Professional Ship Simulator Workboats and Service Craft

Workboats are where Professional Ship Simulator feels like a job. They are also the best bridge between beginner ships and the commercial fleet. This page groups tug, rescue, fishing, offshore, pilot, and coast-guard roles so you can match them to missions instead of treating every selector entry as a skin.

Early Access is scheduled for 16 September 2026. Names and counts may grow. Physics will not get simpler. RC 1717 says the Medium Trawler is not in the Early Access fleet yet — it still has sea trials. Use the small trawler if your build includes fishing.

Tugs

Tugs exist to make large ships honest in tight water. You will push, pull, and sometimes escort. Line tension is simulated and lines can break, so a tug is not a magnetic sticker. Stay out from under the bow, keep a lead you can slip, and talk to the job — even if the “pilot” is you on another camera. Official tug-operation previews show slow, geometric work, which is the skill. Use tug hulls for your own docking practice too: they teach thruster walks better than a yacht.

When you are the merchant calling a tug, remember career XP charges you for the help. When you are the tug, you are the help. Those are different mindsets. Do not mix them in the same minute.

Rescue and coast guard

Small rescue boats are sprint classrooms: fast, wet, easy to over-drive into a swell. Large rescue vessels add endurance and worse weather. Coast-guard style craft sit in the same family. Missions include patrols and assists. Later betas let random rescue cases interrupt fast travel, so a “quiet transit” can become a job.

Approach casualties from a lee that does not put you on top of them. Night and fog turn this into instrument work — radar, AIS, searchlight, radio. Rehearse the same pattern in daylight first. Maps on Rügen hide plenty of awkward shallows to practise on without Dover traffic.

Fishing trawlers

The small trawler is a workboat with a factory attached. Find fish on sonar, shoot the net, fill it, come home. That loop is slower than a rescue dash and more technical than a sightseeing yacht hop. Watch stability and turning while towing. Do not treat the net as a pause button. If the demo or EA build offers only a small trawler, that is enough to learn the instruments you will want on every other ship.

Offshore vessels and fire monitors

The offshore ship is the Swiss army hull: logistics, firefighting monitors, and ugly-weather station-keeping around structures. Fire missions ask you to fight a blaze without becoming the second fire. Approach upwind, keep a camera on your own heading, and remember the water cannon does not grant immunity from collision.

Wind-farm and repair-adjacent work shows up in marketing and tug scenarios. Treat jackets and buoys as steel. Station-keeping in current is the whole game; if you cannot hold a small rescue boat on a mark, you are not ready to hold an offshore hull next to a platform.

Pilot boats

Pilot boats are the recommended first spawn for a reason. They also have a job: moving people and, in the fiction of the sim, supporting harbor operations. Crew-transport style missions in betas could trigger from a few kilometres off an office. Fly those at sensible speed. A pilot boat that arrives damaged is a bad joke.

The Pilot V2 demo add-on named on the feature page is extra classroom metal, not a different genre. Use it if your build includes it.

Shared habits

All of these hulls still need a proper cold start from getting started, a control layout you can touch without looking, and respect for bank effect. They are “easier” than an LNG tanker only in length and visibility. They are harder than they look in wind.

Pick workboats when you want to live on the coast instead of in a traffic separation scheme. Graduate to merchants when you can do this work bored. That is the honest tier progression in this sim, and it matches the career story of growing from a small harbor operator into someone who is allowed near a cruise ship.