wowsb ship tool: 829 ships, and the data source that made it possible

The site went from 85 ships to 829. Every ship in the game now, all ten tiers, with full stat sheets and the equipment planner working on all of them. This post is about how that happened, and it mostly was not me doing the hard part.

Where the data came from

I did not collect any of this myself. The ship data comes from a WoWS Blitz database compiled and shared by TC307, and I want to thank Exusiai Covenant and 奇葩 for the work that went into it. They did the difficult part, which was getting the numbers out of the game in the first place and organising them into something usable.

What I did was take their data and wire it into my site so it displays properly, which is a far smaller job.

What was missing before

Up until now the site only had tier 8, 9 and 10 silver and premium ships, 85 of them. That was fine when the tool was a small side project, but it made the site useless for anyone starting out, because new players spend most of their time in the low tiers and none of those ships were on it.

The full game has 829 ships across ten tiers. Now the site has all of them.

The numbers

• Tier I 13 ships, II 21, III 33, IV 38, V 66
• Tier VI 90, VII 114, VIII 171, IX 121, X 162
• By type: 381 silver, 365 gold premium, 71 Black variants, 12 fictional designs
• By nation: United States 142, Japan 117, United Kingdom 106, Germany 103, Soviet Union 80, France 64, Pan-Asia 53, Italy 52, Pan-Europe 37, Netherlands 22, Commonwealth 19, Pan-America 18, Spain 16

Sorting them correctly was the real work

Getting the numbers in was the easy part. Making sure each ship is labelled right was harder, and I got a lot of it wrong at first.

The database uses number codes for nations instead of names, and I guessed the mapping instead of checking. So the United States, which is the largest nation in the game at 142 ships, got filed as Spain, and Japan got filed as Italy. Every filter was wrong. Someone looking for American ships found the wrong ones, and some ships looked like they had vanished entirely.

I only found out because I compared the counts against the source database ship by ship. Once I did that properly, all thirteen nations lined up exactly.

Two other labelling problems came up:

• The German tier 10 fictional battleship is called Götterdämmerung in game but was listed under a different name in the database. There is also a separate Japanese tier 8 premium with a very similar name, so I had to key the fix to the ship's internal code to avoid renaming the wrong one.
• There was no Poland flag, so I added one, then took Poland back out of the filter because the database has no Polish ships yet.

Colours so you can tell ships apart

With 829 ships on screen, the type matters. Each ship is colour coded by its type, on the ship name and the tier number:

• Gold for premium ships
• Purple for Black variants
• Blue for fictional designs
• White for silver tech tree ships

The ship class icons are coloured the same way, so a gold destroyer is recognisable at a glance without reading anything.

A problem I created, and a problem a player found

A player reported that the equipment item called traverse acceleration was affecting the wrong stat. I had mapped it to the ship's acceleration, which sounds right from the name. It is not. In game it is the rudder shift, which shows on the stat sheet as max traverse speed.

They were right and I was wrong. I fixed the mapping and verified it on the site: fitting the item now moves max traverse speed and leaves acceleration alone, which is what the game does. I left a comment in the code explaining it so I do not "fix" it back later.

The stat sheets got a redesign too

Each stat section now has a blue title bar with the section name on it, so you can see where a section starts when you scan down the page. The individual stats have no box around them, just a dotted line running from the stat name across to its value, so the values line up on the right edge instead of floating in the middle.

On desktop the panel is wider and the sections sit in two columns, so you are not reading a narrow strip on a big monitor.

I also removed the dark glass blur from both the ship detail and compare overlays. It looked fine in a screenshot but was genuinely hard to read over a long list of numbers, so they use a flat background colour now.

Bigger, and slower

Going from 85 ships to 829 has a cost. The data file is now around 1.9 MB, and the page draws all 829 cards at once, so it takes roughly three to four seconds to load. That is noticeable, especially on a phone.

I am not pretending that is fine. It is the tradeoff for having everything in one place instead of a separate page per tier. If it becomes a real complaint, the fix is to load cards as you scroll rather than all at once. I have left it as it is for now so the change stays reviewable, but it is on the list.

After that: tidying up the details

Once the ships were in, the rest of the work was making it look right and describe itself properly.

• The footer was rewritten. It now explains what the site is in plain sentences, what it covers, how the equipment planner works and what the colour coding means. That text is there for search engines and for AI assistants that summarise sites, so it states the facts directly instead of being vague.
• A Wargaming disclaimer. The site is not connected to Wargaming in any way, and the footer says so plainly. World of Warships Blitz is their trademark.
• Credits moved up. My name sits right under the footer heading, so you can see who made the site without scrolling through everything else.
• The email address came off. People can reach me through the social links instead.
• A tab icon. The little icon in the browser tab is now a piece of equipment art rather than a blank page.

One more thing I got wrong

Earlier I renamed the German tier 10 fictional battleship, and there are two ships in the game with almost the same name. The German tier 10 and a Japanese tier 8 premium both read as Ragnarok depending on how the name is written. If I had done a simple find and replace I would have renamed the wrong ship, or both of them. I keyed the change to the ship's internal code instead so only the right one changed.

It is the same lesson as the nation mapping problem above, which is that guessing at an identifier is how you silently break things.

What changed in this build

• 829 ships, every tier, every nation, every class
• All 16 class icons, four classes in four colours
• Ship names and tier numbers colour coded by type
• Filter order tidied to tier, class, type, nation
• Traverse acceleration now affects rudder shift, not acceleration
• Stat sheets with titled sections, leader lines and right aligned values
• Flat overlays instead of blurred glass
• Footer rewritten with a full description, a credits line and a Wargaming disclaimer
• Author credit placed at the top of the footer so it is seen immediately
• Email address removed from the site
• Ship data credited to TC307, Exusiai Covenant and 奇葩
• Tab icon added

Credits

Ship data from the WoWS Blitz database compiled and shared by TC307, with thanks to Exusiai Covenant and 奇葩. Equipment values cross checked against the official Wargaming equipment lists. The tool itself is built by me, LAFFI, and is not connected to Wargaming in any way.

The site is at wowsbshiptool.netlify.app.