Design and build your own fleet
NavalArt is a sandbox where you act as designer, engineer, and commander. You construct warships in a dock using parts from the game or the mod community, placing and adjusting them with a high degree of freedom. You control everything from the overall hull shape down to small details like anchor chains. Each property matters, so different armor and weapon layouts will change how your ship performs. Once a ship is finished or still in progress, you can take it out for trials to see if the design holds up. The game runs real-time physics calculations, including waves, and offers various sea conditions and a day-night cycle, with combat possible in fog, heavy rain, and snow.
Fight across eras and roles
When you are ready to fight, Quick Battles and Operations put your ships against enemies using a weapons arsenal that spans the 19th to the 21st century: naval guns, torpedoes, carrier-based aircraft, missiles, and more. You can test your anti-air weapons, including the Phalanx CIWS, in a test scene against several waves of air strikes. Aircraft carriers get their own RTS-style gameplay where altitude is a crucial resource for warplanes; you configure squadrons, assign specializations, and launch strikes against the enemy fleet. Submarine mechanics and an anti-submarine system round out the naval combat. Beyond combat, Gallery Mode lets you walk around your ships as a sailor, line up your fleet, and watch a parade from your flagship. Career Mode, Quick Battle Mode, and Mission Stage Mode give you different stages to play through, and a mission editor lets you build your own.
Playing together and getting started
NavalArt supports Steam-based multiplayer battles and multiplayer co-op stages, so you and your friends can bring your designs into shared fights. The Steam Workshop holds thousands of warship designs and mods you can download to add more parts or preset ships to your game, and you can share your own designs there as well. The game has been in Early Access since 2018 and continues to receive updates with new parts, stages, and Career Mode chapters. Planned additions include a map editor, weather nodes for the Mission Editor, new Career questlines, a tutorial rework, and reworks of legacy gameplay systems, so expect the experience to keep changing as development goes on.