Woods & Trim

Two ships of the same class can sail and fight nothing alike, because at craft time the builder chose what they’re made of. A ship is framed in one wood and planked in another, and given a trim on top — and those choices set how fast it goes, how much punishment it shrugs off, and how well its crew survives a splinter storm. Picking the wrong woods for the job is one of the most common — and most invisible — new-captain mistakes.

What “wood” means

When a ship is crafted, the builder makes two separate wood choices: the frame (the structural skeleton) and the planking (the outer hull). They’re chosen independently, so you can mix them — a heavy frame with lighter planking, for instance — to bias a hull toward what you want. Together they push the ship’s underlying stats around: its hull strength and thickness, how well it resists leaks and fire, how badly its crew gets cut down by splinters, and its speed, acceleration, and turning.

The light-versus-heavy trade-off

Almost every wood choice is a point on one axis: speed and agility at one end, armour and survivability at the other. You can’t have both at once, and the woods sort roughly into three families:

• Light & fast — fir is the classic example, with bermuda cedar in the same family. They give the best speed and acceleration, at the cost of thin protection and heavy crew losses when hit. The wood of raiders and runners.
• Heavy & tough — live oak is the archetype, alongside woods like white oak and caguairan. Thick, durable, and kind to your crew under fire, but noticeably slower and less nimble. The wood of the battle line.
• Balanced — teak, sabicu, and mahogany sit in the middle: decent speed with reasonable toughness. The safe all-rounder when you’re not building for one extreme.

Since the August 2026 update there is a second axis to weigh, and it runs against the grain of the first. Your frame and planking feed a ship’s Rating, with rare woods counting for more than common ones — and Rating is what sets the reward for sinking you. A hull framed in live oak isn’t only tougher than a fir one; it is also a richer prize. That doesn’t make rare woods a mistake, but it does mean the cost of sailing an exotic build is no longer just the price of the timber.

Trim

On top of the wood, a crafted ship gets a trim — an extra build bonus layered onto the finished hull, such as a bias toward speed. Think of it as a finishing touch that nudges the ship a little further in one direction beyond what the woods already did. The menu of trims, and how a given trim is applied at craft time, has changed over the game’s life, so treat the specifics as something to confirm against the current crafting screen — the durable point is just that trim is a third build-time lever alongside frame and planking.

Matching woods to the job

Choose the build to fit how the ship will be used, the same way you’d choose its rate:

• Raider / escape artist — light woods (fir, bermuda cedar) for the speed to catch what you want and run from what you don’t. You accept that it’ll fold quickly if a fight goes wrong — the plan is not to be there when it does.
• Line ship / RvR / port battles — heavy woods (live oak, white oak) for thickness, hull strength, and crew survival, so it can stand in the line and trade broadsides. Slow is fine when the job is to hold position and absorb fire.
• Trader — usually light or balanced woods, since the goal is to complete the run and survive an ambush long enough to escape, not to win a slugging match.
• All-round PvP — balanced woods (teak, sabicu, mahogany) when you want one ship that does a bit of everything without a glaring weakness.

Where the woods come from

A couple of woods — fir and oak — are the common ones: cheap and widely available almost everywhere. The more specialised woods like live oak, teak, sabicu, and bermuda cedar are produced only in particular towns and regions, so you trade for them and haul them home — which is part of why a hull built from exotic woods costs more than a plain fir one. A few special plankings — fisher planking, for example — aren’t gathered at all but bought as a unique item from the Admiralty via the Bermuda Exchange (see the Port Interface for how the Exchange works). The gathering, buildings, and economy behind all this belong to the crafting side of the game; for that, see Resources & Woods and Ship Crafting.