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I use it. What you want to do is have several different types of food. On board, you can move the food from the storage to the galley. Having more than one type gives you a discipline bonus. Not sure that which food type it is matters, just having a variety. Potatoes are free, and just buy the cheap stuff until you gain some money. I always put fruit onboard to prevent the scurvy, but that's just roleplay, and fruit is expensive, so wait until you have too much money. I'm playing on hard economy and still have way more money than I need.

I don't know about the weight of the stores. My first patrols I loaded 50 potatoes and 50 canned meat and that was plenty to do a month-long cruise. You will have the chance to provision lifeboats, if you want, so having some extra food on board could be handy. Now I load four types of food minimum. Potatoes, fruit, and two of something else.

Good hunting Herr Kaleun. Let us know how it goes.

Having read wormfood's post about consumption rate makes me wonder, since I didn't have enough on board to complete the patrol at 6 per day, but I did not run out. I'd calculate based on what he says until we know more, and anyway, it might change tomorrow.

Here's the Wiki: https://uboat.fandom.com/wiki/Galley#:~:text=Food%20continues%20to%20be%20eaten,food)%20will%20last%2020%20days.
Conflicts with a lot of the info I posted earlier which was based off of different forums and reddit posts. But then, those all conflicted to over the same period.

I agree about all the conflicting info out there, which is why I asked here in order to get some decent info from players I respect, so thanks much!

Since I'm itching to start I will run some early war patrols this evening to test the food consumption, and then get a fresh crew (shaved, uniformed to start) ready for launch day (knew I should've picked up a bottle of Cook's champers). Actually I might use the 'free roam' to test. Cheers

Speaking of champagne, Donitz sent two bottles one time. I still have them, and forget about them. I should be able to pop one open to celebrate a sinking. Seems best to save them for a time when morale is sagging, but they also each take up an inventory slot.

Tonight I did my first boardings. In an early patrol I set up an approach on a freighter, which turned out to be flying a Swiss flag. I let it go, but then later remembered there are false flags in this game, and it may have been a deception. In the BF grid in July 1940 I came across a number of neutrals, and stopped four of them. Three were let go, two when we could find nothing amiss, and the other when we could not prove anything was amiss. The fourth however was discovered to be an enemy ship sailing under a Portuguese flag, which we discovered when interrogating the captain about his papers. Which options you have, and whether you can be successful in uncovering these deceptions depends on the officer type and skills he has acquired. You have to assign officers and ratings to the boarding party, which of course carries risk. In retrospect I should have been stopping ships in the North Sea early in the campaign. With the right skills, you can order the ship evacuated and then either sink it with torpedoes or gun. Or you can open the seacocks, or set explosives. All of this has never been in a sub sim I don't think, at least none that I have played, and not many I've missed.

Rescuing or capturing prisoners is something else I've never seen before. Reading Blair's U-Boat books there are many accounts of boats capturing skippers and chief engineers. So I do this too. Usually take them and drop some food to the ones left behind. You can only take eight on board, so I stick to the officers. In one historical account, it is said a U-Boat offered whiskey and cigarettes to the lifeboats. Probably hastened their demise lol, but maybe they were picked up later.

There is a lot more depth to this sim than I expected (no pun intended). I've not picked up any survivors, but have distributed rations- canned bread and canned meat- but the number handed over was arbitrary (10 of each per life boat) but they thanked my crew anyway. I only realized earlier this evening I could take on board a maximum of eight survivors lol.

0800h PST can't come fast enough. Good luck all! A willing foe and sea room!

Looking forward to it myself

This is the only early access game I have ever bought, even if that was just a week before full release. Still a record lol

For my final act before starting everything over, I explored how changing bases and boats works. Once the French Atlantic bases are up and running (Brest and La Rochelle) I had the option to take a transfer mission assignment from the officer ashore. I chose La Rochelle since Brest is too close to Blighty, and Coastal Command. Rather than teleport, we needed to sail there, and I turned it in to a patrol. The BF grid is busy, at any one time I might have four or five different sound contacts in range. Finding ships is easier in UBOAT than in Silent Hunter I reckon. Hydrophones seem to have much longer range in this one.

After sinking a few ships I headed for our new home. Maneuvered right in to the harbor, and rather than have an automatic mission end, I needed to ease right up to the dock. Once there, I used the blueprint I had obtained in an earlier mission to upgrade my boat to a VIIC (U-407). Did not take her out for sea trials. Just wanted to see how it works.

Log (excerpts):
01 September 1939
U-4, type II. Wilhelmshaven

1230h- Captain's notation. All crew present and accounted for. Lt. Rieger supervised the last of the supplies being loaded. Orders arrived from FDU. We are to patrol grid AN18-AN54. Course set. Weather: rain. Set sail at 1225h. CPT. Rolf Meyer, Commanding.

1245h- Supplemental. Cleared locks, left port confines. Course bearing 08 degrees, speed 1/2. R.M. cmd.

1300h- Navigators notation. Bearing remains 08 degrees, standard ahead, Weather; rain. Visibility low. Wind 34 km/h. Sea state 2. Estimated 1.5 hours to reach open sea. Lt. J. Rieger, 1st Officer.

1410- Captain's notation. Course 00 degrees, speed 1/2. Wind 33, rain, low visibility, sea state approx. 3. Watch crew in slickers. At 1359h I ordered U4 to periscope depth. Attempted to take the vessel deeper, however, scraped barnacles off the exterior. Water too shallow, charts inaccurate. No damage reported, however we'll stay surfaced until I'm satisfied. We'll practice dives as soon as we get further into open sea. Currently the crew are still busy settling in. CPT. Rolf Meyer, commanding.

Good luck Herr Kaleun, or whatever rank we start.

Did my first patrol in the full release version. New careers are required in a new, or different version. Again I elected to take command of U-48, a Type VIIB out of Wilhelmshaven. I like that you started on a Type II (which variant? A-D?), Leaf. I think for my next career I will do the same. I'll play this game dead is dead and see if I can make it to the end of any campaigns. In Silent Hunter 3 I played a hundred or more careers, and made it to the end of the war exactly once. In UBOAT we can start careers at a number of points throughout the war, starting as late as '44 I think. Survival by that point will be nearly impossible, and especially I would think starting with a green crew. Early starts give us a chance to work our boat in to shape without much risk. The specialization points are all tuned toward survival, and the more patrols we get under our belts, the better the chance of survival. Those are dive time, noise and discipline. In my last career I put the first three points in to dive time and the next in to crew noise. I'll distribute them again between these two in my new career, and work in the occasional morale point. I'm on medium morale difficulty so I think I can get away with focusing on the other two.

I bumped a few settings this time, and am playing on 71%. Using realistic torpedoes. In the first patrol just completed I had just one dud, having taken a full load of G7e. That's better than I expected, and it didn't feel like depth keeping was a problem. Detonators worked well. Not sure how to set pistol to magnetic, so I have yet to try an underkeel mag shot. Is it possible in this game? All torpedo tracks were ideal, all set at 3.0 meters. I do tend to narrow down the fan spread to closer to 55 meters as any more than that can cause the second fish to miss on anything smaller than say 5000 tons. When using the crew attack the first torpedo is aimed at the center of the ship, so too much spread on the second can miss astern. Of course data isn't always accurate so the torpedoes can hit anywhere on any given attack. But when perfect the first fish goes for the center. I like to fire two-fans mostly, as it just feels right, covers errors and duds and makes it so I cannot go crazy with like 14 sinkings on a patrol. The torpedoes, and especially the deck gun, feel powerful in UBOAT. In the war, sinking a decent sized freighter would take 100 rounds or more. Here it takes about ten. So I mostly ignore the gun, and I think by fall of '41 I'll remove it entirely. I never fight planes, and rarely use the 88. One round will sink a U-Boat, and you're bound to get a few of these side missions where you are asked to do so. Nice not to waste a torpedo on these.

First patrol was to the North Sea, sailing before hostilities commenced since this time around I didn't need training. Had a fantastic result, 48k tons, all Commonwealth freighters sailing between Hartlepool and Bergen. Most were around 6,000 tons so it added up quick. Ten days port to port. I bumped the settings to tone down my results, and then have my best patrol yet. Of course it's early in the war. Didn't see a warship at all.

To keep a more realistic patrol pace I will take a vacation after every patrol. Real-life refits were often months long, overhauls even longer. In UBOAT you can be sailing again after three days and I want to slow that down. I can get it out to about a month with the right choices and indecision with the quartermaster haha. Plus this will always give me the best morale state to start the next patrol.

Game ran fine, some of the pausing I was experiencing in the beta has been cured, but not all. I can get some long pauses when the game switches to a new screen for the first time. Probably should have it on a SSD but it works fine once everything has been visited and loaded for the first time on the session.

Great, glad it is working well. Pretty much the same for me and no glitchiness. I went with 'normal' mode for this patrol- can always increase if I need to. Didn't bother with the tutorials. I did have a look through the manual but it still doesn't say a whole lot- which is fine by me as I like to discover as I go in sims. My boat is the ancient Type IIA...makes the VII look like a stretch limo. I have four torpedoes (three forward tubes, no stern tube). Dead is dead for me as well (I never had a crew reach 1944 in SHIII).

For now I'm avoiding the use of the time accelerator mainly because I think I've damaged my boat more than meets the eye, and more than what my two engineers can 'see'. After I scraped the sea bed testing the crew dive time, as I headed for open sea, I noted my buoyancy had dropped to 80 from 90. Ran the bilge pump and dried her out. As I reached 1900h, I 'crash' dove to 30m (I'm not in deep water yet and irrc there isn't much in the way over 50m where I'm headed- too much time in SHIII lol), ran under water at 1/3 to allow hydrophone to work. When we surfaced, I ran the bilge until it shut itself off, but the buoyancy had dropped to 70. I'm hoping if I do come across enemy shipping it will be at night and I can do surface runs before heading back to port for repairs. Might be a short career to start.

I did my first two night surface attacks on that patrol. The challenge here is the crew visibility range is so short that having them work out the solution just isn't a good option. I don't want to be 500 meters off the track on the surface, even if it's safe against unarmed merchants. And that's how close you need to be to get a solution, and the window is so short it just doesn't work well, at least until the crew is better later on. So it means manual targeting, which is pretty straightforward in this game. With map icons on, getting a range is pretty easy. AoB is easy too since I'll shoot on a steady wire. The challenge is speed, and I don't know a good way yet to do this. I need a nomograph to do distance over time, and I've asked for one on Subsim. I think the periscope can be used for finding speed, I recall reading. Should check that out. So in these surface attacks I estimated (guessed) the speed, since most medium sized merchant ships are doing 8 or 9 knots and then covered the error with a spread. In both cases the shot came from around 1400 meters with 30-knot electrics. In both cases I entered 8 knots, and in both cases the first torpedo hit near the after mast and the second torpedo missed astern. In all likelihood these ships were making 9 knots, but other incorrect data could explain it as well. So yeah, gotta work out a good way to nail the speed. I think there is something to click in the attack scope screen that lets you put the crosshair out in front of the ship, leave it steady, click once when the bow touches the wire, and a second time when the stern passes it. This generates a speed. I'll use this next patrol if I can work it out.

AoB on a steady wire is simple because I am selecting the firing bearing ahead of time. And as long as my boat is 90 degrees to the target's course (which is also simple with map tools and icons on), i can take the number of degrees off boresight, and subtract it from 90 to arrive at the AoB. Let's say the ship is sailing from port. If I set the scope bearing on 340 it is 20 degrees from boresight. So 90-20=70. AoB is 70 at the time the ship crosses the wire and the torpedoes are fired. If the ship is sailing from starboard it works the same way. If I set the scope on 020 it is the same 70 AoB, but now must be a negative, so -70 is the AoB. This only works well if you are exactly 90 degrees to the target's course, but that's always possible against merchants since we can always get ahead to gain good position. The faster the ship is travelling the more off-boresight you need to place the scope so that the fish still hit squarely

I always say the key to shooting torpedoes is positioning. The rest becomes academic and down to dud rate and accuracy of your data. This is good practice since I think it will allow night surface attacks against convoys from outside the screen. Not using the darker night setting so in good weather ships can still be seen at several kilometers.

I am really liking this option to choose crew solutions or manual. The data gathering and collating done by the AI feels really good, imparts that sense of being part of a team that is missing in Silent Hunter. And it's satisfying to dial it up yourself sometimes too.

You posted while I was writing. Sounds like that old bucket leaks like a sieve!

But you bring up another cool thing this game does for the first time, and that is it simulates the leaks which are natural with so many things sticking out of the pressure hull, and how the water must be dealt with. I read a post in a different forum where a player had a medic who would not go treat the wounded because he refused to walk through the water covering the deckplates.

I dig the whole vibe where we are running compressors and pumps and stuff. Great game.

Agree totally. I also like the way it's done in the game- not fiddly or overly micromanaged (I'm happy not to need to do the maths pertaining to trim/ballast/daily consumption etc lol) but it seems to hit the right balance. Headed back in to spend a couple more hours getting my bucket of bolts towards the patrol area. I'm super enjoying this.

Yes, we aren't required to do trim dives to calculate the compensation so that the next time we crash dive we don't go right to the bottom

Yeah, the balance here between player responsibility and crew automation is good. I do have the crew on mostly automatic for this first career so that all I really need to do is give commands to officers.

I'm happy I was spending time working out manual torpedo shooting, it came in handy on patrol 2. I took the mission to retrieve an enigma machine from a sunken U-Boat. I timed our arrival for the middle of the night, hoping to conduct the salvage operation in darkness. I cruised right up to the marker in time compression and as I got within a klick and a half I suddenly saw the site of the sinking was guarded by two Royal Navy warships, a F-class destroyer and a corvette, both of which were stationary over the sunken boat.

So clearly to pull this off I need to sink both of these ships, since the salvage operation must be done from the surface. The corvette was slightly farther away, a couple hundred yards. What I needed to do was shoot at both ships so that the torpedoes hit close together, or the second target could get underway and evade after seeing the first ship hit, leaving us hunted in shallow water. At 1.5 km the crew would be unable to achieve a solution, they cannot see the ship for this purpose. I can however see the ships through the scope. Shooting at stationary targets is as easy as it gets. All that matters is a speed of zero. Range and AoB no longer matter, the torpedo will go straight out on whichever bearing the scope is on. The key here was to get the second torpedo shot off quickly after the first.

First torpedo went to the corvette, at 2 meters depth. Then you need to unlock the scope, lock it on the other ship, flood the tube and fire. I sent this second torpedo at the bow of the destroyer to buy a little time should it get underway at the last moment. If I had loaded G7a in the bow it would have been easier, since I can change speed, send the first out slower and the second at a faster speed to cause them to converge with the trailing fish overtaking. In the event it all went as planned, both ships sinking quickly and we surfaced our boat to begin the salvage operation which was completed.

I don't think I could have done this without manual targeting, so it's a useful thing to learn and get accustomed to.

And I looked in to using the periscope to determine speed. To do this, the range and AoB must be set. Then you click the chronometer and place the crosshair in front of the ship. When the bow crosses the wire you click 'set' and leave it stationary and when the stern crosses the wire you click 'set' again and it generates a speed which is then entered in to the TDC. I have yet to try this but I will and I'll report back on how it went. With map icons range is easy, without them it would require the recognition book and the stadimeter to find the range. This method is pretty slow, since it takes a long time for the target ship to sail through the periscope at 7 knots or whatever. I'd rather do distance over time with a nomograph which leaves the scope free to check out other stuff

My Type IIA's issue with buoyancy seemed to be solved by todays hotfix, as it's steady at 80% (no yo-yo-ing between 70 and 90) and the bilge pump seems to work properly now (water icons show up in compartments, and vanish over time as the pump operates-- this wasn't visible yesterday). Fuel consumption is certainly varied dependent on sea state which is a welcome additional worry lol. I've decided to run six to eight hours underwater during the daylight hours (10 hours of O2) to help conserve fuel. I'm hoping by using that approach it will give me some extravagant wiggle room for "high speed" course changes/pursuit on the surface. I hate cutting off an attack set-up just in order to get home lol.

For the magnetic detonators equipped on some torpedoes, the only thing the manual suggests is setting the torpedo run depth 1 to 1.5 m below keel (similar to SHIII). Haven't fired anything yet (still 02 September, so England/France still to declare hostilities). One more thing- about the food consumption- on my sub the vegetables and fruit seem to be consumed first., although at one point I was mousing over the cook station and saw apparently the galley had prepared some fish (afaik I had no fish aboard, unless tinned meat is now tinned fish?).

As an addendum, I am not sure that the radio orders take into account the Type IIA's lack of range. Was given an order to recon Liverpool harbor superseding the zone patrol orders. Decided to use the time acceleration at slow speed to save on fuel. Ran out of diesel just over the Orkney's. Was adrift, morale took a nosedive, one sailor exhibited signs of TB so became bedridden, then the RAF arrived. Next time I get an order like that I'll ignore it and face whatever courts martial gets thrown my way. Oh well, was down to one torpedo. Three 'doink's in a row lmao. Will start a new career this evening lol.

Do you have assistants assigned to the chief engineer? That should extend the range. Type IIs operated west of the British Isles during the war, but I doubt they were A's. That variant has abysmal range, and yeah, as long as you sail the IIA I think you have to ignore those missions, Any of the other Type IIs would be OK, with the B and C having double the range, and the D triple. If you need a blueprint to upgrade to another Type II I'd skip it and go to a VII. I just picked up a blueprint by completing the second level of Tonnage War.

Forget what I was saying earlier about having 500m crew visibility at night. Like a dumbass I failed to use red lighting. I assumed it would only affect crew coming on watch for a short time. A minor thing in the grand scheme at high time compression, you know? But today I was thinking about it and thought, well, maybe that's not how it works in the game. Sure enough, I turned it on for my first night attack and suddenly the crew could see two kilometers. I could have shot those two warships over the sunken sub with ease lol. But even so I'm now doing at least half of my attacks manually, and gradually increasing the ratio as I get accustomed to it. My goal is to get that achievement for completing a campaign with 90% difficulty and that will be manual only.

Just got back from war patrol 3. Another in the northern part of the North Sea, hunting the highway between Bergen and Edinburgh/Hartlepool. Followed U-52's beacon signals and we teamed up to sink a number of ships in a convoy. They picked us up on Asdic a few times but we managed to slip away. I'll be happy when I am out of this lake. Shot all but one torpedo in a week. Feels like I might eventually tweak the shipping density, but I want to play this first career stock and get a feel for how things evolve over the course of the war. Otto Popp was awarded a Ritterkreuz after this patrol.

Now I'm going to try Scapa Flow again. With red lighting it should be a little easier than the first time derp.

U-48 before departing on a covert mission to penetrate the naval base at Scapa Flow on a snowy December evening. The flag on the back of the flak platform can be removed in first person at that spot, as I finally learned. There are eight captives, four captains and four chief engineers. Each one you turn in gives 15% rep, so a full load is a free full point per patrol, if you can sink enough ships, that sink slowly enough to cast off lifeboats. Careers begin with five officers -- two leaders (including the skipper), one radioman and two engineers. You get two more, and how you do it can be an interesting choice. You can add any combination of those three types. In this career I added an engineer and a radioman. Three engineers for when the sh!t hits the fan.





I said I don't want to be surfaced 500m off the track, but this is fog, come on haha. This was a manual shot, and guessed right on the speed as the torpedo hits MoT. Second torpedo was a dud.





A shot of the bow torpedo room as the machinist mate cranks the torpedo out of tube number one for routine maintenance.

Well done, great action!

The Type IIA really has diddly for range, but I was aware of that when I picked it. One thing I noted as I started a new crew this evening and left harbor on 4 September this time, was a variance in fuel consumption between the two Type IIA's I've used. I've given my engine room engineer two helpers yet the fuel consumption out of Wilhelmshaven and into the North Sea was quite high. I checked buoyancy (this boat started at 80%), depth to make sure we were not 'decks awash', wind was 20 (down from 34 that my 1st crew faced on their opening run), similar course, sea state 1 to 1.5 (not 2-3), no swells to fight through. Speed settings were basically the same (max. gear 2). Also I picked the same supplies/torps etc as my first sortie. Technically I should be using less fuel. However, if they've actually modelled some performance variance into the Type IIA then that excites me.

U4, now under Cpt. Stefan Schmidt, is headed for AN4 and we're four hours in to the run and have left behind the shallower waters (although 50 m isn't that deep, at least I can dive down to 30m to give my listening post a chance). I should really grab some screen pics. Cheers!

This buoyancy thing is interesting. Is it because of the boat, or settings? In the Type VII I start at 100% and it mostly stays that way as long as I keep the bilges clean. All compartments are dry and it says 80%? That thing has already started to sink!

You probably know this and forgive me if so, but the pump only does the control room, and other compartments need to be bailed to the control room by buckets where it can be picked up by the pump, at least in the VIIB

We did the Scapa Flow mission, and found an escort carrier in the anchorage too. Not sure if it is randomized from career to career, or if it is a change from beta to release version. Copying Prien, we did it entirely on the surface. Took a manual shot from 4000 meters, as visibility was excellent even at night. Shot one torpedo at the farther carrier and three at the Royal Oak (actually Nelson again). All three torpedoes hit and detonated on the battleship and it went down. The torpedo fired at the carrier was a dud. Fired another from over 5000 meters from the stern tube as we came around on our escape course. This was also a dud. The carrier was at a fairly sharp angle and the detonators failed. We could have sailed deeper in to the harbor to improve the track, but I decided to scoot. Fewer patrols too, just one destroyer that I saw and we managed to slip past it at the eastern exit as we were clipping along at 18 knots.

Most sinkings give a handful of medal points, like 5 for a sinking and another 5 for obtaining the solution. "Royal Oak" was 280 for each which is a massive difference. I suspect the propaganda value has delighted Donitz and Raeder eh? As a result, Otto Popp was awarded the Oak Leaves.

Fourth war patrol is in the books, this time I took an agent insertion in Ireland. That went well, and we dodged a patrol boat on the way out, but it was Irish, so neutral. Not taking any chances. Control then assigned us a patrol sector back in the AN grid where were done all of our patrols so far. Intercepted a few singles, and then found a convoy. Got in great position ahead, and as the convoy sailed past the scope U-48 fired all five tubes at four different ships. Missed a corvette, but the other torpedoes sank four ships including a County Class cruiser. I put all I've learned to the test on this attack, manually firing all the torpedoes and as quickly as possible to get the Multitasking achievement (hit three ships within 120 seconds)


Three of the ships attacked in a single salvo, with the farthest ship to port just being struck