Ship Crafting

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 specific hull: it defines which ship you’re building and exactly what materials and components that build consumes. As with every recipe, you can only craft ships whose blueprints you’ve unlocked — and blueprints unlock as your crafting XP climbs, with the bigger, more complex hulls sitting behind higher thresholds. A handful of ship blueprints — and the permits some hulls require to build — are instead bought from the Admiralty. Think of your unlocked 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.

Ship quality and color

The color shown on a finished ship is its craft quality, running from gray through green, blue, and purple to gold. The quality determines how many of the ship’s upgrade slots are unlocked, but the color is not a verdict on the whole build: a lower-color ship made from well-chosen woods may suit its job better than a gold hull with the wrong wood combination.

You choose the hull, woods, and trim when you place the build, but you do not choose its color. Quality is rolled when the ship is crafted, so spending rare materials does not guarantee a purple or gold result. Port location affects the odds: since the November 2025 crafting update, higher-quality ships are more likely when built in capturable ports and less likely in uncapturable ports. Treat quality as a chance at extra upgrade potential, and judge the finished ship by its color, woods, trim, and bonuses together.

Crafting is its own progression

You don’t start able to build a first rate. Your crafting level rises as you bank crafting XP, 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, until crafting tops out at roughly level 87. The fastest way to climb is to keep building hulls close to your current crafting level: as of the 2026 build the XP a build awards falls off sharply the further below your level you go, dwindling to nothing several tiers under, so churning out cheap low-tier hulls stops paying once you’ve outgrown them. The full XP curve lives on Buildings. 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 — and a crafter listing their own builds has the auction listing fee waived, as covered on Acquiring a Ship. If you’d rather get a ship another way, weigh the options there too.