Here be helpful hints on the fine arrrt of navigation, which involves matching the stars, yer steering wheel, and the consolation ye need together, in order to be sure ye be headed on coarse- a crucial arrrt it be, too, because navigation multiplies the acceleration yer sailors provide to yer fine vessel.

There is only one navigation station, and it looks like the ships' steering wheel. Only one person may navigate at a time. Clicking on the wheel during battle puts you in control. (if you're an officer) Officers may order you to navigate if you're a jobber, cabin person, or pirate. When a battle starts, the person navigating will automatically take the helm for the battle.

Navigation is also the only way to memorise your charts, and is sometimes referred to as 'travel nav' to avoid confusion.

Navigation's difficulty progresses along with your rating and the time spent in the puzzle. This means constellations with more targets, with targets further out, and with targets of the same colour repeatedly.

The basics.

So you want to get new colours onto the bottom rung...?

Tiering and escape-strategies.

Before you can nav, you must either be ordered or be of officer rank or higher. As a jobber, asking politely if you can navigate may have the required result, or it may not- seeing it is a requirement for starting a crew, there are lots of people who hassle officers and captains about it unnessecarily.

During this tutorial I will use the following format to show representations of the navigation puzzle, as it is very boring and difficult for me to find a way to draw it in a circle like the game displays it. The nav puzzle has three rings, each capable of holding 8 stars, and rotating. I'm going to treat that as three rows, where the stars shuffle to either direction, and going off the side of the row brings you back to the opposite side. The stars come in five colours, and I will show stars going to be dropped in a fourth row.





The controls for navigating actually work a lot like the controls for sailing or swordfighting. You select which of the three rings you wish to rotate using the up and down arrows. The left and right arrows rotate the stars placed on each ring (or rung) anticlockwise and clockwise respectively. Spacebar will plonk the waiting piece down very shortly after it is pressed.

Also like swordfighting and sailing, the stars in the nav puzzle are effected by gravity. This means if you rotate a star on the second rung over a gap on the first rung, it will fall down. Because you can lines of three both along a rung and running up along all the rungs, you can cause combos while navigating. Because it is so hard to achieve these combos and they give a comparatively small benefit, the highest message you can recieve for them is 'triple.'

New pieces slowly fall from just above the third rung, so you have to rotate the puzzle to be ready for them before pressing space (if you're doing a complicated manuevre involving multiple rungs, then it could take the whole time the star spends falling, or even more)

The Aim:

There are two important parts to doing well at navigating. The first is matching the rotatable stars to the non-rotatable targets, to form a 'constellation.' The better you tend to navigate, and the longer you have been in the puzzle, the more difficult a set of targets you will recieve. More complicated constellations score more points than the simpler ones. As a beginner, it is likely that you would get very simple constellations needing one or two stars on the first rung.

The second important part to the puzzle is piece efficiency. The less pieces that you use to make your constellation, the higher your score will jump when you achieve your constellation. Clearing rows of three will give you a short boost in score, but that is only to tide you over until you finish your constellation. Incidentally, the efficiency mechanic makes combo breaks and accidentally comboing into a second constellation quite rewarding. Time also has a small impact on your score.

Basic tips

Right! To the actual tutorial. The first thing I'm gonna tell you is that you must use left and right for basic manuevering. Don't feel afraid to rotate around trying to see if you can match two of the three stars on a rung instead of just one. Rotation incurs no penalty to your score.

When you're first starting with nav, you won't need much in the way of tactics or strategies or hints. The only thing the will help if you have trouble with one/two star constellations on the first ring is to familiarise yourself with how rotation works, and to make sure to leave yourself some space to put the correctly coloured star.

Now, when you progress to second-ring constellations, and especially constellations invoving first AND second-ring constellations, there are many hints to help.

The first is that if you are going to fill up your first ring to allow free rotation of the second ring, (and this is highly advisable) then you want to strike a good colour balance.


That, although balanced, isn't exactly what you want. It's good if it's all you can do, but you can do better. Also, if you need one or two of these spots for a constellation... ignore them when considering colour balance. They'll be removed anyway, and the reason we want a good balance when possible is to get a good setup for the next constellation.


This is better. By grouping the stars by colour, we make it more likely that they will fit into a combination with any other given colour. This configuration also means that we are more likely to be able to complete a constellation with two stars of the same colour next to each other.

As I mentioned earlier in the Aims section, just plonking those stars down isn't quite how you do it. Unfortunately, efficiency in navigation means star efficiency. (doing it fast doesn't hurt, either) What you need to do is look very carefully at which types of stars you need, and leave holes for them. When a star of that colour comes up, arrange your board so that it is possible to rotate it into the required place.

Actually, sometimes there is a lot more to it. The essential thing to remember about nav is that almost all of the time, the rows are seperate. Until you want to change the way a row is, you can avoid mistakes by always ensuring you don't make a column of three stars, and by ensuring there's always a star in the row below when you are rotating the higher rungs. For example, the first two diagrams are okay to rotate clockwise, but the next two aren't.



(The blue star slides safely into its target, because the orange star underneath keeps it on the higher rung)




(The above diagram is okay because when you've got the whole constellation in position, that breaks BEFORE any lines of three)



(The orange star falls before it can hit the target, so the constellation doesn't break)




(There is an unfilled target elsewhere, so forming a row of three here breaks all three stars. Whoops)

Setting up breaks to move stars down

If you were an observant reader, you'll have noticed that I eluded to the fact that you might want to move stars down to lower rings, even when those rows are filled. (this is usually due to needing two or three stars on the same ring to make your constellation) This is where you set up an intentional break, and wait for enough stars to fill it up with. You will need at least two or three stars on your second ring, and a full or almost lower ring.




This is what a break will look like just before it fulfills its function. The only thing you have to be careful of is that you don't do something like this:




Did you spot the mistake? The break was set up using a colour that they still needed quite a lot of for their constellation. Use the colour which has the minimum impact on completing your constellation to set up your break.

And if you're still observant, you'll have noticed that I have been referring to breaks that you yourself set up. Sometimes, when you get three targets on the lowest rung, there may be little choice as to what you can do. You have to weigh up the usefulness of setting up one or two of those stars in the bottom ring versus the difficulty of getting four, five, or even soven or eight stars of that same type in order to set up breaks and finish your constellation. This is why you started off with learning to balance the colours in your lowest ring!

Tiering your stars and setting up escape routes