One catch per ship per day
Aircraft have had this rule since August: catch a tail once, and for the rest of the UTC day it is in your bag. Try again, from the flight or from the map radar, and the game says "already caught today" instead of pretending you caught it a second time.
Ships only had half of that rule. A second photo of the same freighter on the same evening did not move the catch counter on her card, which was right. But it still went through as a catch. You got the reveal, you got repeat XP, and the card said "seen 3×" when you had just taken your fourth shot. Two things on screen disagreed about what had happened, and that is the kind of small mismatch that makes people stop trusting the numbers.
From today the sea works like the sky.
In the reticle. Aim at a hull you have already caught today and the ring goes grey instead of filling. The dossier shows her name straight away (she is in your collection, there is nothing left to reveal) and the line under it reads "Already caught today · free again in 4h". The lock never builds, so the touch shutter never lights up for her.
On the shutter. Press anyway and you get the same sentence as a toast, not "hold the lock". Coaching you to hold steady on a ship that cannot be caught would be sending you after something that will never work.
On the server. If a stale tab or an out-of-date map does let a shot through, the server now refuses it with already_today. Nothing about the card changes: no XP, no counter, no new "last seen" time. Your client remembers the answer for the rest of the session.
A few details:
- The day is the UTC day, the same boundary the aircraft rule and the Feathers payout already use. It is not your local midnight. "Free again in" counts down to UTC midnight for that reason.
- Real-world photos are not affected. If you added a ship from a verified photo on your phone and have not caught her in the sim yet, that first sim catch still goes through and closes the card's sim side, as before.
- Old counts stay as they are. Before August a repeat shot on the same day did add to the counter, and we never stored which day each shot fell on, so there is nothing to rebuild those numbers from.
- The plate over a hull in the 3D world and the map card now say "· caught today" instead of "· counted today", because that is now what it means.
Other ships around you are still fair game, and the same hull comes back tomorrow. If you want to find something new in a busy harbour, the spot radar strip at the top of the screen greys out the hulls already in today's bag, so the bright ticks are the ones worth turning towards.
If there is a ship you want to see every day rather than collect once, add her to your fleet: that page follows her position and port calls without asking you to catch her again.