Acquiring a Ship

There are four ways to put a ship in your docks: craft one, buy one, capture one, or redeem a DLC hull. They differ in cost, speed, and how much say you get over the build — and the choice matters more here than in most games, because in Naval Action a ship that sinks or is captured is gone for good. You will lose ships; the question is how cheaply and how often you can replace them.

Crafting your own

Crafting is how you get a ship built exactly to your spec. In a port where you’ve put up a Shipyard, you pick a blueprint for the ship you want, choose the woods it’s framed and planked with, and — if the materials are sitting in your warehouse — build it straight into your docks. The catch is that crafting is its own discipline: it needs a crafting level high enough for the ship you want, the right buildings, and a steady supply of resources.

Buying a ship

If you’d rather not build, you can buy — and the main marketplace is the Ship Auction, where players list the ships they’ve crafted for sale. The auction is filtered by your rank, so you mostly see hulls you can actually crew — listed in rate order, from the smallest 7th rates up to the largest 1st rates — and you can narrow further by ship type, port, and so on. Watch the port tax while you browse: the same hull can list for more or less from one port to the next, so it pays to compare the same ship across a few ports before you buy. The habit worth forming is to inspect before you buy: hovering over a listing shows the ship’s full build — the woods and trim it was made from, how many upgrade slots it has, and any modules already fitted. What you see is what you get, because those choices are locked in at craft time and can’t be changed afterward.

Ports also have a general shop, but that’s mainly for the things a ship needs rather than the ships themselves — cannons, repairs, upgrades, books, resources. Treat the Ship Auction as the place to buy a fighting hull from another captain.

From the seller’s side, the auction charges a listing fee to put a ship up for sale — but that fee is waived for ships you crafted yourself. That waiver is what makes the craft-to-sell loop pay: a crafter can list surplus hulls without the auction taking a cut just to advertise them, so building for the market is a viable trade rather than a tax on every listing.

Capturing in battle

You can also take a ship the hard way: capture it. Almost any ship in the open world can be captured by boarding it and winning the fight for the deck — the notable exception being DLC ships, which can’t be permanently taken. Once you’ve won the boarding, you transfer some of your own crew aboard the prize to take control of it and bring it home.

A related route is the Ship Note (and the rarer Elite Ship Note): a voucher you redeem in port for a ship, earned by sinking or capturing elite ships in the open world, by finishing the Final Exam, or from certain events. The note becomes a real ship at a port — but the game assigns its woods at random, so unlike crafting you don’t get to choose the build.

Redeeming a DLC ship

Finally, if you own a ship’s DLC you can simply redeem a fresh copy — pick its woods, claim it, and it’s delivered instantly, once per cooldown. Because the copy is redeemable you can never permanently lose that hull, which is exactly why DLC ships are popular with newer and busier captains. The full picture — what’s on offer and how the redeemable mechanic works — is on the DLC Ships page.

Which route is right?

Most captains end up using all four, but a rough guide:

• Just starting? Sail the free Basic Lynx — claimable again and again if it sinks — and capture small NPC ships to move up while you learn.
• Want a specific build? Craft it, or buy a crafted hull at the auction that already matches the spec you want.
• Short on time, hate losing ships? A DLC ship gives you a dependable, never-truly-lost hull.
• Out hunting? Capture what you beat — just make sure you can crew the prize home.