Bunch of random tips in no particular order guide to setting up personal economy you gotta set up personal mines to get your own economy rolling. that will give you a daily resource income. you build a personal island within range of those mines and can send out ships every day to go pick up all the resources and bring them back to your personal island. from there you can move them to a city to refine them (in the case of ores) or turn them into finished goods like plates or bulkheads. the real pro move though is to build nothing but maxed out iron mines, then use all your daily workshop labor to do nothing but smelt iron ore into iron bars at a city. the reason for this is that everything else you need for manufacturing can be purchased from towns or manufactured at your personal island using captives instead of your daily town workshop labor. iron bars are the only real bottleneck to progression as they aren't realistically obtainable in bulk any other way. there are 2 ships you need to do all this. you need a trading ship (ideally a flying cloud which can haul a lot of resources around at high speed, ensuring you don't get caught) and a big ship with a lot of crew for collecting "captives" (this can be anything with 150+ crew) to fuel your entire economy. once you have all this your daily routine will be 1) map > click personal island > send out trade fleet to collect all your raw resources 2) while that's going on, board ships to get captives 3) drop them off at all your islands to increase production rate x12 (don't worry about provisions - they aren't worth the extra cost) 4) your fleet should have now dropped the resources off at your personal island. move it all to a nearby town (make sure you put it close to a convenient town with a maxed out warehouse which can be purchased for 1 "insurance" - you'll need the storage) and use all your daily workshop labor to melt the iron ore. 5) if you need anything manufactured, move stuff back to your personal island and craft it with captive labor making fat stacks 0) get a flying cloud asap. beg, borrow, suck, do what you gotta do to get the 4500 battlemarks to purchase one (see "leveling/unlocking better ships/battlemarks" for an actual battle mark guide). it will make everything else following this far easier. the usefulness of being able to move a lot of material fast with minimal gank risk cannot be overstated 1) move ♥♥♥♥ from port to port. ideally from where it is cheap to where it is expensive. ideally something low weight high-value like coal or copper. keep an eye out for opportunities - I spot single-trip 100k+ trade runs that I can do in a flying cloud more often than you'd think. get the skill that lets you dock from lighthouses and the one that lets you fast travel twice in a row - this will often let you fast travel to the port instantly, pick up the good, and bring it back 2) build stuff people need and sell it to them on the ah. ships seem to be the big moneymaker, which makes sense because they're the most effort to construct. build a ship, slide the price slider to max, list before you go to bed, and you'll usually have a lot of money when you wake up. anything tier 4 and larger is usually very in demand. ♥♥♥♥ it, they're ALL very in-demand. guns can sell well as can intermediary goods like bulkheads, beams, canvas, ect. just make sure to do the math first so you don't accidently lose money on the whole operation 3) relisting. a great example would be something like coal at Devios. everyone needs coal. Devios doesn't produce coal. buy coal somewhere cheap, ship it to Devios, sell it on the auction house for probably double. other things everyone needs everywhere: captives (to a lesser extent provisions), repair materials (bronze, planks, canvas, bulkheads, plates), blueprint fragments, saxon/heavy shot. you could even try putting up some buy orders for in-demand stuff for cheap and then flipping it in the same port. leveling/unlocking better ships 1) you can get about 600 arena currency daily for completing the first place and sink players tasks in mass battle. this is totally doable with a 4th rate ship you're comfortable with. you can purchase for 6 arena currency 100 exp in all ship brances. that means for doing these two quests you can get 10k exp every day in all ship branches. much more fun than farming whales 2) if you want to grind for a tier 1 ship the old fashioned way (killing stuff for exp), you pretty much have to use a tier 3 or higher ship to do it. you can do it in a tier 4, but because of how exp scales, even if you fully upgrade the tier 4 ship you'll at most only ever transfer 20% of your exp to the tier 1 you're trying to unlock (that means you need to get get like 250k exp in a tier 4 to unlock a tier 1 - don't do that). most tier 3 ships suck and are just used to unlock tier 1, which ironically means a lot of people look to purchase them. try selling one at max cost or passing it around the clan so people can unlock more tier 1s oh god i need so many battlemarks getting battle marks: so pvp/arena/task battle mark isn't cutting it? burning through thousands of these bad boys unlocking upgrades for your ships? i got you fam. look at this map https://kptjahir.github.io/world-of-sea-battle-map/. you see the 4 battle mark symbols on the edge of the world map? those are "printing houses" - personal islands you can build factories on up to tier 4, just like your iron mines (I think the cost is like 26 bulkheads and 7 plates per tier 1 to 4, feel free to correct me on this). they don't count against your mine limit. they generate 25 battlemarks per day each, and 100 if you fuel them with provisions. it's a long sail, but if you set up all 4 and leave them unfueled, you can come back every week when they fill up and collect like 150 battlemarks per mine. Every 2 days if you fuel them. that's a lot of extra battlemarks, fast (did I mention you should use them to buy a flying cloud???) arena guide - general tips 1) golden lantern is an instant 10% advantage over anyone evenly matched you run into. sadly it's the one item in the game that's genuinely pay to win. it's like $12. if you're at this point in your enjoyment of the game, consider it the cost of the game since it's a free game anyway. slap it on your arena ship, move it around between ships, it's inconvenient, i know. moving on. 2) always nose into enemy ship broadsides. you'll be AMAZED at how much less damage you take. even if they start slow firing at you, guess what? at least they aren't slow firing at your broadside and doing even more damage. this applies to world pvp too. learn this well and it becomes trivial to shred players in much larger ships 3) because mass battle (the one arena mode with consistent pop) is a steel cage match, speed is less important than it would otherwise be in the open world. that makes the scout line bad, right? WRONG. maneuverability is even more useful now. it lets you get guns on enemies faster and then nose into their broadsides for extremely advantageous trades. practice the art of nosing into an enemy's broadside then stern raking their ass with carronades while just far enough away to avoid their attempt at barreling you. 4) boarding is super good. a dedicated boarding build will let you instakill any ship under 1/2 health that you get close to while keeping your own ship safe for the duration. likewise, if you're at 1/2 heath you become submissive and boardable so keep an eye out for fast ships beelining towards you. if you're afraid they'll win, worst case turn their charge in to a head-on and let insurance handle the rest (they can only board when alongside you) tier list of best arena ships (those currently viable wrt pop and queue times at the time of writing, Nov 2025) S - Devourer - cheap to unlock for an imperial ship. 10 forward guns, 12 aft. put triple 6 guns there, that's a 30 forward, 36 aft barrage. use saxon shot. your enemies will be in hell. there is no good side to look at this ship from. spin2win. make sure to take the upgrade that gives +35% damage to forward and aft cannons immediately instead of forgetting about it and wondering why you suck (i definitely didn't do this). it has 6 armor too, so you're fairly tanky. I recommend bringing upgrades that lean into your strengths - don't worry about speed, just be maneuverable so you can get guns on and tanky, and bring consumables like small plates, rum rations, and black powder. S - Red Arrow - I don't own this ship but it's an agile combat ship with a mortar. pretty damn good. Someone who owns one can fill in more here A - Surprise - classic agile ship. take all the maneuverability upgrades. buy a race car wheel, convert into an antique ship's wheel. fully erect your standing desk. put a fan blowing into your face and nose into every broadside while playing the Master and Commander: Far Side of the World soundtrack and shout the lines alongside with the main character Russel Crowe until your neighbor bangs on the wall B - Constitution/Essex - They're fine C - Tier 3 -sure, you're tough, but enjoy the Tarkov-length match loading times D - Tier 5 - you will die. go get a better ship closing thoughts with regards to this section and really the whole guide in general, i am sure many will have differing opinions. consider; i don't care. feel free to post them; i won't read them. in fact i've already turned reply notifications off. credit to fluffyporcipine for at least like 1/3 of this stuff if I ever feel like updating this i'll say so here, otherwise consider this info current as of nov 2025 happy trails