Greetings fellow zee captains and zailors.

I hereby warn you that some of the tips I mention will unearth some of the mechanics the tutorial doesn't deem to mention. These may spoil your fun a little bit but I will try to keep it as spoiler free as I can:

Without further ado, let's get this hansom cab on the road.

Zeecaptain's SOP(Standard operation procedure):
- First of all, Sunless Sea is primarily an exploration game. You may glean some echo by trading but although it is a fine tradition, the admirality expects us to explore. After the albion is stolen by the bats and pulled underground, admiralty had lost its distinguished fleet as a result. So, this is where we come into play - freelance zee captains.
- Explore and write port reports to any dockable land you see. These port reports will net you fuel and echo. And not only for the first time. As a personal advice I strongly encourage you to find Venderbight, Codex, Whither, Mt. Palmerston in your first forays. These four usually reside in the northern part of the zee and will prove useful later. As for your other runs Salt Lions should be a primary target to find. Also do go into hunter's keep also. [1] (These will signify some of the spoilers I will be mentioning after giving you some general tips. You can peruse them at the end.
- Your order of upgrade should focus on guns and engine. There are three types of guns in our great Albion. Torpedo Launchers, Cannons and another type I haven't used yet. Torpedo Launchers will need torpedo parts to work. Cannons do not. As for the engines there is a caveat, faster means more fuel expenditure. Do keep that in mind and do your range calculations according to that. As a rough example, your starting engine will give you 800 running power and you do a passenger run to venderbight for... say 2 barrels of oil. If you were using an engine which gives you 1500 power, you will spend 3,80 barrels (roughly 4 barrels) but arrival time will be halved.

So why do we upgrade the engine? Because the problem in this game is the distances. The more you spend in the darkness, more problems you encounter. Be it zee beasts, be it terror, be it other ships the less time you spend away from the civilization, the better.
- Which moves us nicely to another topic. Terror. Terror is a horrible thing to experience in this game and yoıu have no escape from it. You may turn on the lights, but this will devour your stock of oil like a lifeberg on crack, or you won't and try to manage it on the road and in London. There are several social occasions which are aimed to lower this [2]
- Whenever you are able, do try to get more shipmates. Zailors are important and your main ship crew are also important. You level up and increase your stats one by one by speaking to them. Also they passively increase your stats and other stuff (less fuel usage, more damage etc etc).

SPOILER TERRITORY! HERE BE DRAGONS! AVAUNT!
[1] - For a quick money making scheme you can use London->Hunter's Keep-> Salt Lions Route. You dock to london, go to your home, get latest news. Then go to Hunter's keep, dine with Cynthia (therefore get Salt's attention), get to Salt Lions and do the ritual to get an Extraordinary Implication which can be sold for 250 echoes. Also after you get your economy stable-ish, if you had followed my advice and wrote reports again and again to every port you encounter you only have to pay for supplies which are consumed far slower than fuel, you can carry sphinxstones to London which are worth a lot. Then again Hunter's Keep and Sphinxstone are not endless, you can do them for a limited amount of time so don't depend on them. They are there to get you up and running in a decent ship I guess.
[2]- There is an event called "carouse in wolfstack docks", this and if you are lucky spending a night with a lad or a lass, will significantly decrease your terror. Do bear in mind that whenever you dock to london it resets to 50, this events will decrease from that. Also if you are lucky and had an offspring you can spend the night with your family and tell him/her stories about the zee. After you tell him 25 stories he will become your Scion and take two legacies in case your current captain dies.






SPOILER TERRITORY END! STARVELING CAT IS A MYTH!

















There, safe journeys my fellow captains and take care!

I only have a single tip: Invest in Veils. When you encounter evil, turn off your lights. There, I made the game easy :-P

sounds like reasonable advice

To save fuel, leave your lights off. I tend to only turn my lights on to either identify a new section of the map, halt my terror dropping (only if it's getting bad), or to speed up my firing solution (only if the enemy has already spotted me).

Great article on the whole.

It's been tested a few times that engine power doesn't linearly increase speed (like in reality). You won't use half supplies and get half terror with a bigger engine on your lightweight starter ship, and any engine except the serpentine questionable as an investment. Bigger engines are a convince because of less waiting, but don't expect to ever recoup the costs of the engine. The serpentine isn't even that good on the starter, but its combination of power and efficiency translates well into heavier ships like a frigate and it's plenty good until you can get the fulgent.

WE ARE CLAY can tide you over for speed and battle manoeuvrability on your starter for a long time.

If your ships engine power is a lot less then it's weight class it's an efficient to upgrade, after that you get diminishing returns.

That said my first game I rushed the Boudica engine, and I managed somewhat ok but it did make the game noticeably harder after the buy, not easier. If you must upgrade your starting engine don't go higher than the Illyrian, and I've heard even that causes some mild issues.

Full power on even the basic engine can get you away from any zee-beast or pirate while taking only a hit or two at most, which you'd take even if you had better engines. Unless you're going hunting for lifebergs or better and have decent Iron you don't really need guns for anything.

About Terror, once you have a good zee map you can greatly minimize it by knowing where the light buoys are are hanging out in the light for a few seconds with your lights on if you're getting close to your next level of terror. A basic engine running lights and travelling the routes with most light will hardly accumulate any terror even going from London to Irem and back. An advanced engine without lights will burn similar amounts of fuel and accumulate large amounts of terror even if you go the same route. An advanced engine with lights won't save you much on terror because you'd still have to rest in the light occasionally plus it burns more fuel. The only perks are less supply consumption and things happening faster.

Thanks for the post! I have been having luck doing something counter-intuitive to the exploration element of the game: I have been choosing the 'legacy' that gives you the map of the previous captain. It's actually been helping me decide where I should go next, and have more focus while exploring. This helps me save valuable fuel and supplies when deciding where to go next.

Also (SPOILER-ish), I have found that repeat visits to discovered islands by subsequent captains yield reports.