Caribbean Prospector

The year is 1669. The West Indies are a chessboard of empires, smugglers, and storms — and you've just been handed a ship. Caribbean Prospector is a turn-based pirate roguelike that drops you into the 17th-century Caribbean as a ship's captain and lets you write your own saga — trader, privateer, or pirate — across a living, procedurally generated sea. Play it in the painted tile mode — surf breaking on every coast, fluttering pennants, storms cracking with lightning, broadsides and boarding actions in muzzle flashes and flying steel — or in classic terminal glyphs, sharp and readable the way only a roguelike is. Five careers, one living sea Choose who you are before you weigh anchor: a Merchant Trader chasing a fortune, a Privateer with a letter of marque, an outlaw Pirate, a Naturalist Explorer charting the wild, or a Castaway who starts shipwrecked with nothing but driftwood and stubbornness. The world doesn't wait for you — merchant convoys ply their routes, patrols hunt pirates, storms drift across the chart, and port economies move whether you're there or not. What you'll do Trade & smuggle — 23 goods with port-by-port prices. Run contraband past colonial customs: submit, bribe the searcher, or fight your way clear. Fight broadside naval battles — round shot, chain, and grape; rake her rigging, board her, or run before the wind. Board her — a top-down deck fight: two hulls lashed together, your crew crossing the planks beside you. Fell her captain and the crew strikes at once — then take her into your fleet or sack her. Command a fleet — commission prizes as crewed consorts: appoint captains, rotate crews, refit at the yard; they fire in support. Lead shore parties — land on any island; forage, mine, cook, fight jaguars and raiders, dig up buried treasure. Run a crew that matters — hire face by face off the waterfront, equip them, commend them, pay their wages — or watch them desert. Become the hunted — raid enough lawful shipping and the Crown puts a price on your head: bounty hunters chase your wake, ports bar you, and the Imperial Armada itself sails. Brave the weather — visible storm cells drift the chart, trade winds bias your speed by heading, and hurricane season turns a third of every year into a gauntlet. Fill the Royal Survey — describe the islands' wildlife in a field-journal codex; describe every species and be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. Retire in glory — estates, a noble title, a legacy score… or go down with your ship. Both end with your tale told. Made for the couch — and the terminal A native window with the painted tiles by default; a classic curses TUI in any terminal 60×18 or better (pure-ASCII mode included). Full controller & Steam Deck support — official layouts, every action pad-reachable, hints that switch to button names when a pad is connected. A focused 20-minute Short Voyage mode, and Story / Captain / Ironman difficulties. Seeded, shareable world generation. One autosave slot, crash-safe. A spiritual successor to Prospector, magellan's (Matthias Mennel's) cult sci-fi terminal roguelike — its spirit of open-ended captaincy, recast under a Caribbean sun. Early Access (v0.8.12): the full loop — sail, trade, quest, fight, explore — is playable end to end, and updates land frequently, most of them straight from player reports. The roadmap says what's next. Also on Steam, with official controller layouts and the overlay. Downloads Linux / Steam Deck — Flatpak: the native window, no terminal needed. flatpak install --user CaribbeanProspector-0.8.12.flatpak, then Add to Steam to play in Game Mode. (Saves and audio in the Flatpak were fixed in 0.8.10 — if you played an older one and lost progress on quit, that was a sandbox permission bug, and it's gone.) Windows / macOS / Linux — native build: unzip and run CaribbeanProspector. It opens its own window with the painted tiles; pass --tui to play in a real terminal instead (60×18 minimum, pure-ASCII mode included). Version history 0.8.12 — The Title Screen Answers · a Steam Deck display-handshake quirk could leave the screen frozen on its first frame while the game played on underneath; it repaints through that now, and any button press wakes the display. The game also keeps an input log beside your save so stuck-input reports can be diagnosed. 0.8.11 — Official Layouts, a Quieter Voice · official Steam Input layouts ship with the game; hints and metadata render in a smaller face so menus read as menus; every prompt names the button your hands are actually on; the docking digest cycles instead of clipping. 0.8.10 — The Thread Round · fog of war persists across save and load (the explored chart used to reset on Continue); a new Chart sidebar tab remembers every port and place you've found, with bearings; controller fixes in port; ammo and magazine counts explained; prizes always point you at a court that will buy them; Flatpak saves and audio fixed. 0.8.9 — The Controller Answers · living-room pad hardening, fullscreen big-screen sessions, input diagnostics. 0.8.8 — Every Random Sea Its Own · random worlds are truly random (they had all been generating the same map), and the world seed shows in the pause menu and on your legacy card. 0.8.7 — Easing-In, Second Round · a "new here?" nudge toward Short Voyage, newest-first conversations, prose endings, roped overlay menus. 0.8.6 — Board Freshness · commissions show their deadline and stale offers are pruned; rope is purchasable at the chandler. 0.8.5 — The Playtest Round · a gold chevron marks your ship and faction washes colour friend from foe; a First Voyage checklist teaches the loop by doing; pad-first help; renderer fixes. 0.8.3 — The Windows Launch Fix · Windows builds launch again (a Unix-only signal had been killing them), and the Steam Overlay hooks the renderer. 0.8.0 — Short Voyages · sound arrives — synthesized shipboard effects — plus controller rumble, a 20-minute Short Voyage mode, and big-screen UI scaling. 0.7.0 — The Open Port · docking opens a proper dockside destinations hub. 0.6.0 — A Second Set of Colours · ten switchable tile-art styles (the painted default, Kenney 1-bit, three CP437 glyph packs and five full-colour looks), real wall/road/river junctions, freshwater rivers that reach the sea, doors that show whether they're locked, and the charting economy. 0.5.x — The Captain's Legacy · The Living Sea · Deck Polish · a nine-stage authored questline walked its own way by every career, animated painted tiles with a combat effects layer, and a Deck-readable UI. 0.4.x — The Deck Update · Mutiny & Standing Orders · Letters of Marque · Fleet, Pets & Rigging · the painted chart arrives, crews mutiny over unpaid wages, privateer commissions and cargo manifests, fleet command and ship's pets. 0.3.x — Smugglers and Storms · contraband and customs searches, drifting storm cells and trade winds, bounties on your head, tavern gambling, a settings screen, forged pardons. 0.2.x — The Captain's Update · the Early Access launch, then boarding deck-combat and prizes. Each download also ships the full CHANGELOG.md. Follow development: @CaribProspector · Steam