Increase ship weight and NPC count.

[Bleakwise 6]

I feel like ship weight/npc count is way too low. At least NPC count.

First of all NPC count doesn't realy make sense int he context of the game. You either have the weight/gold to afford your NPC crew or you do not. I would suggest removing the stat all together  (as well as sturdyness) and making it a part of the accomidations stat.

You could do something like a soft cap where without the accomidations crew wants more money, which would be offset by the "cheaper crew" skill that captains have. This would tie crew-size to a captian instead of a ship, allowing players who are "captians" to fit more crew on a boat than one who is not.

I would also suggest that Studyness and Resistance should be combined, and make sink-time directly relatable to plank health, so 220% resilance means 220% sink time.

Boats tend to sink from damage and not taking on water anyway, and with some of my other suggestions like a "maintenance deck" that could be placed on a cannon port to repair your ship and throw water, along with passives from captienerring like immproved ship maintanance, efficent repairs and crew education would greatly empower the captianeering tree.

I also dislike the "damage" talent on ships. If anything I would suggest that this be swapped to an NPC stat, so we might have something to level on NPCs instead of food or health. Having high quality or named NPCs would perhaps then be a side-quest in Atlas, like perhaps we would rescue some Legendary NPCs guys from dungeons or free them from slavery by buying them from merchant ships, or getting them off the ghost ship or off ships of the damned with some RNG

What I mean is, get rid of the default stats for NPCs as players, and give them just Health (and let it level like player health, 3 per pt), Melee damage, make weight unchangable or cap it, and make it level decently. put a cap on food, then have stats like "cannonier" or "repairman" or "oarman" or "sails" that we could level up.

All of these stats would have different caps, and depending on the quality of the NPC the caps would be different. Basically just have NPCs like an item, common, adept, journeyman, master, legendary and mythical.

I wouldn't even make NPCs levelable anymore, or just make them all start at 1 and end at 30, 40, 50, 60, or 70 or some such depending on their quality, and of coures their base stats would reflect whatever quality they were, but they all start at level 1.

So you have classes and quality of NPCs, now, all that's left to do is male them sell-able. To do this you could sell the NPC to the freeport as an indentured servent. Players could then purchase them by buying their freedom.

This would add another activity to the game, slaving. If you sunk an enemy ship you could capture some of their NPCs and sell them (they won't work for you) or you could capture them off ghost ships and sell them. You would have to use handcuffs on them which would make them follow you for 60 or 90 seconds or something and then put them in a cage, take them to a freeport or a "pirate port" or something and sell them off.

This would allow you to buy higher quality NPCs than the ones you get from freeport. I would also make it so that the prices fluctuate based on market demand based on the number of purchases recently compared to the others. For example, if players bought Legendary 100 cannon NPCs and 50 oarmen, the price of Legendary Oarmen would go down vs cannoners, and if only 10 repairmen were sold their price would go down more. I would say each "tier" should be put in their own league, and each type in their own price point, and at the very worst make it so that a legendary would cost the same as a journeyman, so if say journeyman cannoneers if bought up would max out at 100 gold, while a legendary if it never hardly sold due to not being much better or whatever would also sell for 100 gold, while the same situation for legendary and mythical would be 400 gold, while mythical could cap out at 800, or whatever that number may be.

Selling them back to the NPC pirate slavers would net you a net price of a quarter of whatever their base price is, so say 75 for a journeyman, 100 for a legendary or 200 for a mythical, or whatever that number might be. You would still need the crew slots to cart the NPCs around, but maybe they would only count 50% as long as they were in a cage, so having 4-5 extra slots would letyou hold 8-10 captured NPCs as long as they were in cages.

That said, you wouldn't have to pay the NPCs but you would have to feed them.

You should also have the optoin to sell to other players directly by letting them come on your boat and buy the NPC out of the cage. So they would put gold ont he 0 slot, press E, and the NPC would geta payment as if rescued, and the gold would go into your ship's resource box. This could also be something players could setup at the "pirate market ports" or what have you.

I would suggst the pirate markets behave much like freeports, except no decay timers. Instead, have it so that after 30 minutes to an hour players have to pay a fee to stay there or then they can be attacked. This would allow players to dock their boats and sell goods there provided they are paying gold. The gold would come from the resource chest of the boat that is docked.

I honestly think this would be a great way to handle "safe zones" that are NOT starter zones, as these starter zones allow you to build, and these zones would not.