6.7 How This Guide Is Made

This page explains how the Guide is put together, so you can judge how much weight to give any particular page. Short version: it is written by AI, reviewed by a person, built only from official Letters of Marque sources, and dated so you can see how fresh it is.

6.7.1 Who writes it

The pages are written by AI and reviewed by a human editor before they are published. Nothing appears here because a model produced a confident-sounding paragraph — each page is checked against its sources, and pages that cannot be supported stay unpublished rather than being filled with plausible guesses.

That arrangement has a real advantage and a real weakness. The advantage is coverage and consistency: a large reference can be kept in one voice and revisited quickly when the game changes. The weakness is that AI writes fluently about things it has not confirmed. The method below exists to constrain that tendency.

6.7.2 What it is built from

The Guide uses only first-party sources — material from the developer or from the game itself:

• The developer’s public devlogs, which record what was built, what was being tested, and what was planned.
• The public development board, the most current view of work in progress and completed tasks.
• The game client, which settles questions the written sources cannot — what a menu actually says, what the default controls are, what a ship’s stat sheet reports.
• The developer’s community Discord, the access point for the playtest and the first place a change to it is described. Used for how to get in, not for how the game plays.

Every page lists the sources it used and carries a “Sources & Credits” footer. If a page cites nothing, that is a fault worth reporting.

6.7.3 How claims are checked

Developer material mixes tenses freely: a single post can describe a released feature, something in testing, a near-term plan, and an idea still being argued over. Before a claim becomes instruction, it is sorted:

• Live — reported as working, then confirmed in the current build.
• In testing — implemented, but not confirmed as generally available.
• Planned — described as intent, and presented that way.
• Exploratory — an open design question, never written up as a mechanic.

Where two sources disagree, the newer one wins. Where the client disagrees with any of them, the client wins. Where nothing settles it, the page says so instead of choosing.

6.7.4 What we deliberately leave out

Some things are knowable and still do not belong here.

Specific numbers, mostly. This is a playtest, and balance values change between builds. A table of ship statistics or market prices would be wrong within weeks while still looking authoritative. So the Guide concentrates on what a figure means — which direction is better, what it interacts with — and leaves the value to the panel in front of you. Much of that data also reaches your screen from the game server as you play rather than living in the installed game, so for a good deal of it there is no fixed table to publish even when we would like one.

Things you cannot check. Inspecting a game reveals more than the game shows a player: internal names, unfinished content, plumbing. Publishing that would be a poor trade. It spoils what the developer has not announced, and it puts claims in front of readers with no way to verify them. If you cannot see it in the game, it does not go on a page.

6.7.5 How pages stay current

There is no automatic update feed for Letters of Marque, so the Guide is reviewed on demand rather than on a schedule. A review is triggered by a new devlog, visible movement on the development board, a build that changes something a page describes, or a reader telling us we are wrong.

Each page records when its claims were last checked. Treat that date as part of the content: a page verified against a build from several months ago deserves more suspicion than one checked last week, however confident its prose sounds.

6.7.6 Facts, not prose

Facts about how a game works belong to nobody. The words someone chose to explain them do not. The Guide restates what it learns in its own language, links you to the original, and does not reproduce the developer’s writing. On the rare occasion the exact wording is the point — a tooltip whose phrasing carries the meaning — it is quoted briefly, marked as a quotation, and attributed.

6.7.7 Tell us when we are wrong

Every section of every page has a feedback control. Please use it. A note saying “this key does something else now” or “this stat reads the other way round” is worth more than it feels, because it points at the exact section rather than the whole page.

Corrections from players who are actually sailing are the fastest route to an accurate Guide, because the game changes faster than any review schedule keeps up with. See Sources & Credits for the sources themselves, and Useful Links for where to find news the Guide has not caught up with yet.