You can stop near most land in the game for land exploration. Land exploration costs a bedroll each time, but gives you a chance to make discoveries, acquire ship parts, and acquire items that can be turned in at a collector or gifted to mates or inn employees.

Land exploration operates by zones. Unlike other Uncharted Waters games, you don't have to drop anchor at particular, small spots to explore. Rather, most of the shore areas are divided into zones. Stopping anywhere within a zone to do land exploration is equivalent to any other place, with only the exception of quests that lead you to a very particular spot.

Each land exploration attempt will last two to four days. There are two events per day. Land exploration events are divided between combat, observe, and gather. At the menu to start land exploration, it will give you probabilities of each event type appearing in each particular slot.

The last event of the second and third days are always gather events, while the other events are always either observe or combat events. A land exploration attempt continues until either a gather event fails or the fourth day ends. Because gather events take fixed slots, the nominal probability of a gather event is meaningless. The ratio of observe to combat events does matter, though.

Every land exploration zone has some difficulty rating. It uses the same difficulty rating for each of the three event types. Your party also has a rating for each of the three event types. Your chances of success at each event depends solely on the difference between your rating and the zone's rating in the relevant event type. All three types use the same formula. I don't know the exact formula, but empirically, this formula seems to be very, very close:

success chance (as percentage) = 96.42/(1+exp(-0.05451*((party skill)-(zone difficulty)-18.73)))-1

That formula is so close that the true formula is definitely some sort of logistic curve. It also levels off at something significantly less than 100%.

The party skill rating depends mostly on particular skills. The relevant skill, by event type, is:


Nature and supply are adventuring skills that have fleet levels. Your skill for land exploration depends on the fleet level, not on the exact skill value. You get 14 points per fleet level in the skill. A table up to level 23 looks like this:


For levels 3-10, a formula of:

10 * floor(37.4 * level^2 - 74.8 * level + 37)

always gives exactly the right number of stat points required. For levels 10-20 (and yes, level 10 fits both formulas), a formula of:

37.425 * level^3 - 76.25 * level^2 + 61.2 * level - 130

is always off by less than 10 points. That formula does not still work at level 21, however.

Note that it is only the fleet level, not the total number of points. Having 6300 points in nature or 9300 makes no difference, as either will give you nature level 5. Having 6300 points rather than 6200 makes a big difference, as that's the difference between level 4 and level 5.

Combat goes by melee skill, which is calculated separately for each ship. Each ship in your fleet gives a bonus based on its own melee skill. A table up to level 10 looks like this:


Thus, which mates are on which ships does not matter for nature and supply, but it does matter tremendously for melee.

You can also increase various stats by using exploration items that are sold in item shops. Each land exploration attempt will consume one of each item that you use, so this increases the cost of exploration considerably. The items available to buy are:


Prices given are base prices, before the language discount.

Every ship gives a large stat bonus to some particular stat, in addition to the stats that the mates in the ship cabins give. The ship stat bonus depends only on the particular ship type, such as a cutter or xebec. You can find the list of them in my ships guide.

Be sure to set your ship cabins to have an appropriate mix of adventure, trade, and combat cabins. In particular, you do want some trade cabins, as higher grade trade mates will tend to give you better stats than lower grade adventure or combat mates. You may also want a combat cabin or two on adventure ships so that melee-focused mates can improve your combat rating.

The event difficulty and bedroll type mostly depend on the company level requirement of the zone, at least for zones that do not require seaworthiness of 150 or higher. Rather than listing them separately for each zone, I'll only list the difficulty requirement for the zone. The gear grade is for the highest grade of ship gear available in that zone. There have been some changes to company level requirements since launch, and land exploration parameters generally haven't made corresponding changes. As such, the level requirement in the next table means level requirement at launch, and may not still be accurate today.


This table fails for top end zones, as those rely on very high requirements of seaworthiness and either momentum or ice breaking to limit access to the zones. Top end zones always require A-grade bedrolls and can give S-grade parts. For top end zones, the difficulty is:


The name of each zone gives the approximate location. Some are a little misleading, such as that there is a "Near Bahia" zone, but the shore that is actually near Bahia is all part of the "Near Caracas" zone.

I give a separate column for my own description of the location. Directions generally mean the coast, so something like "east USA" includes the east coast of Florida but not Vermont, even though the latter is objectively further east. My references to countries use the modern political boundaries, not those from the 1520s.

The level column is the company level requirement to reach the zone. As above, that also determines the difficulty rating of the zone, as well as the type of bedroll needed.

The S/A/B/C/D columns are the number of discoveries of each grade available in the zone.

The sea, mom, and ice columns are the minimum values of seaworthiness, momentum, and ice breaking needed to reach the zone. A lot of zones straddle multiple values of this, so I pick the lowest one. For example, part of "Near Ushuaia" requires 30 momentum and part has no momentum requirement, so I report is as 0. If you just want to get to the zone at all, you don't need any momentum.

There are some zone that may spill slightly into a lower level (or seaworthiness or momentum) sea region than the main difficulty rating. These have the level marked with an asterisk. They use the difficulty rating of the main zone level even in the lower level sea zone. I'm not entirely convinced that they really do spill into the lower level region as opposed to the zones marked on the global map simply being wrong, though.

Also, Steam censors the name of the largest river in western Africa, which is why I called it the (censored) River below. You can see it for yourself on many real-life maps of the area. Oddly enough, Steam does not also censor Nigeria, which is based on the same root word.

Finally, there really are two completely separate regions called Near Cambridge Bay. They should have called one of them near Iqaluktuuttiaq, which would actually be less confusing.

The general rules above accurately describe most zones, but there are some exceptions.

First and most important is the Kerguelen Islands zone. Most zones give one resource when you redo a discovery, but for one of the discoveries, the Kerguelen Islands zone gives five. Furthermore, they're B-grade resources, as that is the lowest grade of discovery. That makes it useful as a way to farm adventuring fame if you're high enough level to get a good success rate.

The North Pole Entrance zone gives A-grade ship parts rather than B-grade. It is a small portion of land at the east end of the portion of Greenland that is accessible below company level 70, though it is not clear whether it extends into the level 70 portion of the map.

Near Banda is mostly for western New Guinea, which requires 130 seaworthiness. However, you can access the zone at the eastern edge of Seram Island, which requires only 75 seaworthiness.

Some other zones that are have only a small portion near the boundary of a level range are genuinely just small zones, however. This includes Near Jeju and the very misnamed The Pacific Northwest, which outside of the game, usually refers to roughly the area of the zone that was instead named Near Ohlone, in spite of not containing Ohlone.

After you make a discovery, if you would have made the discovery again from continued land exploration, you get a resource instead. Such resources can be turned in at collectors for adventuring fame. With the introduction of guild skills, people sometimes want particular resources. Old chests are obtainable everywhere, but other resources are only available in particular zones. The game won't tell you which resources are available where until you make the discovery, but I will.

This guide is currently complete, though that can change as new zones are added in future patches. I also include the palace as a source for the resources that are offered there. The zones for a given resource are sorted by increasing order of difficulty.

Here are the C-grade resources, other than Old Chest, sorted in the order that the game displays them if multiple such resources are available in the same zone:

Here are the B-grade resources:

Here are the A-grade resources, sorted alphabetically:

Finally, the S-grade resources, again sorted alphabetically:

The current top end land exploration area has difficulty 260, but gives an enormous amount of investment certificates. People farm it for the certificates, but you'll need very high stats to be able to get a good success rate. How high of stats you really need is a judgment call, but I see a threshold of 300 as being about what it takes to justify farming the area. So the point of this section is to explain how to get those very high stats.

For observation and gather, it's pretty straightforward. Get nature and supply to level 20, then add in some bonuses from some of the things that you're doing for the sake of your combat level, and that gets you well over 300. Combat is the hard one to get high and always has been.

I currently have a clear path to a combat rating of 365.9, which is high enough that you can afford to skip a few points here and there. I can't quite get there quite yet, but as of this writing, will probably be able to within two weeks. So I'll explain the various things that you can stack to add up to a high rating. Let's start with a summary table, then come back for more details later.


Some of those values can go higher than I've listed. I've listed what I personally have or will soon get, not the theoretical maximum. Let's explain the values in order.

First is the base value of 10 points. Everyone gets this automatically.

You get points for the melee level of each ship. I have all ships in my fleet at melee level 8, then use the blue gem buff at a cathedral to raise that to 9. That's 32 points per ship, for 224 points in total. This is the main source of the combat stat, and if you can't at least get all of your ships to melee level 7 without buffs, you're not ready for high end land exploration. If you can't get all of your ships to level 8, then you should rearrange mates to get as many to level 8 as you can, without letting any drop below level 7.

There are three consumables that get used on each land exploration attempt. If you use all three, that's 15 points. The table is listed early in this guide.

Tier 20 or 21 adventuring ships all give +2 combat in the captain's cabin. A golden flying cloud gives +3. I'm guessing that all flying clouds give +3, but don't yet have a non-golden one. My main fleet has one golden flying cloud and six improved sagyeonseons, which makes 15 points total.

Adventuring flags from the investment shop give +1 each. One per ship makes 7 points.

If your country has a prime minister and you set all the national policies, then one of them gives 3 combat points. When running for prime minister, a candidate can choose one of the three land exploration stats to give an additional 3 points to. Hopefully he chooses combat.

Mate effects are separate for combat against pirates versus beasts. You can theoretically get up to 70 in each. I'm aiming for 38 in each. For beasts, that is done as beast hunting level 10 and beast extermination level 2. For pirates, that is done as pirate hunting level 5 and pirate eradication level 5. Beast extermination and pirate eradication are both potential effects that require the mate to be SS-grade before learning the effect. They also require spending 1000 red gems per mate to learn the effect. Beast hunting and pirate hunting are normal mate effects, so they're easier (and cheaper) to get. In particular, all biologists get beast hunting, as well as a high nature stat, so they're the main way to get your beast hunting level high.

If your guild uses adventuring effects, then the novice, intermediate, and high exploration manual effects give 1, 2, and 3 combat points, respectively at level 1. Increase them to level 4 and they add another 1, 1, and 2 points respectively. You're going to have to be in a major guild to get these unlocked. The cap is 10, but I list 9, as that's what CsdaIndia has at the moment. We'll probably get that to 10 within two months of this writing.

Each ram from the Maybe Duck assault (weirdly, if I list the whale's real name, then Steam also censors "assault") gives +3 combat, so this can go up to 21 points. The rams mostly give momentum rather than ice breaking, so it is difficult to get 160 ice breaking if you're using momentum rams. I can get a fleet with 6 such rams into the top end areas, so I count 18 points.

You can buy various pets for $9 each in the product -> appearance section of the shop. The rabbit named Snow gives 10 combat points. You can only equip two pets at a time, and Snow is the only one that I think is interesting to buy.

If you complete the Maria Margarethe Kirch relationship chronicle, you get the "Class 3 Red Eagle Medal" accessory, which gives 3 points to each land exploration stat, but only if equipped on Kirch herself. Furthermore, the three mates from the chronicle each get an extra effect with 3 points to some land exploration stat. Johannes Kepler gets the "Conquer Rough Lands" effect that gives the 3 points to combat.

Isaac Newton gives 3 points to each land exploration stat as his unique job effect. He is only available from the season 1 investment shop.

The golden flying cloud gets an effect that gives 4 points to all land exploration stats.

Finally, each archaeologist in your main fleet gives 0.3 points to combat. I have three of them in my fleet, which adds up to 0.9. In case you want to know which three I use, they are Joseph Eastman, Vasco Nunez de Balboa, and Alvaro de Mendana.