It's About Pirates Ship Builds: Slots, Damage Types, and Crew Synergy

How It's About Pirates Ship Builds Actually Work

It's About Pirates launched on Steam on November 6, 2026, from Austrian indie studio Elderwoof Games, and it treats your vessel as the character sheet. You steer a hull through waves of enemies, hoover up gold, and pour it into the parts that turn a modest sloop into a floating fortress. It's a survivors-like — a bullet heaven with cannons — which means It's About Pirates ship builds are the real progression system, more than twitch reflexes.

The loop is a two-track choice. Survive a day at sea and you pick either an officer or a weapon upgrade; between waves you spend gold on weapons, items, and crew. Demo footage from creators shows the same rhythm repeating: level-up screen, shop screen, then back into the water with a slightly nastier ship.

The official It's About Pirates Steam page frames the goal as combining weapons and items into builds, then surviving storms of cannonballs and mythical sea monsters, with a boss battle closing out each run. The advertised feature set is broad: 30 adventures, 10 captains, 6 factions with unique abilities, over 140 items, and more than 150 ship parts to discover.

Two dated snapshots are worth having before you buy. As of November 9, 2026, the Steam store listing recorded a "Mixed" all-time rating from 34 user reviews, 67% of them positive, and priced the game at $11.75 with a 15% introductory discount to $9.98 on an offer the page said ends November 16. Both numbers come from a very small, very young sample, so treat them as a starting point rather than a verdict.

Weapon Slots and Placement in It's About Pirates Ship Builds

Placement is where most It's About Pirates ship builds quietly succeed or fail. Weapons attach to specific mounts rather than floating freely, and the mount decides which enemies you can realistically hit. Player experience from the demo suggests a hull with distinctly different firing lanes rather than one universal gun deck.

Community reports also note the starting loadout in the demo captain's kit: eight cannons and two harpoons, before any shop purchases. That baseline matters, because the harpoons are where your secondary damage type usually comes from first.

Two practical quirks stand out. First, weapons could not be sold in the demo build, so every purchase is a commitment — a creator bought an expensive weapon, forgot to equip it, and effectively wasted the gold. Second, the shop offers a reroll button; using it to chase the weapon you actually want beat settling for a mediocre buy in both runs we reviewed.

Blunt, Pierce, and Elemental: Damage Types That Decide Builds

It's About Pirates ship builds aren't just about how many guns you own — they're about which damage tags those guns apply. The demo footage shows four overlapping categories, and items often buff one specific tag.

Spreading thin is the trap. One creator deliberately ended up with pierce, blunt, and elemental damage all at once and flatly called it "probably not great from the build standpoint" — the pieces didn't reinforce each other. The alternative is to pick a lane and let shop items that boost that lane do the heavy lifting, such as crit-chance stacking or single-type damage buffs.

Aiming matters here too. The Steam feature list confirms both automatic and manual aiming, and the developers recommend a controller. Auto-attack mode lets you focus on positioning, but indirect weapons like the mortar won't target the priority enemy for you.

Officers, Crew, and Morale: The Hidden Multiplier

Officers are the upgrade path most new players undervalue. Every level-up asks you to choose between upgrading a weapon or hiring an officer, and officers apply fleet-wide buffs rather than a single gun's numbers.

• Cook — raises morale and increases crew size, per player footage.
• Powder Monkey — improves reload rate, which shortens every weapon cooldown, plus adds elemental damage.
• Spotter — boosts range and critical chance.
• Sail Maker — increases sailing speed, useful for kiting.
• Musician — adds luck and life steal.

Crew members stack similar bonuses: plunder, repair, reload rate, and sailing speed all climb as your roster grows. The catch is that crew are consumable in practice. Taking hull damage can kill crew outright, and sirens in particular were reported to wipe out half a crew in a single pass. That's why items like the life buoy (health barrels restore one crew member) and duct tape (armor plus repair) quietly do more for a run than another damage trinket.

Morale is the one stat the footage never nails down. Creators noted several items trading against it — a beer jug cuts sailing speed while raising morale and plunder, an eyepatch bundles crit chance with morale and plunder — but no one explained what the number actually does. If you're building around it, expect to experiment.

Practical Priorities for Your First Runs

If you want a repeatable process rather than a lucky run, these habits showed up across both playthroughs:

1. Take raw cannon damage early. Cannon level upgrades were the first buy in both runs, and they scale every shot you fire for the rest of the adventure.
2. Don't buy a weapon you can't place or aim. Since the demo build wouldn't let players sell gear back, a mis-click occupies a slot for the whole run.
3. Protect your crew before you chase crit. Repair, life steal, and armor kept runs alive far longer than an extra 5% crit chance.
4. Reroll instead of settling. The shop reroll is cheap compared to a dead slot.
5. Turn your broadside. Side-mounted weapons only connect when the hull is angled properly, which is the recurring complaint from players learning the controls.
6. Use the breeze boost to escape. The in-game tutorial points it out for exactly the moment you get boxed in.
7. Watch the arena edge. One creator nearly lost a strong run to boundary damage while grabbing gold.
8. Try the auto-upgrade button with caution. A player observed it upgrading from the top-left of the inventory outward — convenient, but not a strategy.

Also worth knowing: the demo's ten-day structure ends in a boss encounter (a magma turtle with a volcano on its shell), and players reported that the demo levels are handcrafted rather than procedurally generated. Whether the full 30 adventures keep that approach is unconfirmed.

Frequently Asked Questions About It's About Pirates Ship Builds

What's the best first upgrade for It's About Pirates ship builds? Raw cannon damage. In the footage we reviewed, cannon level upgrades were taken immediately in both runs because the boost applies to every shot, while officer picks are more situational.

Can you sell weapons you don't want? In the demo build, players reported no selling option, so purchases were permanent for the run. That raises the value of the shop reroll button, which lets you cycle stock before committing gold.

Do I need to match damage types? Keeping to one or two damage tags is more efficient than collecting one of each. Pierce, elemental, and blunt support different items, so scattering your shop picks dilutes the buffs you can stack.

Does the game support controllers and auto-aim? Yes — the developers recommend a controller, the Steam page lists both automatic and manual aiming, and the tutorial references left-stick steering and a breeze boost for escapes.

Ship builds in It's About Pirates reward planning over panic-buying: pick a damage lane, keep your crew breathing, and let the shop reroll do the rest.