6.6 Sources & Credits

This Guide is built first from primary sources. Its most important written source is the public series of Letters of Marque developer posts on Patreon. The posts record what the developer had implemented, what had reached testing, what was planned next, and which ideas were still open to discussion.

Credit belongs to the developer for the game, the technical explanations, and the continuing public record of its development. This Guide restates facts in original language, links readers to the source, and does not reproduce the posts.

6.6.1 Official development board

The public Letters of Marque development Trello is the most current view of work moving through development. Its lists cover immediate priorities, playtest feedback, completed tasks, the overworld, combat, interface, graphics, sound, technical work, and the broader road to pre-alpha.

The board is an operational workspace rather than a release record. A card can be a bug report, experiment, reminder, design question, or long-term idea. Moving a card to Done is evidence that the developer considers that task complete, but it does not by itself establish which public build contains the change. Guide text therefore identifies board material as completed work, current priority, or planned work and checks the playable build or a release statement before presenting it as a player-facing feature.

6.6.2 How the posts are used

A development post is evidence of what was reported when it was written. It is not automatically evidence of what is playable now. Before a claim becomes current player instruction, the Guide classifies it:

• Live: reported as released or usable, then checked against the current build.
• Testing: implemented in a test build or approaching release, but still requiring confirmation.
• Planned: on the roadmap or described in future tense; presented only as development intent.
• Exploratory: an idea or unresolved design question; never written as an established mechanic.
• Historical or technical: useful background about development, research, or implementation rather than player instruction.

6.6.3 Official developer posts

The following public posts are listed from oldest to newest. Each link leads to the original article on Patreon.

1. Dev Blog 1 — the original overview of the 1812 Mediterranean setting, privateering, battles, the overworld, and the game’s design priorities.
2. Adding the HMS Vanguard, sails, and rigging — ship preparation, dynamic sails, rigging, cameras, chasers, and gun calibres.
3. Preparing to add the overworld — the persistent-world foundation, terrain, networking, and movement between world and battle.
4. Love, death, and taxes on Sailboat Sunday — early plans for markets, orders, taxes, industry, and crafting.
5. The Economics of Wood, on Sailboat Sunday — shipbuilding materials, material traits, and early crafting work.
6. Growing the Economy — resources, components, modular ships, port management, recoil, leaks, and heel.
7. Trading, and Drawing the Rest of the Owl — ports, travel, AI trade, convoy interception, and cargo questions.
8. Letters of Marque: FAQ — the broadest statement of combat philosophy, sailing, boarding, trade, the overworld, and territorial warfare.
9. Trade, and everything else — the most concrete account of the trade workflow and its development state.
10. Flags, flags, and more flags — nations, cosmetic subnations, historical ensigns, and deliberate historical compromises.
11. Steam, and reflecting on a quick 5 minute adventure — Steam preparation, HMS Gorgo, ship production, graphics, and upcoming technical work.
12. Development roadmap — near- and long-term work including interface, physics, ammunition, AI, crew, repairs, and boarding.
13. The Only Good Bug Is A Squashed Bug — aiming, parallax, convergence, language support, interface improvements, and playtest fixes.
14. Collisions and wind shadowing — implemented ship collision and wind-shadow behavior.
15. Waves, and cannonball skipping — water, buoyancy, waves, shot skipping, water penetration, and outstanding issues.
16. Water, and the road to Early Access — the updated water system and remaining Early Access work.
17. UI, AI, I/O, EIEI — development priorities, interface limitations, NPC work, and later content plans.
18. All Hail The Robots — NPC testing, input remapping, experimental controller support, compatibility work, and proposed activities.

6.6.4 The game itself

The third source is the Letters of Marque playtest client itself — the game as distributed through Steam, obtained with a key from the community Discord. It is the strongest source available to this Guide, because it is the software rather than a statement about the software. Where a development post says a feature was planned and the client shows it working, the client settles the question.

It has one significant limitation, and pages built on it say so: a playtest changes. The client is authoritative for the build actually observed and no other, so any page citing it records the date it was checked. A statement true in July may be wrong by autumn, and a stale verification date is the signal to go and look again.

Guide pages use the client for behaviour a player can see and confirm: interface labels, default controls, the fields on a ship’s stat sheet, the categories a market presents, the choices offered at sign-up. They do not use it to publish things a player cannot check.

6.6.5 The community Discord

The fourth source is the developer’s own Letters of Marque Discord. It is where the playtest is actually distributed, and where the procedure for getting a key, the layout of the channels, and news that a build has changed are described before they appear anywhere else. This Guide cites it for the mechanics of getting in — which channel carries the instructions, what the key-claiming bot asks you for — and not for how the game behaves, which is the client’s province.

It is also the most perishable source here. A channel can be renamed, a bot reconfigured, and a distribution method replaced without any announcement, and none of that leaves a dated record this Guide can check later. Pages built on it therefore say plainly that the instructions visible in Discord take precedence over the page. Messages, bot text, and screenshots from the server are not reproduced; only the facts they convey are restated.

6.6.6 What the sources cannot establish

The post archive and development board cannot by themselves provide a dependable current list of controls, ships, ports, recipes, prices, balance values, or available activities. Those facts require observation in the current build. Numbers shown during development may be placeholders, and an announced feature or completed task may be revised before release.

The client closes part of that gap but not all of it. Much of what a player sees in port — ship statistics, port names, item names, prices — is supplied by the game server as you play rather than stored in the installed files, so it varies with the live world and cannot be treated as a fixed table. Where this Guide describes such a system, it explains what the numbers mean and leaves the values to the panel in front of you.

For that reason, individual Guide pages identify the specific sources they use and record when their claims were last checked. If a page cannot distinguish current behavior from intent, it remains unpublished.

6.6.7 Thanks

Thanks to the developer for documenting the work openly, and to the testers whose reports and play sessions appear throughout that record. Their contributions make it possible to trace not only what the game does, but why its systems were built as they were.