Ship Crafting & Blueprints

Crafting a ship is where the whole system comes together — and it’s the only route that gives you a hull built exactly the way you want it. To build one you need four things at the same time: a Shipyard, a blueprint for the ship, the materials the recipe calls for, and a high enough crafting level. Miss any one and the build won’t happen. Get them all together and you choose the woods, press craft, and the ship appears in your docks.

The four requirements

• A Shipyard — the building that constructs hulls, placed at one of your outposts. See Buildings.
• A blueprint — the template for the specific ship, which you must have unlocked (more below).
• Materials and components — the woods, raw materials, and crafted parts the recipe consumes, all sitting in that port’s warehouse.
• Crafting level — high enough for that hull; bigger ships demand a higher level (more below).

Blueprints

A blueprint is the recipe for a hull: it defines which ship you’re building and what materials and components that build consumes. You can only craft ships whose blueprints you’ve unlocked, and unlocking them is its own progression — some come with crafting level, others are bought from the Admiralty. Think of your collection of blueprints as the menu of what your shipyard can make; expanding it is part of growing as a crafter.

Choosing woods and trim

Crafting is the only point at which you choose what a ship is made of. When you start the build you pick the frame wood, the planking wood, and a trim — and those choices are locked in for the life of the hull. This is the whole reason to craft rather than buy a generic ship: a captured or shop hull comes as-is, but a crafted one can be tuned to its job, light and fast or heavy and tough. The trade-offs behind those choices are covered in depth on Woods & Trim.

Materials, components, and where they're built

A hull’s recipe rarely consumes only raw materials — it also wants components that are themselves crafted in your other buildings (the Workshop and Forge) and in turn made from raw materials. So a big build is really a small supply operation: gather raws, work them up into components, and feed everything to the shipyard. One practical limit to remember — a deep-water ship can’t be built in a shallow-water port, so the shipyard you use has to suit the hull you want.

Crafting is its own progression

You don’t start able to build a first rate. Crafting level rises as you craft, and each step up unlocks bigger, more complex hulls — so the path to building ships of the line is simply to keep building the ships you can, the same way combat rank rises by fighting. A crafter is a distinct kind of captain, and a valuable one: while others buy hulls at the auction, you’re the one supplying them. If you’d rather get a ship another way, weigh the options on Acquiring a Ship.