Regarding the 1,000 km cap on Captain's Milestones(a possible intermediate remedy)
Until the game dev's come up with a fix to the bug in the next game patch.
The current Sail-a-thon event means that the Papayaplay will be capturing data on the total distance travelled by all eligible characters that currently exist on the server. This presents an opportunity to Papayaplay to add the recorded distance at the close of the Sail-a-thon event to the characters distance travelled stat for the purpose of determining their rank(and the rewards they are granted) with the Captain's Milestones game mechanic. This seems like a reasonable partial solution to the current issue with the new Captain's Milestones mechanic
For those of you that say "just port hop, bro", that is onerous as well as unreasonable and is not possible in sea regions with long distances between ports, such as The Arctic, Oceania, Latin America, North America and Africa. Furthermore you have entirely failed to do the mathematics:
To achieve 1,000,000 km you must port hop 1,000 times at 1,000 km per trip. This ensures that you are kept at minimal speed because of how frequently you stop at ports because you must set sail and accelerate to top speed again and again. Assume that the UWO world map adheres to the 40 million km estimate for the Earth's circumference, I acknowledge the distance at the equator is slightly longer than pole to pole, but UWO is basically a cylinder and not a sphere so it's not important. To get from nothing to Deck Swabber is 5 million km, so 5,000 port hops required at a minimum. To get to Legend is 2.1 billion km requires a bare minimum of 2,100,000 port hops.... How long do you think you will live?
The distance from Amsterdam to Oslo is about 1,023 km, lets use that to give you idea of what "just port hop, bro" demands from the player. I have a fair well modded ship that lets me travel tht distance in about 5 game days(one day = 1 minute), so 5 minutes, click on the port, enter dock, then set sail again. Lets excuse the few seconds it takes to enter and set sail again. Imagine doing that 100 times, let alone 1,000 times, and never mind 5,000 times to become a Deck Swabber.
5 minutes x 2,100,000 = 10,500,000
10,500,000 minutes / 60 = 175,000 hours
175,000 hours / 24 = 7,291.66666(recurring) days
7,291.6 days / 365 = 19.97716894977169(irrational number) years
19.97 years, lets just call it 20 years, that's twenty years of 24/7 clicking every 5 minutes, without taking into account the need to sleep or eat or take toilet breaks or even working a job to pay the bills require to play this game. Again I ask: "How long do you think you will live? When taking into account the need to sleep and attend biological functions as well as hold down a job to pay for everything, the average human lifespan is not long enough to reach Legend, it is effectively unobtainable.