The helm changes hands the way vanilla hands over a hull. When the server names a new helmsman, the machine that was simulating the ship passes it to them on the spot, in one exchange. No tug-of-war between two machines, so no jitter, no hull snapping under the crew, no deck throws, and no helm that steers but will not take forward or back. A helmsman whose connection drops — logout, timeout or crash — has their helm released for everyone, so a ship is never bound to someone who can no longer let go.

She keeps her way. Step back from the rudder and your ship sails on, as in vanilla, until you actually leave the boat.

Each ship knows who is aboard, exactly — a crew standing on the seam between two deck volumes no longer piles up phantom passengers that leave a hull unresponsive.

Every hull has its own cap, matched to the prefab the game really uses. OdinShip and OdinShipPlus hulls are found by inspection, not from a fixed list, so new ones from those mods are picked up with no Njord update, and each gets a MaxSpeed_ setting of its own when that mod is installed. Set a cap above what a hull can physically reach and the limiter is, in effect, off.

Where she appears. She takes her post the first time anyone loads the zone nearest the world spawn, and keeps it across restarts. A dedicated server loads a zone only while somebody is standing in it, so on a world where everyone spawns straight into their own base she may never appear by herself — and the log says so plainly rather than going quiet. New worlds place her on their own, because the first thing anyone does is stand at the spawn.

Placing her is done from your own game. The shoreline is found by raycast and she is seated on settled ground, and a dedicated server has no colliders or heightmaps outside the world origin: it decides, it cannot measure. So your machine sites her, and the server checks you against its adminlist.txt and records where she went. The server's half of an answer prints in the server log; what your own machine can see prints in your console. njord.harbour.placeat needs that zone loaded on your machine — if in doubt, stand there and use njord.harbour.place.

She stands on what you built. Njord seats her once, at the moment she is posted, on every solid surface at that spot — terrain, your pieces, the world's own structures — but never on a boat moored under her, and never on a roof over her head, so in a boathouse she stands on the deck. For half a minute afterwards Njord watches that she has not sunk into ground still settling, and lifts her if she has.

When she never appeared, njord.harbour.find reports the world spawn, whether that zone is loaded, and whether the shoreline search finds an acceptable site — which tells "the search never ran" from "the search ran and rejected everything". Those look identical in a log and have completely different fixes.

The free hull is the one thing the server keeps. Buying follows vanilla's own trust model — you pay out of your own inventory — but a grant that can be repeated is not a grant. Who has had theirs is decided on the server, against a ledger keyed by your persistent player ID, and the row is written before the boat is handed over: a crash mid-grant costs a boat rather than handing out a second one. Rerolling a character does not get you another. A gift is not a christening either — you did not name her, so she does not count toward your christenings.

Her own shop, not Haldor's. Vanilla's shop can only count coins, and Njord's prices are lists of materials, so Njord draws its own — no other trader mod on your server is patched or touched. Hulls carry the names the game gives them, translated, modded hulls included, and the window wears the same gilt frame as VikingOS's. Costs are written as prefab names (FineWood:60,DeerHide:20,BronzeNails:80), the same string in every language; a cost naming an item this world does not have takes that hull out of the shop, with the reason in the log, rather than selling it cheap.

What a star is worth is the server's business. Upgrade_Tier2, Upgrade_Tier3 and Upgrade_Tier4 are lines of speed, accel, health and cargo values against the hull's base figures, never compounding — so a ⭐4 hull is exactly base × her own tier's numbers, however she got there.

speed raises the cap; accel raises the boat. If your MaxSpeed_* values sit above what a hull can physically reach, the cap is not what holds her back and speed does nothing at all — accel is the only key that makes her faster there, and it still helps on a default server by reaching the cap sooner. Its return is sub-linear, because drag rises with speed, so the defaults are a starting point to measure, not a promise. That is why the panel quotes m/s you can check against your own HUD, and tells you outright when a hull has no cap at all.

A refit neither heals nor hurts her. Raising her maximum health scales what she has now by the same factor, so a battered boat leaves the yard exactly as battered as she arrived, with a bigger hull around it.

⚠️ cargo is the one refit that can destroy items — an item in a slot that stops existing is gone. It is 0 in every tier out of the box, and Njord never shrinks a hold within a session; lowering it later, or removing Njord, takes those rows away with whatever is in them.

With Barrkbot_Enable on, the server writes barrkbot_boats.json to BepInEx/config/Njord/: world_boats, the census by prefab, and speed_records, one per hull type. Players' games sample the speed of the ship they steer and report their bests; only the server writes. Records survive restarts in njord_speed_records.tsv beside the export, and every file is written whole, so a reader never catches one half-written.

Absence is honest. A hull missing from the census means none exist; missing from the records, nobody has sailed one; cap_in_effect is null when no cap applied; world_boats is null until the first count finishes. None is ever reported as a zero. Each record also carries samples_observed and samples_recorded — the second is the sample size behind top_speed, after Barrkbot_MinSpeed has discarded the drifting.

Where a cap is in force, top_speed settles on it — it measures the cap, not the hull — so the lasting content of a record is the helmsman and recorded_at. A null cap on a capped server is an admin signal: a hull Njord has no cap for, such as a boat from another mod. A reader checking top_speed <= cap_in_effect should skip nulls rather than fail them.

Sailor stats are split by subject, never by rows: barrkbot_sailors.json (distance, helm time, hulls helmed, last seen), barrkbot_wrecks.json (wrecks, christenings and the world totals) and barrkbot_hull_bests.json (one flat row per sailor × hull). Every file holds every sailor, keyed by persistent player ID with the name beside it, so any ranking sits on a complete base. A sailor's best is personal_best_speed; top_speed only ever means the world record for a hull.

A wreck is a hull destroyed by damage — not one you dismantled, not one that rotted at her mooring — and a hull lost with nobody at the helm is unattributed, not blamed on whoever last touched her. Distance is counted once, on the machine that owns the hull, so sailing in company never banks the same miles twice.

Big rosters roll over. Past Barrkbot_RowBudget characters of rows, a collection continues into _2, _3 and so on, each part carrying part, part_of, and a _leaders block — the top three per field, worked out across the whole collection before the split, so every part names the true leader. Leftover parts are swept when the roster shrinks. A growing roster is the writer's job, never a reason to ship a new build.

Not included: a per-player leaderboard across hulls. "Who holds the Longship record" has an answer; "who is the fastest sailor on the server" does not.

Stand on the shore where your players actually gather, facing the water, and type njord.harbour.place in your own game's console (F5) — not the server console, which has no ground to measure. The slipway is worked out from the water in front of you. The server checks its adminlist.txt, records her, and prints its half of the answer in the server log. If it says you are not an admin, njord.whoami shows why your machine thinks so.

In 12 - Shipwright, each vanilla hull has a Vendor_Cost_ line (Raft, Karve, Longship, Drakkar) and Vendor_Cost_Default covers every other hull, modded ones included. Write PREFAB:AMOUNT, comma separated — FineWood:60,DeerHide:20,BronzeNails:80. Vendor_HullList picks which hulls she sells, in order; empty sells every hull in the world.

Run njord.harbour.remove all first, so no Harbourmaster is left in the save. Everything else Njord stores — ship names, refit stars — lives on the boats themselves and is simply ignored once the mod is gone. Cargo rows from refits go with it, and so does whatever is in them.