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 its benches 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; a seated steward carries it on to Level 30. It produces no resources of its own. Every level instead buys two things: more room to hold goods, and the level every bench needs to open. 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.

Benches: what an island can make

Crafting happens at benches. The common bench makes the everyday goods any island runs on. Each steward's doctrine has a bench of its own, and appointing the steward opens it beside the common one. Nobody hires a trade any more: the doctrine is the island's one choice.

Which islands have which benches

Islands you held before stewards arrived keep everything. Their common bench opens at Workshop level 4 with no hire. A trade you hired there before keeps every recipe it made for life, even on a bench your steward does not work; those recipes sit under their bench, marked kept from before.

An island you settle, capture or are granted from now on crafts nothing until a steward is seated. Its Workshop can still be built to level 5 to store goods, and the Craft tab says how to open its benches. Once a steward takes the seat, it works the common bench and the doctrine's bench, and the Workshop climbs again.

NPC islands have no benches.

Master Quill: Margin note

A colony founded now is a storehouse first. Ship it the goods it needs from an older island, and raise it toward Dominion; the benches open with its steward.

Unlock recipes one at a time

An open bench 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, and most also ask for crafting mastery, earned by crafting in that island's Workshop. Mastery belongs to the island, not to a bench: every craft adds to it and every recipe checks it. More than half the recipes need no mastery at all; the table below shows which do. Mastery is never spent, and every 50 points quickens all of the island's crafting by 3%, up to 15%.

With a recipe learned, crafting runs like any other queue. You order up to 99 pieces at once (the Wayward Compass one at a time), and the bench works through them one at a time. Each piece takes its inputs from your stores as it starts, so you only need enough for the first piece to place the order. If the stores cannot cover the next piece, the order waits, marked short of stores, and picks up again once they can. 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 a piece completes, it waits rather than spoiling the goods; a full shelf also refuses a new order until you make room.

Cancelling an order returns the inputs of the piece in progress. Pieces not yet started have taken nothing, so there is nothing to return.

Treasurer Mora: Treasury habit

A long order does not lock your stores away. The bench takes each piece's share as it begins, so what you have not yet spent stays in your stores, where you can use it.

Doctrine shot: the one thing a bench makes for war

Each doctrine bench can cast one kind of doctrine shot, a crate of catapult shot founded from that doctrine's own ore. It is the first ammunition the archipelago has ever needed, and it is for exactly one thing: the creature of the same doctrine that comes up through a Lumen Rupture. Thrown at a wall or a hull it may as well be a bag of sand, and loaded against anything but its creature it is simply carried home again.

The ore comes only from the rocks at sea, so a bench with no seam behind it casts nothing; Oceans covers working one. A crate takes 2.5 hours on a plain-speed world, and a world running at five times speed casts it five times faster. The recipe needs no earlier recipe, only the bench, the coins and the mastery; each crate cast earns 5 mastery. Crates can be queued in quantity, and they are specialty goods: they trade, they sell on the market, and no raider ever finds one in your stores.

Reference

Common questions