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.