Resources & Woods

Every crafted thing — a cannon, a repair kit, a first rate — begins as raw materials: ore, coal, hemp, logs, and the woods a hull is built from. Resources come in two kinds. Base resources are the raw materials you gather at their source — ores, coal, fibres, timber. Intermediate goods are themselves crafted from those base resources — rope, planks, fittings, gunpowder — and then feed the next recipe up the chain. A finished ship sits at the top of a tree whose leaves are a dozen different base resources, each crafted up step by step into the components that go into the hull.

Woods

The resource new shipwrights meet first is wood, because a ship is framed and planked from woods chosen at craft time, and those choices shape how the hull sails and fights. Woods differ along two broad lines:

• Light woods (fir is the type case) make a hull faster and more nimble but thinner and easier to break.
• Heavy woods (oak and up) make a hull tougher and better armoured but slower.

Cutting across that split is availability. The common woods are cheap and easy to get; the rare woods — live oak, teak, sabicu, bermuda cedar and the like — sail or fight better than the common ones and are correspondingly harder to come by, which is exactly why a hull built from rare woods costs so much more than a plain one.

Where resources come from

In the current game you assemble materials rather than farm them passively. The practical sources, in order of how much you’ll rely on them:

• Gather them where they’re dropped — each base resource is added at particular ports, and buying it there, at the source, is the primary way to get it. This is where a material is cheapest and most reliably in stock.
• The market — buy what another port sells, or place a buy contract and let sellers bring it to you. A useful secondary source when you don’t want to sail to the drop yourself.
• Looting traders — NPC and player merchants carry raw materials you can take by sinking or boarding them. A distant third: free, but unreliable and risky.
• Shipwrecks & port quests — incidental bonuses rather than a channel you plan around. Rare woods can turn up in the shipwreck a sealed bottle leads you to, and you get one sealed bottle per server reset, so treat it as a lucky windfall. Completing port quests can likewise hand you wood or item chests along the way.

A couple of odds and ends round out the picture. Some special planking — fisher planking, for instance — isn’t gathered at all but bought from the Admiralty through the Bermuda Exchange (see the port interface for how that exchange works). And if you’re just after volume, Neutral and Dutch ports tend to carry extra supply of ordinary goods, which can be a handy place to top up.

Looking up what an item needs

You don’t have to guess a recipe or hunt for where a material comes from. NavalGaming’s market browser mirrors the game’s live market data, and an item’s own market page pulls it all together: its crafting requirements, what it’s selling for, and — the part that matters most for sourcing — where the resource drops, plotted on a map, along with the ports that produce and consume it. Look an item up at /market/<item>, for example /market/gunpowder?server=peace (drop the ?server=peace for the war server), and you can see at a glance what goes into it, where on the map to sail to get it, and what it’ll cost — turning a guessing game into a couple of lookups.

With the materials understood, the next questions are where you turn them into things — Buildings — and how you turn them into a hull — Ship Crafting.