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Caribbean Prospector
A turn-based piracy roguelike — classic terminal glyphs or a living painted tile mode. Captain your ship through a 17th-century Caribbean: trade, smuggle, hunt prizes, fight boarding actions, chase your father's legacy — then retire in glory or go down with the ship. Full Steam Deck support.

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Features
Single-player
Family Sharing
Steam is learning about this game 
Languages:
Interface Full Audio Subtitles
English ✔ ✔

Coming Soon To Early Access

The developers of this game intend to release as a work in progress, developing with the feedback of players.

Note: Games in Early Access are not complete and may or may not change further. If you are not excited to play this game in its current state, then you should wait to see if the game progresses further in development. Learn more

What the developers have to say:

Why Early Access?

“Caribbean Prospector is a playable systems-driven roguelike with five careers, a complete trade-to-retirement loop, a nine-stage main quest, and a native Steam Deck-ready build. Early Access lets us tune its economy, careers, combat risk, and replay loops with players who are already getting full voyages from the game today.”

Approximately how long will this game be in Early Access?

“Our current estimate is roughly 12–18 months. That estimate may change as player feedback shapes the scope, and we will update this answer if it does.”

How is the full version planned to differ from the Early Access version?

“The full version is intended to deepen replayability rather than replace the current core: faction storylines, hand-authored landmarks and treasure mysteries, richer town and shore encounters, seed sharing and challenge runs, broader legacy progression, and platform features such as Cloud saves and achievements. The exact scope and order will be guided by player feedback.”

What is the current state of the Early Access version?

“v0.6.0 is playable end-to-end today: five careers, a procedurally generated sea with a living economy, 15 quest types, broadside naval combat, boarding and prize capture, shore parties with mining and crafting, smuggling and customs, storms and hurricane season, crew management, three difficulty modes, The Captain's Legacy main quest, a specimen codex, and retirement with a persistent hall of fame. The Linux build has a native SDL renderer and controller/Steam Deck support. A voyage typically takes several hours; the game has an automated test suite and cross-platform CI.”

Will the game be priced differently during and after Early Access?

“We expect the Early Access price to be lower than the full-release price as the game gains content and polish. Any price change will be communicated in advance; Early Access buyers keep the game.”

How are you planning on involving the Community in your development process?

“We will use Steam discussions, bug reports, saved tales, and patch notes to guide the roadmap. We will publish clear change notes with each update and invite players to report confusing openings, balance spikes, broken saves, and the stories they want to see next.”
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This game is not yet available on Steam

Planned Release Date: August 2026

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About This Game

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 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 two ways: classic terminal glyphs, sharp and readable the way only a roguelike is — or the painted tile mode, where surf breaks on every coast, ships fly fluttering pennants, storms crack with lightning, and every broadside, boarding action, and shore fight plays out in muzzle flashes and flying steel.

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. Ships that strike their colors can be taken as prizes and condemned at an Admiralty Court.
  • Lead shore parties — land on any island; forage, chop timber, cook at a campfire, fight jaguars and raiders, dig up buried treasure.
  • Mine the islands — survey for mineral riches, work rock outcrops for iron, copper, saltpeter — or strike silver, gold, and gemstone veins. Feed the forge: mill powder, cast cannon, fit permanent ship upgrades.
  • Run a crew that matters — hire hand-picked officers off the waterfront, equip them, commend them, pay their wages — or watch them desert. Navigators widen your sight, surgeons keep the butcher's bill short, naturalists fill your specimen codex.
  • Brave the weather — visible storm cells drift across the map, and hurricane season turns a third of every year into a gauntlet.
  • Take 15 kinds of quests — cargo runs, bounties, escorts, patrols, island surveys, rescues, lost expeditions, treasure maps.
  • Follow your father's wake — The Captain's Legacy, a nine-stage main quest that starts with a stranger recognizing his medallion and ends at the island where he buried everything. Every career walks it its own way; the sandbox never waits on it.
  • Fill the Royal Survey — describe the islands' wildlife in a field-journal codex and present your findings before a governor; describe every species and be elected a Fellow of the Royal Society.
  • Retire in glory — buy estates and a noble title, then step away with a legacy score… or go down with your ship. Both end with your tale told, written to a hall of fame that outlives every run.

Made for the terminal — and the couch

  • Two renderers — a classic curses TUI in your terminal, or its own native window from Steam and Game Mode with the animated painted tileset (lapping surf, glinting water, pennants, flames, lamplit windows, combat effects — all optional, all off in terminal mode).
  • Full controller and Steam Deck support — every action pad-reachable: D-pad to sail, A to confirm, context-sensitive triggers, stick-driven trading. On-screen hints switch to button names when a pad is connected. Remap with Steam Input.
  • Plays in any terminal at 60×18 or better; pure-ASCII mode for minimal setups.
  • Three difficulty modes — gentle Story seas, the intended Captain experience, and unforgiving Ironman.
  • Seeded, configurable world generation — replay a favorite archipelago or crank the pirate count.
  • One autosave slot, crash-safe: your voyage is rescued even if the game founders.

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.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Some pre-rendered 2D artwork (several of the optional tile-art style packs, plus store capsule and marketing images) was created with generative AI image tools, then curated, edited and integrated by the developer. Portions of the game's code and text were written with AI coding assistance under full human review. The game does not generate any content with AI at runtime, and contains no AI chat features.

System Requirements

Windows
macOS
SteamOS + Linux
    Minimum:
    • OS: Windows 10 64-bit
    • Processor: 64-bit dual-core CPU
    • Memory: 1 GB MB RAM
    • Graphics: Any GPU capable of 1280x720 display
    • Storage: 300 MB MB available space
    Minimum:
    • Requires an Apple processor
    • OS: macOS 11 or newer (Apple Silicon)
    • Processor: Apple Silicon (M1 or newer)
    • Memory: 1 GB MB RAM
    • Graphics: Any GPU capable of 1280x720 display
    • Storage: 300 MB MB available space
    Minimum:
    • OS: 64-bit Linux with glibc 2.31+ (SteamOS 3 supported)
    • Processor: 64-bit dual-core CPU
    • Memory: 1 GB MB RAM
    • Graphics: Any GPU capable of 1280x720 display
    • Storage: 300 MB MB available space
    • Additional Notes: Launches in the native SDL renderer; a terminal renderer and pure-ASCII mode remain available as fallbacks.
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