The scholarly syntheses behind the game — how the world's ports ranked, decade by decade, from 1550 to 1815; the flow matrix that now drives the simulation; and the silences the archive keeps. The live world sails 105 of these ports.
The documentation page: what the simulation invents and what it inherits — the sources and how they were interpreted, the evidence classes on every ledger, how the 105 ports were chosen, how ships move and are named, and a plain list of the places where the chart knowingly differs from the record.
The flows we know existed and cannot — or choose not to — quantify: coastal metabolisms, fisheries, trades silent by evasion, and the seas outside every European series. Each silence carries its reason and its treatment; three have been answered with stated estimates that now sail the chart.
The routing engine is the least-evidenced part of the project: its wind field is a parametric model of about fifteen constants, never tested against the record. This is the beginning of that test — and it leads with how little it can yet say, because a pass rate over the few routes with surviving evidence would launder a narrow check into a broad reassurance.
Prominence as an output: the per-decade busiest ports summed from the 60 evidence-classed trade systems — Istanbul, Shanghai, and Tianjin where the ranked record could not put them. Ports not yet sailable in the sim are marked.
Per-decade top-10 ports ranked three ways — ship movements, tonnage, and approximate value — each with a persistence ranking and a presence-grid heatmap. Switch the metric to watch the board change.
Each port's decades-in-top-10 summed across all three metrics — a single staying-power score, with a stacked bar showing which metric carried it (all-rounders vs. specialists).
The long tail — ports that never troubled a ranking yet mattered for a monopoly, a chokepoint, a single precious cargo, or the flag of an excluded people. Curated for diversity of geography, cargo, and polity, à la Dejima.
A structural trade-lane model: each top-10 port's principal routes, activated by decade and ranked by staying power — 165 lanes from 1,818 port-decade entries. Filterable by port, region, or cargo.
On the data. These are scholarly best-effort reconstructions, not censuses. The port rankings are anchored to hard regional series (Sound Toll Registers, Dutch-Asiatic Shipping, the Carrera de Indias, English customs) where they exist and are informed estimate elsewhere; the minor-ports roster carries a ◆ where a claim was verified in an adversarial research pass; the route model is explicitly structural. Full sources and caveats live on each page.
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