The Workshop

The Workshop is where a settlement starts making things instead of only digging them up. It does two jobs at once: it stores the durable goods you craft, find, and loot, and it houses the single trade you hire to turn raw stores into finished cargo.

Construction

Costs, build times, and where the Workshop sits in the queue.

Goods

What you store, craft, and spend here.

Raiding

Why raid cargo needs a Workshop to come home.

Expeditions

Where crafted goods are loaded and spent.

Build it before you need to store anything

The Workshop opens once your Main House reaches Level 4. It costs 220, 180, and 160 at the first level, and climbs to Level 20. It produces no resources of its own. Every level instead buys two things: more room to hold goods, and a faster path to the trades that make them. The full cost ladder lives on the Workshop card.

Storage that grows with the building

Goods do not share the Storehouse with your gold and stone. They live in the Workshop, and the Workshop holds only so many at a time. A Level 1 Workshop is a small shelf; a tall one is a warehouse. Goods waiting in an open Marketplace offer still take up that space until the offer clears, so a full shelf can quietly block a craft or a raid haul.

This is why raiders need a Workshop at all. A raid still sails and plunders resources without one, but a recovered good has nowhere to land unless the launching settlement keeps a Workshop with room to spare. Overflow is not banked, it is left on the sand.

Treasurer Mora: Treasury habit

Storage is the constraint nobody plans for. Before you queue a long craft or send a big raid, glance at the shelf. A finished good with no room waits in limbo, and a full Workshop turns a good haul into a wasted one.

Hire one trade, and mean it

A Workshop houses a single specialist, hired once and kept for the life of the settlement. There is no swapping later, so the choice is a real one. Each trade unlocks a different line of work.

Hiring a trade asks for a level 10 Workshop and 3,000 coins. The early levels are for storage — collecting goods, holding raid loot — so picking your specialism is a deliberate mid-game commitment, not a first-day decision.

Master Quill: Margin note

Match the trade to the island. A frontier launch-point that keeps settling new shores wants a Quartermaster or a Chandler. A safe rear island that hoards relic fragments wants the Relic Workbench. One island cannot do both, so let each settlement specialise.

Unlock recipes one at a time

Hiring a trade opens its line of work; it does not hand you every recipe at once. On the Workshop's Craft tab each recipe shows as a square — the ones you have learned are ready to queue, the rest show their unlock price. You learn a recipe by spending coins on it (a few also ask for a little crafting mastery, earned by crafting), so a freshly hired trade with nothing learned starts as a blank slate. Unlock costs run from 800 coins for the Wayward Compass up to 2,500 for the Lumen Crystal.

With a recipe learned, crafting runs like any other queue. You order it, its inputs are taken from your stores at once, and the order works through over time. The Workshop handles one order at a time, and a finished good needs a free slot to land in. If the shelf is full when an order completes, it waits rather than spoiling the goods.

Treasurer Mora: Treasury habit

Crafting spends real resources up front, not on delivery. Check that you can spare the lumber and food before you commit a long order, because the stores leave your hands the moment you confirm.

Reference

Common questions