The yards behind the ships — shipyard pages and a hidden shelf
Every notable ship was born somewhere — a slipway in Papenburg, a dry dock in Ulsan, a fjord-side hall in Turku. Ship people know the yards the way plane people know Boeing and Airbus. As of today, the game knows them too.
Where it comes from
When you catch a vessel that broadcasts an IMO number, we already look her up in Wikidata for the ship's page — builder, year, photo. Now the builder sticks to your card: the yard's name, keyed by its stable Wikidata identity, quietly attached moments after your claim. Nothing about catching changed, nothing got slower — the lookup runs after the fact, cached for a month, and if Wikidata knows nothing, the card simply stays as it was.
That sparseness is the point rather than a flaw. Most working tankers have no encyclopedia entry — but the famous ones do, and that's exactly what makes a yard a find.
A shelf that hides until you earn it
Your collection page has a new shelf: ⚓ Shipyards. It doesn't exist until at least one of your ships carries a known builder — no empty state, no "0 of 400 yards" checklist guilt. Catch your first Wikidata-notable vessel and a golden tile appears: the yard, and how many of your ships came from it. It's the collection's hidden layer — you don't grind for it, you stumble into it, and that stumble is the fun.
Every yard gets a page
Click a yard tile and you land on its public page — every vessel built there that anyone in the game has ever spotted, with rarity, IMO and spotter counts, each linking to the ship's own page. One yard, its whole in-game legacy, assembled from the community's catches. The Wikidata entity is linked as the source, as it should be.
These pages join the rest of the public spine — ships, aircraft types, airlines, ranks — and they follow the same honesty rule as everything we let search engines see: a shipyard page only enters the index once at least two of its spotted vessels exist. Below that, the page works fine for you but stays out of Google — no thin-page spam, ever.
Catching up on history
Ships you caught before today get their builders filled in by a one-time sweep over the registry, so your Shipyards shelf may well appear without you lifting a finger. If you've ever caught a cruise liner, a famous tall ship or anything with a Wikipedia article, chances are her yard is about to surface on your collection.
The sea has flags, the sky has liveries, and now the slipways have their ledger. Go find out who built your fleet.