Arriving at Fallen London: Wolfstack Docks, the full sailing HUD and the Log Book

About this game

Developer: Failbetter Games · Publisher: Failbetter Games · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Hand-drawn & ink · Screen type: HUD & Gameplay UI

More Sunless Sea screens in the Gallery

What to study

Sunless Sea's sailing screen refuses the usual HUD hierarchy: the ship's survival state (fuel, supplies, terror) outranks everything, parked top-left as a dial and bars, while the crew is a row of portraits with bare numbers and the story is a log book, not a quest list. The design lesson is that a roguelike about attrition should wear its clocks on its face, terror is a bar with a skull, not a debuff icon, and every discovery is immediately converted into dated prose plus fragments in the log. The port behind it matters too: Fallen London is not entered through a menu but sailed into, its name lettered over the docks like a chart annotation. Frame at about 1:15 in the Explore Trailer (Steam; 3-second-interval probe frame E_0026, cross-checked against an exact seek at 75s).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

top-bar portrait-row stat-panel status-row side-panel action-bar location-label hud-overlay

Components

Parts on screen.

Gauge Portrait Log Resource bar

Screen inventory

• the top-left cluster is the ship's whole state in one dial and three bars: a round speed/telegraph dial reading 100 / 100, a fuel bar with a flame icon at 4, a supplies bar with a cutlery icon at 4, and a terror bar with a skull icon whose white marker sits near the right end, the game's three survival clocks, always on screen, never in a menu
• the top-right row is the crew as portraits and numbers: seven officer slots (two filled, a woman in a red scarf, a silhouetted captain in a top hat, five empty), each with a quality pip beneath (26, 51, 25, 25, 31) and a crew count of 8/10 at the far right, so the party reads as a roster with stats, not as character art
• the bottom-left LOG BOOK panel is the game's diary in miniature: dated entries in green and black, 'May 5th, 1892. Luminescent beasts like eyeless dolphins play in your wake.' and 'May 5th, 1892. discovered The Echo Bazaar! (50 fragments gained)', discovery itself is logged as a dated event with a currency reward
• the bottom-centre icon rail (bat, lamp, wrench, pause, book, compass, gear) is the entire command surface: seven small round buttons, pause prominent in the middle, because at sea the player needs almost nothing except stop, look, and fix
• the world behind the HUD is the port as a diagram: FALLEN LONDON lettered across the docks, a moored steamer in a lit slip, lit windows in green and red, and the player's tiny ship with its green lamp and wake line in the channel, the city is drawn as an explorable chart, not a backdrop
• a small HELP ME / 'All at sea?' card sits bottom right, the game's own admission that this HUD needs a guide

Top 3 colors

#000000 30%#0e1610 21%#1d2b20 18%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Failbetter Games, Sunless Sea screenshot: Steam trailer (Explore Trailer), Failbetter Games, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Failbetter Games.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-28. verified 2026-10-28: 3-second-interval probe frame E_0026 from the verified-clean Explore Trailer download (67,554,317 B, MD5 d457c47c4d6c31fb5cb6531fce127dcd; full decode to null with -xerror exit 0, zero error lines, decode-explore.err), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); keeper file candidates/sunless-sea-0.png, MD5 532b9136889559afdb3fedb46e06d45d; the speed dial, all three bars, the full officer row and quality pips, both Log Book entries and the FALLEN LONDON label legible; no trailer text or marketing overlay in frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-28 via web search of Failbetter Games press/media material); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.