where to aim, and whether to press or break off.

The distinction is important. The ships are governed by a physical sailing model, and cannon fire is manually aimed, but complexity is meant to serve tactics. The developer’s recurring design rule is that sailing and combat must first be enjoyable. Historical detail earns its place when it produces readable behavior that a captain can learn and exploit.

1.1.4 PvP, PvE, and the space between

The long-term identity is PvPvE: human captains and NPC ships occupying the same wider conflict. Direct player combat is part of that identity, but it is not the only intended way to play. The developer has discussed computer-controlled fleets, trading targets, treasure hunts, structured objectives, territorial warfare, and activities with different levels of player-versus-player risk.

Those surrounding activities are at different stages of development. The newest source reviewed for this page reported NPCs entering live world testing while describing many proposed PvE and PvPvE activities as ideas still awaiting design and player feedback. This Guide therefore documents a mechanic as playable only after it is implemented and checked; a Patreon roadmap alone is not treated as proof that the feature exists today.

1.1.5 A game built in public

Letters of Marque is being built in public with frequent test builds, developer posts, and direct feedback from players. Early battle tests drove balance changes almost immediately, and later posts show the same pattern continuing through interface work, water and collision changes, input remapping, controller experiments, and NPC development.

That openness is useful, but it also means old descriptions age quickly. A post may explain what was live when written, what had reached testing, and what the developer hoped to build next in the same article. Throughout this Guide, current instructions are separated from design intent, fixed numbers are avoided unless they can be checked, and source dates matter.

1.1.6 What to expect next

Expect a tactical sailing game that is still being built. The strongest foundation is ship handling and combat; the persistent economy, activities, organizations, conquest systems, crew, and boarding have developed at different rates and should not be assumed complete merely because they have appeared in a plan. Some systems have since arrived: in-battle repairs are one of them.

To begin playing, continue to Installation. For the ideas behind maneuvering, see Wind & Points of Sail; for combat fundamentals, see Gunnery & Aiming.