Now look mate, this game is pretty easy and yet I see you struggling. No mere human being should have a hard time trying to play this thing. So I'm here to help you out of your misery, I'll teach you how to survive. I'll teach you how to bring money to that gal waiting for you at home. You're will grow into a real man. So prick your ears up and hear my words of guidance brother.

• First of all, make sure you have enough food for your crew, if you do not have/can't afford food for your crew, then go fish with your net or harpoons. Crew must eat. Also setting your portions to generous will increase your crew members' recovery rate.
  
  
• Second, stay away from random things that appear at sea, like boxes or abandoned ships. They have the possibility to give you the plague, which has no treatment and would ♥♥♥♥ your entire save up. If you're so desperate or just want to have some fun, then go for it fam.
  
  
• If you can afford, always have medicine and apples in your inventory. Apples will protect you from scurvy (which is similiar with the plague ♥♥♥♥) and giving medicine to your crew will increase the condition of your crew members including the injured/sick. Make sure to eat apples once in a while.
  
  
• Always check the ship ahead with your spyglasses and raise a banner of their faction/a faction they're allied in.
  
  
• Invest your skill points in decreasing the chance of sickness and increasing the rate of recovering your crew members. Don't forget, you can always earn money, but you can't find another crew member (well I assume you're not playing the coward mode matey).
  
  
• Do not go for reefs when water is too shallow if you have a tiny boat. Make sure that the water is at least 30 ft deep if you want to survive.
  
  
• Buy a spare sail, compass and sextant. Compass and sextant are like Vincent and Jules and will help you travel much safer and faster. Having a spare sail will help you a lot if your sail gets torn during a storm.
  
  
• Little dots that appear in water means there's a fish flock there. They're pretty good spots to fish.
  
  
• Always visit pubs if you had lost a member. They sometimes go full Jack Sparrow and come back from dead.
  
  
• If you can, stay away from storms using your compass. One of your crew members or maybe even you can get struck by a lightning. Your sail might tear apart. It's worth traveling a day off course.
  
  
• Treat your crew well in order to avoid a mutiny. Don't go too harsh on your crew members when they ♥♥♥♥ things up. Do not punish them if you're not having any wealth problems. But if you don't have money and yet they keep ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ around, beat them up only a little bit.
  
  
• Do not fight tough looking guys if you're not on a sturdy ship like a galleon or brigantine. Size matters. They'll most probably sink you down. Try to flee. If you fail, then surrender or die fighting like a real man, honorably.
  
  
• If one of your crew members gets injured after a fight, just amputate him. If not, he'll die from infection eventually. By doing this you'll give him the chance to live longer.
  
  
• Stay away from British ships with a torn flag raised. It's a trap!
  
  
• Don't ever go fishing using harpoons near Nassau. Narwhales will eat you alive.

Now that you know how to breathe, let's get into the making money part. You'll need money all the time during your gameplay. It's vital to have enough money during the beginning of your journey. So here's a few basic methods you can use, and remember: you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs.

If you select the fisherman class at the beginning of the game, you'll get twice as much food from the fishing sessions. Which will make fishing much easier for you. Here's what you need to do:

1. Buy as many harpoons as you can
   
2. Make sure you're not near Nassau (If you're near Nassau, just use fishing nets so that you won't get narwhaled)
   
3. Wait for a friendly ship/your destination to appear
   
4. Fish 'till you're out of harpoons or your food storage is full
   
5. Go to that friendly ship/destination and sell all your food and refill your harpoons
   
6. Make sure to catch some more fish after the trade so that your crew won't starve
   
7. Repeat

By doing this you can earn a lot of money. Let's say that you have a food storage of 1000 and you see 2 friendly ships on the way to your destination. They buy 25kg of food for $10 (This is average, sometimes they buy for $15 or much lower.) You'll get $400 after each trade. Which makes you earn $800. Plus if you make it to your destination, you can sell fish to them too. So at the end of the day, you'll get $1200 (average) by selling food.

You can get jobs from the opportunities section of the pubs. This job might be scraping off ♥♥♥♥ from other peoples boats or delivering some letter to a port far away. Letter deliveries have the most pay-off (It can go up to +$500, depends on the distance)

If you have a sturdy ship and enough cannons you can pretty much sink everything down. I'd recommend having a galleon with all the upgrades done and having full cannons. This would cost you something like $4000. You probably won't do much money by using this method (maximum something around $1000 a single voyage if you're lucky) and you will most probably get your crew members injured, which will lead them to be amputated or living with the injuries and dying eventually.

Well, if you think you're a lucky bastard, then you can go on and try making money by playing liar's dice at pubs. The game is not hard to learn and the most you can bet is $1000.

Now there was a few useful methods for making money. But there's only one method which will make you rich fast and easy:

The kings' way, buying low & selling high

Yep. This is the OP way to make money. Here's what you have to do:

1. Buy as many luxuries as you can (NOT from New York. The cheaper the better, don't go buying luxuries for $15. Make it $11-12 maximum, they sell that ♥♥♥♥ for $3 at Shangai)
2. Go to New York
3. Sell all of the luxuries you just bought for at least $20 (it might raise up to $40 if you're lucky. i've seen it with my very own eyes)
4. Profit maximum around $11.000. It depends on for how cheap you got the luxuries and how many luxuries you can have in your ship combined.
5. Repeat

Now comes the most important part my dudes. The key to survive is to keeping my advices in mind and playing safe. You know how to make money, you know how to keep yourself alive. So what's holding you mate? Now all you need is some experience, go and get experienced! You'll come thank me when you find yourself gambling thousands at Shangai and not caring about finding food.