We've been sailing the waters of the Caribbean for some time now in the beta of Pirates of the Burning Sea and having a great time battling against the British Navy, chasing ghost ships, attacking merchant flotillas and occasionally uncovering buried treasure...

(You can still join the beta on FilePlanet.) In all that time, though, we never asked the obvious question -- where does all this stuff come from? After all, without cargo to steal and ships to plunder, a pirate is just a funky-smelling guy in a frilly shirt. Fortunately, Flying Labs, the developer of Pirates of the Burning Sea thought about this question a lot. While they might just as easily have created an automatically-run command-and-control economy that generated "loot" from pre-determined tables, that obviously wasn't good enough for Flying Labs. We tore ourselves away from trying to sink every ship we ran across for a few moments to delve into one of the more intricate games of economic wheeling-and-dealing we've ever seen.

Everything in Pirates of the Burning Sea is created by the players. That means everything: bandages and rum. Hull braces. The cannonballs your ship fires, the cannons they're fired from, even the very ships players sail... It's all the result of a long daisy-chain of player-run economic activity. A ship, for example, will be constructed by a player-shipbuilder from a number of different components -- sails, spars, masts, a hull. Each of these components, in turn, is crafted from lower-level components. Hulls are created using things like nails, tar and finished boards that are in turn forged and planed from raw iron and logs grown or mined from various islands in the Caribbean area.

Everything begins with "plots" and "deeds." Every player account is granted to 10 "plots," or spaces with which to build economic buildings using "deeds." A "Granite Quarry" deed, for example, will entitle a player to build a quarry in one of their 10 plots, but only in a port on an island that has granite as a natural resource. Players accumulate "labor" in real-time (up to a maximum of 72 hours) that can then be used to produce goods at their buildings. These goods can then be sold on the open market in local or regional auction houses, sold at an NPC vendor at a steep discount or taken to another player-run building for the next step in processing. Even if a player chooses to go no further into the economy, the basic deeds a player starts with will at least provide a small trickle of income that can help out the beginner.

Odds are, however, that once a player gets into playing the economic game, they won't want to come back out. The restriction to 10 plots means that it's impossible for any one player to produce more than the tiniest fraction of what's needed for daily life in the Caribbean. Hard-core soloers may find that they can create a small chain to produce low-level goods that allow them to "make a living," but more than likely, most players will want to join a "Society" (Pirates of the Burning Seas' version of guilds). Groups of players will be able to combine forces to create larger ships and better quality materials. Very large player groups will find that they have enough economic clout to begin to actually influence the political fortunes of the region.

It's the way that player crafting ties into this larger "meta-game" that really makes Pirates of the Burning Sea stand out. Goods are more than merely a way for guilds to get bigger, badder ships. Flooding the port of a rival nation with low-priced goods will actually begin to create unrest within that port. Create enough unrest and a PvP zone opens up near that port where player-pirates can attack ships of any nation (though national players won't be able to attack each other). Keep creating unrest and the PvP zone becomes universal. Eventually the unrest gets to a point where a Battle Royale is declared, a 25-on-25 PvP battle with participants selected by random drawing that determines who will own the port. This allows players who focus on combat and fighting to determine who will control it. Their chances are greatly improved, however, if they use more powerful ships that have to be created by -- wait for it -- those players heavily invested in the economic game.

Watching this whole process unspool throughout the course of the beta (which runs through 12/23) has been fascinating. When first logging in, it becomes obvious that most players either choose to play as the British or the Pirates. Despite that, it's the much smaller population of French and Spanish players that are dominating the servers. The game has an intricate system of port taxes and resource scarcity that a well-organized group of players can take advantage of and, sure enough, it's these smaller better organized groups that are cornering markets on vital goods, putting together motivated producers and sellers and rigging financial markets in ways that would make Sherman McCoy jealous.

Naturally, that comes with the caveat that such a complicated system isn't for the timid -- there is a bear of a learning curve associated with the economic game. Anyone not willing to put in the time would be better served as a naval officer or a privateer. As it turns out, it's a lot easier to get shot with a cannonball than it is to corner the market on hemp.