Caribbean Prospector

The Caribbean, 1669. Start with a small ship and build a career through trade, smuggling, piracy, exploration, and war. Every voyage is a gamble: make your fortune and retire — or lose ship, crew, and captain to the sea.

Build your own pirate career

Trade and smuggle between a living network of ports — 23 goods, prices that move whether you're there or not, customs searches you can bribe, dodge, or fight. Hunt prizes as an outlaw pirate, serve a nation as a privateer with a letter of marque, chase a fortune as a merchant, chart the wild as a naturalist — or start shipwrecked with nothing but driftwood and stubbornness. Recruit officers face by face off the waterfront, upgrade ships at the yard, and command a growing fleet with captains you appoint.

Fight for every prize

Exchange tactical broadsides — round shot breaks hulls, chain shreds rigging, grape sweeps decks — then close and grapple. Boarding is a top-down deck fight: two hulls lashed together, your actual crew crossing the planks beside you. Fell her captain and the crew strikes at once. Take her as a prize for the Admiralty Court, commission her into your fleet — or retreat before the sea claims both ships.

Dive the reef under your keel

Buy a diving bell, bring her alongside any island and lower away: the reef shelf opens beneath the keel — coral heads, kelp that drags at the divers, and a sunken wreck on about a quarter of reefs. Forty turns of air, and the bell is the only way up. Run the air out away from it and every action chokes the divers; a hand at nought drowns on the reef. Sink a ship beside an island and whatever plunder would not fit in your hold goes down with her — onto that island's reef, under her own name, for you or anyone else to strip. Storms claim ships too, the taverns talk, and factors post salvage commissions for the wrecks they made.

Play the voyage you want

A full career sandbox with an optional nine-stage main quest — or a focused 20-minute Short Voyage when that's the evening you have. Story difficulty to learn the ropes, Captain as the intended experience, Ironman when you want the sea to mean it. Painted tiles or classic terminal glyphs — surf, storms, and muzzle flashes, or the sharp readable grid roguelikes are loved for. Full controller and Steam Deck support with official layouts; keyboard-first on desktop; Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Ashore, the islands are their own game: forage, mine, cook at a campfire, dig up buried treasure, and describe the wildlife in a field-journal codex — describe every species and be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Every wild island rolls its own beasts, each with a temperament and a nest they guard; a tenth of the ruined islands hide a sea cave with richer ore and something living in the deep chamber; and miasma and volcanic ash drift on the wind, carrying fever and blindness to anyone caught standing in them. Retire in glory with estates and a title, or go down with the ship. Both end with your tale told.

Streaming? An experimental Twitch mode lets the people watching fill the berths your crew was going to have anyway — chat's names on your hands, a vote on the encounter cards, and, if you want it, channel points that buy weather. Off unless you turn it on.

A spiritual successor to Prospector, magellan's cult sci-fi terminal roguelike — its spirit of open-ended captaincy, recast under a Caribbean sun. In Early Access since August 2026, with updates landing almost daily — most of them straight from player reports.