- For placing an order from a shoppe or bazaar, see Purchase.
- For the order of items in your inventory, see List of inventory items by sort order.
Anyone with officer privileges on a ship can order any pirate—be they swabbies, jobbing pirates or full crew-members—to almost any duty position. You have officer privileges if you are an officer or better and the ship is not locked. (If it is locked, you must own it to have officer privileges.)
Swabbies try to move immediately, and will attempt to move to an open station of the type you ordered them to. If there are none, they will complain in vessel chat that they couldn't find a station of that type.
Human players will get a whistle and a message that you have ordered them to whichever post you ordered them to. As they have free will, they may move quickly if they're paying attention, or they may take their time depending on whether they're a) playing with sound off, b) away from keyboard, c) incompetent, or d) determined to sabotage your pillage for reasons best known to themselves.
There are common reasons for ordering players to stations:
- Asking people playing one puzzle to move to another—e.g., on a ship with lots of bilge but little damage, asking a second carpenter to move to bilge.
- Enabling a guest without officer privileges to navigate or load guns.
- Waking up people whom the commanding officer thinks are asleep or lazing
- Breaking through the haze of puzzle vision.
A number of crews hold that refusing to obey an order deserves the plank.