Saw her with your own eyes? Put it on the card
This one started with a single sentence from a player: "I saw the ship I'd spotted in the game — in real life, today — and I wanted her real photo on my card." That's the whole feature. Here's how it works.
Photograph her while you can see her
Open your collection and press 📷 Add real photo. The game asks for your location — your real one, this is the whole point — and shows you the ships that are on the live AIS map around you right now. Tap the one you're looking at, attach the photo, done. Her picture replaces the card art, the card gets a 📷 IRL mark, and your gallery keeps every shot with the date and the nearest place: 📍 Hamburg · 4 Aug 2026, 09:12.
The verification is the elegant part: there's nothing to check afterwards, because the list itself is the proof. The picker only offers vessels that really are within ten kilometres of you at that moment — a ship that isn't there can't be claimed, and yesterday's photo of a ship that has sailed on simply can't ride the flow. Real sightings are strictly a live-moment thing. (Your exact location is used for the check and then kept private — the public only ever sees the coarse place name.)
Paid like it deserves
Standing on a pier with a camera is the least grindable act in this whole game, and the economy respects that: a verified sighting of a new vessel pays +150 XP — more than any single in-game catch — plus +50 because the ship is also in your sim collection, plus a few Shells. Three rewarded sightings a day; the gallery beyond that is for love, not farming.
And there's a new achievement family for it — 📷 Real spotter: Shore Leave for your first verified photo, Field Photographer up to a platinum at a hundred real vessels, Both Worlds for ships caught in the sim and photographed in the flesh, and Legend in the Flesh for pointing your camera at a world-famous ship and having the card to prove it.
What's next for this
Today the photo attaches to a ship you've already caught in the sim. Coming next: field-first catches — a verified real photo will be able to mint the card by itself, marked "seen IRL, not yet caught in the sim", with a "Fly to her" button when she's on the map. The real photos will also join each ship's public page alongside the community photo wall, and the first real photo of any vessel on the planet will pay Tridents.
The sea was always real. Now your collection can prove you were there.