Three new ship lines: fishing boats, crabbing boats and seafood carriers. Fishing: the Sport Fisher 24 (tier 1, from level 1 beside the Scooter: a 24 ft centre console, 4 aboard, trolls lines, trips of 3 to 7 days, 48 crates), the Sportfisher 60 (tier 3, level 14: a 60 ft sportfisher with a flybridge and outriggers that also runs nets, 16 aboard, trips of 5 to 21 days, 400 crates) and the Factory Trawler (tier 5, level 48: nets and trawls, 80 aboard, out 20 to 90 days, 40,000 crates). Crabbing, every crab caught in pots: the Crab Skiff 24 (tier 1, level 1: an aluminium skiff with 30 small pots, trips of 2 to 5 days, 30 crates), the Crabber 98 (tier 3, level 16: 150 pots, 18 aboard, 500 crates) and the Bering Sea Crabber (tier 5, level 50: 250 big pots, out 30 to 120 days, 6,000 crates; it can stay out all winter on the king crab like the Deadliest Catch boats). Carriers: the Reefer 300 (tier 3, level 16) and the Polar Reefer (tier 5, level 54), refrigerated ships for the catch. Each boat has its own top-down art, and works only the grounds its gear and size can: small boats inshore, the tier 3 boats inshore and offshore, the tier 5 boats offshore and the deep grounds. Their crews are their own, not their tier's.
What's caught: 61 species in 16 families. Every commercially caught crab (24: red, blue, golden and southern king crab; snow, Tanner, red snow and horsehair crab; Dungeness; Atlantic blue crab; Florida stone crab; brown, Jonah, Atlantic and Pacific rock, spider, velvet and spanner crab; gazami, blue swimmer and mud crab; deep-sea red, golden and Tasmanian giant crab) and 37 fish: the game fish already swimming on the map (tuna, billfish, salmon, cod, halibut, mahi, wahoo...) and 13 new ones that swim on the map too, in 32 schools in their real waters. Each species has its gear (troll, net, trawl or pot) and a grade (its price over its family's: a bluefin 3x a tuna). A trophy fish (bluefin, the marlins, sailfish, swordfish, halibut) can be hooked by a small trolling boat, filling its hold on its own ("Reel Deal hooked a giant bluefin tuna").
95 real fishing grounds, each with its species and their real seasons (months), how thick the catch is, how much it holds (stock), how deep (inshore, offshore, deep) and its rough months: Bristol Bay's red king crab from October to January, the Pribilofs and St. Matthew's blue king crab, the Bering Sea shelf's snow crab and pollock in winter, the Aleutians' golden king crab, Dungeness off Southeast Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon and California, Chesapeake Bay and Pamlico Sound's blue crab, Florida's stone crab, the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Grand Banks snow crab, the Barents Sea's king crab and cod, Lofoten's skrei, the North Sea and Norwegian Sea herring and mackerel, the Peruvian anchoveta, the Yellow and East China Seas' gazami, the Sea of Japan's red snow crab, Hokkaido's saury and hair crab, the Kona coast's blue marlin, Cabo's striped marlin, the Florida Keys' sailfish and many more. Each ground has its own fishing routes, straight out to its middle from every port within 1,600 nm as the crow flies (and at least its four nearest within 2,500), so a boat sails straight from its base to the ground and home (a far ground, beyond its base's routes, by way of the port nearest it); routed round the land like any lane and kept with them; a ground's end works like a port for the lanes.
Crayfish on the Great Lakes (added 2026-10-13): the six lake grounds (off Thunder Bay, Duluth-Superior, Calcite, Toronto, Milwaukee and Detroit) also hold two trap-fished crayfish, the rusty crayfish (May to October) and the northern crayfish (June to September), so crabbers have a catch on the lakes; a Crayfish seafood family at $900 a crate, cheapest at Detroit, Toronto and Milwaukee and most expensive overseas, carried by every fishing boat and reefer, with its own crab-style art.
A fishing or crabbing boat is bought like any ship and based at any port in its popup (its Base: it sails there once in port). It goes after what its Target says: "Most timely and profitable" (chosen again for every trip from what's in season within its reach, by what a day at sea of it is worth landed at its base, the trip there and back counted and the stock as it is), or a species and ground of the player's choosing, the list showing only what its gear and size can work within reach of its base, with each one's season and value a day. A trip: out along the lanes to the ground, working it (its hold filling at its rate x the species' density there x the stock left, slowed in a storm; fuel burned at 35% of its sailing rate; wear, more in a storm and 2.2x in the ground's rough months: the Bering Sea in winter), and home again with a full hold, at the end of its time out (its most days less the sailing, or what its tank allows), when the season closes, or when it needs what it has left to get home. It can be lost at sea like a cargo ship (out of fuel, broken down, battered in the rough months) and is fetched by a recovery boat or tugs like any. Out of season it waits in port ("At Norfolk: nothing it can catch is in season within reach"). Its status says what it's doing ("Crabbing for red king crab at Bristol Bay: 3,200 / 6,000 crates"), its Catch bar how full it is, and on the map a crabber at work has its string of pot buoys bobbing beside it, a trolling boat its lines streaming astern, a netter its purse seine ringed with floats, a trawler its warps out to the net.
Inshore trolling at every port (added 2026-10-11): 40 more trolled species, each with its real season, a fact and its art: Spanish mackerel, bluefish, bonito, little tunny, skipjack, greater amberjack, sea trout, Atlantic salmon, Arctic char, pollack, saithe, European sea bass, cobia, red drum, queenfish, barramundi, largehead hairtail, lake trout, walleye, snoek, Australian salmon (kahawai), northern pike, zander, rainbow runner, dogtooth tuna, coral trout, snook, spotted seatrout, kob (meagre), leerfish, dentex, lingcod, rockfish, Japanese sea bass, pink snapper, grouper (hamour), muskellunge, smallmouth bass, garfish and mangrove jack, and the Antarctic toothfish and marbled rockcod for the Antarctic stations (101 species in all). 234 inshore grounds ("the Japanese coast off Kobe", ids off_<port>) lie a few miles off the ports a Sport Fisher based there couldn't otherwise fish, on each port's nearest anchor point (Punta Arenas's in the Strait of Magellan), shared with the ports near them, each stocked from its sea's list (46 seas: the Great Lakes, the Baltic, the Gulf of Mexico, the Red Sea, the East China Sea...) with the southern hemisphere's seasons its own. A Sport Fisher based at any of the 322 ports has at least 4 months a year with something in season and at least 2 species to go after; the typical port has all 12 months and 5 species, and the leanest are the Arctic ports' 4-month summer (char with saithe, salmon or pike). 329 grounds in all, with 1,315 lanes.
Fishing boats port like cargo ships: home from a trip they queue for a berth, come alongside and land the catch during their stop, then pull out (to the moorings while they wait for a season, a spot on a ground or fuel money, or straight out to sea for the next trip). A boat at its pier with a trip to make pulls out bound for its first leg's end and sets off on the trip the moment it's clear of the pier; a boat setting off from a pontoon mooring (a boat that waited there, an idle ship given a route) sails out the way it came in and out through the mouth.
Trips are planned to bring the boat home with at least 70% maintenance on a normal day, and a boat at work turns for home when what's left would take it under 70% (as it does when its fuel or its days run out); the boats' wear rates and the two biggest boats' tanks were set so their longest trips at full range fit. Fishing boats break down at random like cargo ships (a hit takes half their maintenance; at 0% they're lost at sea and fetched by tugs or a recovery boat like any ship). At most 4 boats (every company's) work a ground at once: a boat whose best choice is full takes the next best, or waits ("Taipei has 4 boats on it already"). Each boat on a ground has its own spot round its middle on the water and clear of every marina, its lines and loop too, sailing to it on a curve off its lane (heading the way it goes, never sliding sideways, round by the ground's middle where a plain curve would cross land, straight on into its loop) over as much of the lane's end as the curve is long (at least 12 nm; up to where its port's harbour curve starts), so it's never faster than at sea, and home the same way from just where it stopped work; trollers and trawlers work slow loops round their spot, crabbers and netters lie by their gear. Only at work is their gear out: the Sport Fisher 24's rods angled out over the sides and the Sportfisher 60's outriggers spread, and the lines and nets in the water; sailing or in port the rods stand in their holders and the outriggers are folded back by the cabin. Sailing, each fishing boat keeps its own way up to 1.6 nm off to one side of the lane (eased in from the ports, never over land), so boats on one lane don't sit on top of each other.
Stocks: each ground's species is drawn down by every boat's catch and grows back 1.6x what's missing a year, so a fished-out ground catches less (its catch x stock^0.7) and the best target moves on.
The catch lands at the boat's base as crates of its family at that port's price (its grade in): sold there, or put in the company's cold store there for its seafood carriers (Catch in the popup: by default stored where one of the company's carriers calls, else sold). A carrier loading at a port takes the cold store's catch first (the family paying most where it's going, free: the boat's ledger counted it as income, the carrier's as its cost), else buys seafood at the market like any cargo. The seafood families are 16 commodities, cheapest where they're landed (each family's three biggest landing ports are its sources) and most expensive where they're wanted (East Asia pays most for crab and tuna, Europe for cod and whitefish), so carriers make money taking them from Dutch Harbor to Tokyo; every hub can build a family's plant. Landed catch earns XP like a delivery over the miles out and back, and the seafood families have achievement stars in crates.
The field guide has a Catch tab: every crab and fish, family by family, with where and when it's caught, how, what a crate fetches and a fact. AI rivals don't fish (they may run seafood carriers). Deckhand Joe introduces fishing in the tutorial.
Maritime Empire