Short answer: every rank in Corsair Cove has a permanent per-minute upkeep bill, and unlocking a rank is worthless until the factory that makes its food is already running. Two ranks — Buccaneers and Navigators — partly eat resources that have no production building at all.
The wiki publishes the upkeep list and the production list on separate pages, so nobody ever sees them side by side. Joined below, they answer the actual question: what do I have to build before I hire these people?
The upkeep matrix
Upkeep is per worker per minute. The “supplied by” column names the production building the wiki lists for that good; where more than one building makes it, the cheapest to reach is given first.
| Rank | Class | Upkeep per min. | Supplied by | Prerequisite depth |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Drifters | Hand | 1 Housing | Any housing building | Trivial (Tent, 2 Planks) |
| Builders | Hand | 1 Housing | Any housing building | Trivial |
| Fetchers | Hand | 1 Housing | Any housing building | Trivial |
| Greenhands | Hand | 1 Housing, 1 Stew | Campfire (16 Stew/min, no input) | Trivial |
| Masterhands | Hand | 1 Housing, 1 Roast Bird, 1 Booze | Rotisserie (2 Birds + 4 Herbs), Moonshine Still (no input) | Two feeder buildings |
| Swabbies | Crew | 1 Stew, 1 Booze | Campfire, Moonshine Still | Trivial |
| Picaroons | Crew | 1 Rum | Distillery (4 Barrel + 4 Sugar Cane) | Cooper + Sugar Cane Farm first |
| Scallywags | Crew | 1 Cassava Bread | Cassava Oven (4 Cassava Roots + 4 Salt) | Cassava Picker + Saltern first |
| Bombardiers | Crew | 1 Medicine, 1 Boots | Apothecary (8 Herbs + 6 Fresh Water), Cobbler (6 Leather + 2 Wooden Awl) | Deep: Tanner and Hardwood Workshop under the Cobbler |
| Crow’s Eyes | Crew | 1 Turtle Soup, 1 Slops | Soup Kitchen (4 Turtles + 4 Fresh Water), Slop Shop (2 Fabric + 12 Leather) | Deep: Weaver and Tanner under the Slop Shop |
| Buccaneers | Crew | 0.5 Tobacco, 0.5 Eyepatch | Tobacco: no production building / Eyepatch Maker (2 Leather + 2 Fibre) | Raid-gated |
| Navigators | Crew | 0.5 Wine, 0.5 Tattoo Ink | Wine: no production building / Ink Maker (2 Colour Pigment + 2 Fresh Water) | Raid-gated |
| Marauders | Crew | 0.2 Sabres, 0.2 Spyglass | Weaponsmith (4 Steel + 4 Stone), Tinkerer (2 Tools + 2 Lime) | Steel Foundry chain required |
| Renegades | Crew | 0.2 Prosthesis, 0.2 Hardtack | Limb Maker (4 Hardwood + 2 Steel), Provisioner (4 Cassava Bread + 4 Herbs) | Steel chain plus a second food tier |
| Corsairs | Crew | 0.1 Fancy Clothing, 0.1 Pistols, 0.1 Jewellery | Master Tailor (2 Pearl + 4 Fabric), Pistol Maker (2 Steel + 10 Shot), Jeweller (4 Pearl + 4 Tools) | Three separate luxury chains |
The pattern the table exposes
Upkeep quantity falls as rank rises — Swabbies cost 1 unit per good per minute, Corsairs only 0.1 — but the number of chains you must keep alive rises steeply. A Corsair costs a tenth as much of each good, and requires three independent factory chains, one of which (Pistols) needs a Shot Tower fed by Lead and Copper. Cheap per head is not cheap per empire.
The practical reading: a rank is affordable when its whole supply tree is already standing for some other reason. Bombardiers are painless if you already run a Tanner for Boots. They are a project if you do not.
Tobacco and Wine: the two you cannot manufacture
Corsair Cove’s resource list contains six items in a Raid Resource category — Lens, Grain, Tobacco, Silver, Whale Blubber and Wine — and none of the six has a production building, an ingredient list, or a per-minute output. Two of those six are crew upkeep goods:
- Buccaneers need 0.5 Tobacco per minute
- Navigators need 0.5 Wine per minute
There is no factory entry on the wiki for either. So from the moment you crew a Tier 4 Prowler or Destroyer with Buccaneers, part of your standing upkeep is a resource your island cannot make. The wiki does not state the acquisition rate from raiding, so the honest version is: this is a structural dependency on raiding, of unquantified size. Do not let anyone sell you a Tobacco production number — there isn’t one published.
Grain and Lens matter for the same reason one step removed: the Tack Oven’s Hardtack needs 12 Grain, and the Spyglass Maker needs 8 Lens. Both have a producible alternative (the Provisioner makes Hardtack from Cassava Bread and Herbs; the Tinkerer makes Spyglass from Tools and Lime), so those two chains are escapable. Tobacco and Wine are not.
How this connects to ships
Which ranks you need is decided entirely by which hull you build — Picaroons crew Tier 2-3 Destroyers and Reavers, Scallywags crew Tier 2-3 Prowlers and Hunters, and so on. The crew scaling breakdown covers how much combat stat each additional crew slot actually returns, and the building cost matrix has the full build prices of every feeder factory named above. For the wider dependency picture, see the production chain matrix.
More Corsair Cove reference pages are indexed on the game hub.
Sources
- Corsair Cove Official Wiki, Pirates — all 15 worker and crew ranks, upkeep per minute, ship eligibility (wiki last edited 2026-07-29, read 2026-08-23)
- Corsair Cove Official Wiki, Resources — resource categories including the six Raid Resource entries with no production building (wiki last edited 2026-08-22)
- Corsair Cove Official Wiki, List of buildings — production buildings, inputs and outputs (wiki last edited 2026-08-07)
