You captain a watermelon. The merchant ships out there get richer the further from home you find them, and everything you take from them sits in your hold until you sail it back to the island. Sink first and it goes down with you.
W or the up arrow is the throttle and A and D turn you. On a phone the joystick does both. The ship carries its speed through a turn and turns worse the faster it goes, so start the turn early.
Space fires a broadside, or the FIRE button on a phone. The cannons take whatever is closest to the front of the ship inside a wide arc, so aiming is a matter of pointing the hull.
A sunk merchant leaves treasure floating for twenty-six seconds. Get near and it comes to you. The hold starts at 150 gold and takes nothing more once it is full.
The dock at your island is the only place a haul turns into gold. Sink before you reach it and you lose everything you were carrying, and the Heat you built with it.
The navy
Warships patrol the water away from the island and start hunting you well before they are in range. Heat banked at the dock raises a Notoriety rank, and every rank sends another named officer out after you: Captain Rind, then Commodore Pith, then Captain Zest, then Admiral Bramblewood. Sinking one is permanent.
The Kraken
A leviathan surfaces only in deep water and barely moves. It has 2,400 hull and lobs fans of coral spikes most of the way across the sea. There is never more than one at a time, and it submerges again if you run far enough.
Fruit Pirates runs in a browser tab, free, and there is nothing in it to buy.
No account, no advertising, nothing for sale, and no network request once the page has loaded. Your gold, your upgrades, your rank and your lifetime totals sit in one key in the browser you played in and go no further. Nothing in the game is seeded, so every run draws a different sea and there is no run to hand to anyone else.