Outposts & Warehouses

An outpost is your foothold in a port — somewhere to dock ships, store goods, and build. More than convenience, it’s what makes a port yours to operate from: the goods you leave in a port’s warehouse only stay put if you hold an outpost there. Deciding where to plant your handful of outposts is one of the most consequential economic choices you make, because it sets where you can stage ships, gather resources, and trade from.

What an outpost is

Setting up an outpost in a port gives you a permanent presence there: docks to leave and pick up ships, a warehouse to store goods, and the footing to put up crafting buildings. The persistence is the key part — visit a port without an outpost and anything you leave in its storage is lost when you move on; establish an outpost and your goods and ships stay safe between visits. An outpost turns a port from a place you pass through into a base you operate from.

The warehouse

The warehouse is your storage in a port: materials, modules, cannons, books, doubloons, and crafting goods all live there. Storage is per port — each outpost has its own warehouse, and goods don’t flow automatically between them, so what’s in your home warehouse isn’t reachable from an outpost three regions away. You move goods between the warehouse and your ships’ holds by dragging them across, loading cargo to carry and unloading it to store. The warehouse can also sort and consolidate what’s stored, tidying scattered stacks so a crowded hold is easier to work with. As you accumulate more than the default space holds, the warehouse can be expanded for a fee paid in doubloons.

Docks, buildings, and the port base

An outpost is really three things clustered together. The docks hold the ships you leave at that port; the number of dock slots is capped (25 as of the 2026 build), and adding more costs doubloons at a rising per-slot price, so each extra berth is dearer than the last. The warehouse holds your goods. And the port is where you put up crafting buildings — a workshop, a forge, a shipyard — since those have to sit in a port where you hold an outpost. That clustering is why an outpost is the unit of expansion: each new one is a complete little base — somewhere to keep ships, store materials, and craft. The buildings side is covered under Buildings.

Moving between your outposts

You can teleport yourself between outposts you own for a fee in reals — a fast way to jump to where you need to be. The important limits are about what comes with you. Your goods cannot be moved between outposts at all: hauling cargo always means actually sailing it, which is exactly why where your outposts sit matters so much. A ship, by contrast, is more portable — you can tow an empty hull to another of your ports — but only with its hold emptied first, so towing relocates the ship, never its cargo. A network of outposts therefore lets you hop between bases and reposition bare ships, but the goods still have to make the voyage. If you plant an outpost in the wrong place, it isn’t a permanent mistake — an outpost can be removed for a fee in reals (25,000 as of the 2026 build), freeing the slot to re-establish elsewhere.

Placing them well

Because outposts are few and each one is a real investment, treat placement as strategy, not convenience. The usual reasons to plant one:

• Resource access — near ports that produce the raw materials your crafting needs, so you gather and store without long hauls.
• Trade routes — at the ends of a profitable trading run, so you can buy, store, and stage cargo where the margins are.
• Frontline staging — near contested waters, so you can keep fighting ships forward and join the action without sailing from the rear.
• Reach — spreading a few outposts across regions so you’re never far from a base, rather than clustering them all at home.

One durable constraint cuts across all of these: water depth. Shallow-water ports cannot host larger, deep-draft ships, so an outpost meant to stage big warships needs a deep-water port — a shallow harbour will only ever berth light hulls no matter how convenient its location. Check a candidate port’s depth before you commit; some well-known staging harbours (a deep-water safe-zone capital, for instance) are popular precisely because they take anything you sail in.

You’ll manage all of this — founding outposts, paying for expansions, and teleporting between them — from the Admiralty and port screens. Once you’ve a base worth filling, the money to fill it comes from Making Money.