How to Play

Find fortune, foes, and friends for life in the ultimate swashbuckling MMORPG.

Set sail with friends into naval battles with massive multiplayer crews, and pillage your way to becoming the wealthiest pirates on the high seas.

Free to play, accessible to all

There are no purchase requirements to play Captain & Company. It runs on PC, Android, iOS, Mac, and everywhere browsers are supported. Climb aboard and play now for free.

The short version

1. Open the game and sign in. You start at the docks, the hub everything else leads back to.
2. Your first voyage starts on the Welcome card. Pick your colours and press SET SAIL, and you are at sea as captain of your own Sloop. You start out near the edge of the sea with a pirate sloop a short way off. She waits until you take the wheel, then comes for you: come alongside and sink her with the guns you fire from the wheel. She will put holes in you, so patch them and bail (see Ships). Once that is done, her shots do you no more harm. When she is sunk and your ship is dry, Barnaby opens a ring a short way off that only you can see; sail into it to go home. Barnaby's colours keep you afloat on that first run, and your guns hit that first sloop three times as hard.
3. Back at the docks, Barnaby pays you 5,000 doubloons for it. Every hull above the Sloop is earned.
4. Queue from the shack on the right side of the docks to put to sea.
5. Fish, sink enemies, and buy cheap at one island's trade post to sell dear at another. Everything you collect pays out in Doubloons.
6. Sail into an extraction portal before someone sinks you, because going down costs you 70% of what you are carrying.
7. Back at the docks, spend, bank, take courier work from the Town Crier, join a guild, and go again.

Pillage War

Pillage War is where you earn, and it is what the rest of this guide is about. Two factions share the same water, and a war runs for about a month before everything resets.

There is no single objective to chase. A voyage is worth what you bring home from it, and there are four ways to fill a hold:

• Fight. Sink NPC crews and the players of the other faction. Anything they were carrying drops where they went down.
• Fish. Take a fishing slot on the ship and haul them up. Deeper, more dangerous water holds better fish.
• Trade. Buy cheap at one island's trade post and sell dear at another.
• Hunt bosses. The Leviathan scions are the hardest thing in the water and pay the most.

Most good runs are a mix of all four.

Every other ship at sea carries a mark over it. A sea-foam shield with an anchor is on your side. A coral diamond with crossed swords is one your guns can hurt. Up close the mark sits beside the captain's name and the hull bar, which fills in the same colour. Further out the mark shows on its own, so you can tell whose sail is on the horizon before it is close enough to read.

Getting home is the real decision. When your ship is sunk, 70% of what she was carrying drops in a chest where she went down, and the other 30% is still paid out to her crew. Sailing into an extraction portal banks 100% of what you are carrying, cargo included. One is open at a time and it stays on its spot for eight minutes; the arrow on your HUD points at it, or at the spot it moves to next if you cannot reach it first. Every extra minute at sea is more in the hold and more to lose, and a careful captain who extracts twice usually beats a bold one who sinks once.

You can captain a ship or join one of your faction as crew. A crewed ship is stronger than a solo one and pays everyone aboard, so crewing is not the lesser way to play.

At the end of a war everything resets: doubloons, levels, skills, rating and hulls all go back to the start, and everyone is on a Sloop again. The Warchest is the prize pool, and the winning faction takes a bonus share of it. What survives a reset is land crystals, which the end-of-war cash-out converts your final doubloon balance into, and anything you hold on chain.

The eleven pages after this one cover each part in full.