It's About Pirates Ship Upgrades: Build a Floating Fortress

Every run in It's About Pirates lives or dies at the upgrade screen. It's About Pirates ship upgrades decide whether your starting sloop turns into a floating fortress or a floating wreck, and the game hands you a fresh decision almost every time you survive a day at sea. If you want to know which upgrades to take first, how shop gear fits together, and why your crew keeps vanishing, this breakdown of It's About Pirates ship upgrades walks through what a full gameplay run actually shows.

How It's About Pirates Ship Upgrades Work

It's About Pirates is a pirate survival roguelite. You steer a ship through waves of enemy vessels and sea monsters, vacuum up gold, and pour that gold into making the ship nastier. The loop is simple on paper: survive, loot, spend, repeat.

The upgrade structure has a few quirks worth knowing before you spend a coin:

• Upgrades are slot-based. Cannons live in dedicated mounts, a front cannon slot opens up as you progress, and rams and rear weapons each occupy their own position on the hull.
• There's an auto-upgrade button. It's a fast way to keep pace when you don't want to read every tooltip, but it will happily spend gold you were saving for something specific.
• The shop rerolls. A weak offer isn't a dead end — the shop in the recorded run allowed a reroll when nothing useful appeared.
• Buying is not equipping. A weapon you purchase sits in inventory until you slot it. In the gameplay footage, the host bought a flamethrower, forgot to mount it, and had to go back and fix it.

Movement matters too. The tutorial prompt points you to the left stick for steering and a breeze boost for escaping bad situations, and auto-attack mode handles your guns so you can focus on positioning.

What Each Upgrade Choice Actually Does

After surviving a day, you typically pick between an officer and a weapon upgrade. The tooltips are the real source of truth, but here's what the on-screen descriptions showed during one recorded run:

A pattern jumps out fast: most upgrades are packages of two or three stats rather than a single clean number. You're rarely choosing "more damage" against "more damage" — you're choosing which combination of damage, reload, range, crit, morale, and plunder your build can afford to ignore.

Weapon Slots and Shop Gear Worth Grabbing

The biggest jumps in power come from filling empty slots. A single cannon at the front of the ship is a modest threat; a front cannon, a rear flamethrower, a mounted ram, and a couple of harpoons is a different animal entirely.

Some standout picks from the footage:

• Grapeshot Swivel shreds at close range and rewards aggressive steering.
• Rear flamethrower covers the angle your forward guns can't reach.
• Rams pay off if you commit. The Puffer Fish item, which adds gold from ram kills, turns ramming from a gimmick into an economy engine.
• Chain lightning and fire tornado style effects showed up as high-impact options when the shop rolled well.

Gold pacing is the real constraint. In the recorded run, one late cannon upgrade displayed a 400-gold price tag, which is a serious chunk of a run's earnings. That's the tension behind every It's About Pirates ship upgrades decision: broad cheap upgrades now, or save for the expensive slot-filler?

Crew, Morale, and the Stats Behind Your Build

Crew are not cosmetic. When the ship takes damage, crew members die — the host lost two in a single bad engagement, then another to mermaids and eels later. Losing crew means losing whatever bonuses they were contributing, so a run that ignores defense slowly bleeds out.

The stat list you'll juggle includes base damage, pierce damage, elemental damage, crit chance, reload, range, morale, plunder, luck, vitality, and armor. Morale is the murkiest of the bunch — tooltips in the run tied it to plunder and crew bonuses, but the host openly admitted he wasn't sure what morale was doing mechanically. Treat any specific morale formula you see online as player experience rather than confirmed math.

Officers work differently from crew. Hiring one gives you a skill that levels up when you collect items tied to that faction — Conviction and Calypso's Wrath both appeared as level-one skills in the hiring screen. That makes officers a long-term investment rather than a quick stat bump.

Practical Tips for Better It's About Pirates Ship Upgrades

1. Take raw damage early. Base cannon damage was the safest first pick in the footage, and it stays relevant all run.
2. Fill empty slots before upgrading full ones. A second weapon usually beats a small percentage on the first.
3. Read before you hit auto-upgrade. It's convenient, but it doesn't know you're saving for a mortar.
4. Protect your crew. Armor, vitality, and life steal all quietly keep your bonuses alive.
5. Use the safety net. On the first adventure, dying doesn't end the run — you get a second chance without losing progress, so experiment boldly.
6. Don't sleep on economy items. Plunder and gold bonuses compound into better gear later.

For the official feature list and any build updates, check the It's About Pirates Steam page. The gameplay referenced here comes from a recorded playthrough of the game, and specific values may differ between builds.

FAQ

Do It's About Pirates ship upgrades carry between runs? The game is structured as a roguelite, so upgrades are earned and spent within a run. The first adventure includes a one-time second chance that lets you continue without losing progress, based on the recorded playthrough.

What should I upgrade first? Base cannon damage is the most reliable opener. After that, filling an empty weapon slot — a front cannon, ram, or rear weapon — usually delivers a bigger jump than squeezing more out of an existing gun.

Why do I keep losing crew? Crew members are lost when the ship takes heavy damage. Stacking armor, vitality, and life steal keeps them alive longer, and keeping them alive preserves the bonuses they provide.

Is morale important for ship upgrades? It appears to be. Several items trade sailing speed or range for morale and plunder, and tooltips link morale to crew bonuses. The exact effect wasn't confirmed in the footage, so test it yourself before building around it.