Flags of the world — your collection now collects countries too
Every vessel in the game is a real ship on the real AIS feed, and every one of them flies a real flag — the flag state it's registered under, decoded from its radio identity. That flag has always been on the card. As of today it's also a collection of its own.
The Flags shelf
Open your collection at /{username}/dex and above the card wall you'll find a new shelf: one tile per flag state you've ever caught a ship under. Each tile shows the flag, the country, and how many distinct vessels of yours fly it — and a medal tier that grows with that number: 🥉 Bronze for your first ship under a flag, 🥈 Silver at five, 🥇 Gold at twenty-five, 💎 Platinum at a hundred. The tile tells you how far the next medal is.
Two things are deliberate about how this counts. First, only distinct vessels move a flag tile — photographing the same tanker forty times does nothing here, exactly like the rest of the collection counters. Depth in a flag means finding new ships that fly it, and that means flying out and looking. Second, this is depth where the old badge was breadth: the Vexillologist achievement already rewards how many different flags you've touched; the shelf rewards how deep you've gone into each one. Twenty-five distinct Panamanians is a different kind of accomplishment from one ship each from twenty-five countries — now both count.
Anyone who spends time over shipping lanes knows the flags are their own story. Panama, Liberia and the Marshall Islands rule the oceans on paper; a Maltese cross or a Hong Kong ensign is everyday traffic; and then one day something rare drifts through your lock-on and the shelf grows a tile you've never seen. That moment is the point.
What's next for this
This shelf is the first of a family we're calling meta-cards — collections derived from what you've already caught. On the roadmap: airline and manufacturer shelves for the aircraft side (they arrive together with the aircraft display in the web sim), and a hidden rare layer of shipbuilder cards — catch a famous vessel and discover the yard that built her, courtesy of the same registry data that already enriches the ship pages. Flag rarity tinting (a common Panamanian tile versus a genuinely exotic registry) is also coming — calibrated honestly against what the live feed actually carries, not what a map suggests.
Your flags are waiting to be counted. Go see how many you already have — and which medal is one catch away.