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. Barnaby meets you on the quay and walks you through your first voyage. Follow him: the steps pay, and they end with a hull of your own.
3. You start on a raft, which is free and always available. Bigger hulls are earned, not handed out.
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 home to an extraction portal before someone sinks you, because going down costs you three quarters 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.

Getting home is the real decision. When your ship is sunk, 75% of your loot drops in a chest for whoever is nearby and the other 25% stays with you. Reaching an extraction portal at your faction's port island banks 100% of what you are carrying, cargo included. 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 raft 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.