Bering Tonnage Best Starting Region: Caribbean vs Oceania

By Maren Holt · Updated October 2, 2026

The demo offered three starting regions. The release map has 295 ports worldwide, but you still start a company in one region with two or three licenses and grow out from there.

The short answer

Labels are the ones shown on the region picker in the demo; two different streamers read Caribbean as hard and Oceania as easy.

Why the Caribbean is hard

• Ports are too close together. Ozkorin’s verdict after an hour: “too few ports and they’re too close by”. Short hops mean low revenue per delivery: payouts of $700-3,900 each were typical.
• Low-value exports. The starting depot at Santo Domingo was a “low value” market. Value varies by port and changes over time.
• Hurricanes. Storms cross the map and close ports for several in-game days. In one session nearly every port in the eastern Caribbean was shut at once.
• Lookalike names. Kingston (Jamaica) and Kingstown (St. Vincent) are both stops.

The upside: the Caribbean is where the tutorial teaches feeder routes, and a tight cluster of islands is exactly what feeders and depots are for.

Why Oceania is easier

• Longer legs (Australia to New Zealand) mean each delivery is worth more.
• Fewer, bigger ports make the first 5-stop route easy to design (one demo loop ran New Zealand, Australia, Tasmania and back).
• The tutorial’s first objectives map onto it cleanly: load cargo for Tauranga, deliver from Australia to New Zealand, then a five-connection route.

Whatever you pick

• Expansion is license-driven. Your second license must be at least 621 miles (1,000 km) from any starting-license port, so you will leave your home region early anyway. See licenses and flags.
• The richest-looking routes in official screenshots are long-haul: a four-stop North Atlantic loop estimated at $669,243 a month. Plan to reach Europe or North America; the start region is just the training ground.