Buildings & Blueprints

If you want to make things in Naval Action, you need buildings — and there are really only three that matter: the Workshop, the Forge, and the Shipyard. The important thing to understand up front is what they aren’t: they’re not passive factories that pile up goods while you’re offline. They’re workbenches you stand at and operate — you feed in materials, choose what to make, and craft it on the spot. What any of them can actually make is set by your blueprints — the recipes you’ve unlocked — and those open up as you earn crafting XP.

The three crafting buildings

Each building is a station for one part of the craft:

• Workshop — makes components and repair supplies: the rope, fittings, planks, and consumables that other recipes (and your ships in battle) depend on. It’s the broadest, lowest building and usually the first you put up, at a base build cost of about 10,000 reals.
• Forge — makes guns: cannons, carronades, and the ammunition they fire. If you want to arm your own hulls or sell ordnance, this is where it’s made; it costs roughly 10,000 reals to build and requires crafting level 3 before you can put one up.
• Shipyard — makes ships. It’s the top of the chain and the most demanding to unlock and supply, with a base build cost of about 15,000 reals; the whole subject of building a hull is covered on Ship Crafting. Raising a Shipyard’s level to build larger hulls costs 5,000–15,000 doubloons per upgrade, separate from the reals you paid to put it up.

How they chain together

The three buildings are designed to feed one another, and seeing that chain is what makes crafting click. Raw materials — bought, traded, or looted (see Resources & Woods) — go into the Workshop to become components. Components and more raws go into the Forge to become cannons and shot. And the Shipyard pulls components, guns, and woods together into a finished ship. Each step adds value, which is why a self-sufficient crafter — or a clan that splits these roles between members — can build a fully armed hull far more cheaply than buying every piece.

Buildings live at your outposts

A building has to sit in a port where you hold an outpost, because it draws on that port’s warehouse for materials and deposits what it makes there. That ties your crafting geography to your outpost network: it’s usually smart to cluster a building where the materials it needs are easy to get, rather than hauling raws across the map to a shipyard in the wrong place. You can hold only a limited number of buildings — the cap rises with rank and can be extended — so each one is a real choice about what you mean to make.

Blueprints and crafting XP

A building is only as useful as the blueprints you can feed it. A blueprint is the recipe for a single item — a component, a cannon, a particular hull — spelling out exactly what materials the build consumes and what it produces. You can only make things you have the blueprint for, so your collection of blueprints is really the menu of everything your buildings can turn out, and expanding that menu is the heart of growing as a crafter.

Blueprints unlock through crafting XP. You earn crafting XP by crafting, but the amount each item pays turns on the gap between your own crafting level and the level of the recipe you make: items right at your current level pay full XP, and the further a recipe sits below you, the less it’s worth — craft something several tiers beneath you and it may pay almost nothing at all. As of the 2026 build the falloff runs in rough steps — something like full, three-quarters, half, a quarter, then nothing as the gap widens — so the way to advance is to keep reaching for recipes at or near your level rather than mass-producing cheap low-tier goods. As your crafting XP climbs you cross thresholds that unlock new blueprints and the higher buildings that make use of them — the Forge and eventually the Shipyard — up to a ceiling around crafting level 87, where the ladder tops out. It works the same way as combat rank rising through fighting: you advance as a crafter by crafting, and you advance fastest by reaching for the most valuable things you can currently make.

Planning what to build

Because buildings and their slots are limited, build to your intent. A captain who mainly fights and wants to keep ships repaired and armed leans on a Workshop and perhaps a Forge; a dedicated shipwright invests in a Shipyard and the supply lines to feed it; a trader may skip buildings altogether and simply buy what others craft. Match your buildings to the blueprints you’ve unlocked, too — there’s no point standing up a Shipyard before your crafting XP has opened the hulls you want to make. For how the money side of this pays off, see Making Money.