About the Game

Rise of Piracy focuses heavily on progression and growth. In your campaign, you will first be given a small ship and a handful of coin. Complete missions and find treasure to build your economic strength and relations with the other factions. You can also choose to fight, boarding or sinking other vessels for loot. Build up your fleet of ships and their crews to take on the most challenging tasks such as capture islands of various strength and composition. Defeating large colonial fleets in grand scale naval warfare. Hunt pirates or long lost treasures. Uncovering mysterious lands filled with dangers as you go.
Campaign Sandbox
Everything in Rise of Piracy is carefully hand-crafted to be a new experience and challenge, no procedural generation. Every building in is destructible, allowing you to level an island from afar via bombardment from your fleet before sending your crews as landing parties to conquer them. Talk to mayors of settlements and captains of fleets to uncover hidden lands, or find them yourself through exploration and investigation.
Create your Own Story
Piracy is optional. Choose to trade with over 200 commodities that can be found scattered around the world. Ports with specialized trading routes and dedicated merchants to trade with. Add trading ships to your fleet to maximize your transportation potential. Build relations with other factions to increase your trading effectiveness. Engaging in war, hunting bounties, or seeking hidden treasures are also viable means of building your bank.
Forge Alliances
A deep diplomacy system allows relationships to grow between all factions. Engage in diplomacy with every faction you meet. NPC factions will go to war with one another and their assets will change hands. Changing the balance of powers can impact your play-style, increasing warship activity, and blocking trade routes.
Become the Threat
Fill your fleet with a large variety of playable ships from the 1600s - 1900s, from the light and fast Sloop to the tremendous firepower but limited maneuverability that comes with the 120 Gun ship of the Line. Taverns provide a great place to hire crewmen for your fleet. Fill your ships with specialized crew. Use them to board hostile ships, or invading and capturing islands to secure passive income. Hostile actions will have consequences amongst the factions - fleets of pirate hunters are constantly seeking bounties. Campaign difficulty will grow dynamically and remain challenging no matter how strong players get.
Screenshots
16 imagesVersion Information
Steam Patch Notes
Official update history
Fixes
* Fixed sporadic issue causing crew sizes to grow exponentially in some fleets.
Thanks to everyone who reported the issue! I appreciate it :)
Here is the link to the discord where most tracking / communication is happening:
https://discord.gg/Ws9fjmHP5U
John
Another hotfix due to recent changes.
Always a chance after such massive changes like in the most recent **Major Update** that some issues can show up even a week later. The recent major update touched a huge amount of items. The biggest update in years. More details on that in the #dev-updates channel on Discord. Luckily, this is the only time an update quite like that will be needed.
Hotfix 49.3
Fixes
* Fixed **major** issue that would cause after a battle where a pirate fleet was and scheduled for deregister. This could be player-invoked, or NPC but the campaign would appear bugged regardless.
* Fixed issue where storms were not properly deregistered after a reload.
* Fixed an issue around pickups where sometimes they would be created incorrectly.
* Fixed an issue with cargo and crew display not working sometimes.
Changes
* Added some new campaign tooling and commands to assist development.
* Removed some placeholder UI objects.
Some sink missions will still be off-map but I'm working through a more sizable fix for this issue.
Thanks for the reports, and big thanks to those of you providing campaign files & assisting in the debugs recently.
Thanks also to everyone contributing to the ongoing (very!) active development also :) Thats what Early Access is all about.
Here is the link to the discord where most tracking / communication is happening:
https://discord.gg/Ws9fjmHP5U
Thanks folks,
John
Here is the link to the discord where most tracking / communication is happening:
https://discord.gg/Ws9fjmHP5U
Major Hotfix
* Fixed major issue returning from battle map causing a mapwide glitch in initialization if a transport fleet was awaiting departure.
New
* Faction Popup has been re-enabled. A small summary area with access to Faction Name, flag editing etc.
* Faction Detail Summary screen scaffolding.
* Added a new Support window to assist in assistance! This button will allow players to open links that would previously be difficult to find / require reading the #faq in the discord, or be requested by me.
Fixes
* Fixed some more issues where Tooltips would sometimes remain visible.
* Fixed issue with Times fled from Battle being an incorrect amount.
Changes
* Replaced alot of incorrect namespace information to finish up previous refactoring issues.
New
- Added Maximum Encounter count for NPCs
Fixes
- During loading, the code will check for excessive Encounter spawns and remove them, for retroactive fixing of campaigns.
Changes
- Rebalanced encounter entry for fleets
Thank you to everyone on Discord and here on the Steam Forums who contributed to solving these issues :) I appreciate it.
https://discord.gg/Ws9fjmHP5U
Thanks,
John
Fixes
* Fixed issue with Invincible ships in defending fleets in some cases.
* Fixed issue preventing scrolling on the General options screen showing all available options.
* Fixed issue causing defending ships to sometimes spawn with player fleets.
Changes
* "Reduce Surrendered Ships Damage" difficulty setting now damages to a percentage of enemy fire, rather than a flat rate.
Here is the link to the discord where most tracking / communication is happening:
https://discord.gg/Ws9fjmHP5U
Fixes
* Fixed physics issue on cannonballs that were previously used in pooling for bombarding, causing them to miss.
Changes
* Cleaned up some logging.
Here is the link to the discord where most tracking / communication is happening:
https://discord.gg/Ws9fjmHP5U
Fixes
- Fixed issue with Difficulty Settings not applying correctly
- Fixed directional issue for difficulty settings in Claiming ships.
- Fixed bombard inaccuracy issue. (Always falling short by a factor of 1-10%)
- Fixed a few inaccuracies in the lead target position predictions for ships, towers and land cannons.
Changes
- Increased firing arc for Bombard orders.
Here is the link to the discord where most tracking / communication is happening:
https://discord.gg/Ws9fjmHP5U
Here is the link to the discord where most tracking / communication is happening:
https://discord.gg/Ws9fjmHP5U
Fixes
- Fixed awkward encoding issue when trying to create characters / load games after last weeks Daylight Savings Time changes in some locales. Shoutout to Sven on the discord for his efforts helping debug this one. Thank you.
Here is the link to the discord where most tracking / communication is happening:
https://discord.gg/Ws9fjmHP5U
I also found a pretty major duplication issue with cannons so decided to release this early.
New
* Trees hit by splash damage now fall over.
* Brawler class is now restricted to 5 ships maximum in your fleet but they are much stronger.
Fixes
* Fixed some starter-ship data inconsistencies.
* Fixed some missing colliders on some Temperate maps - causing pathing & object avoidance issues.
* Fixed an issue causing duplicate cannons on some ships.
* Fixed issue with ships leaving the map and continuing indefinitely.
Changes
* Brawler class now does not require level ups to unlock crews.
* Brawler class has a maximum upgrade level of 8 for ships and crew, and twice the maximum amount of upgrades.
Here is the link to the discord where most tracking / communication is happening:
https://discord.gg/Ws9fjmHP5U
Enjoy!
Fixes
* Fixed historic mission issue pre-37 that was messing with Loot gathering logic for Encounters.
Current Release
Build 24958869
Uploaded Aug 28, 2026
System Requirements
How to Install
Rise of Piracy.exe to play
Troubleshooting tips
• Run Redist/_CommonRedist installers if game won't start
• Add folder to Windows Defender exclusions
• Run as administrator
Download
Direct link available
Needed when extracting (WinRAR / 7-Zip) — not a site login.
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