Short answer: the Fancy line is the cheapest housing in the game per pirate — Fancy House gives 25 capacity for 25 Coins, one coin per head, and costs no materials at all. The Tent is the only option with no unlock requirement, at 1 Plank per head.
Housing is not decoration. Every Hand-class worker — Drifters, Builders, Fetchers, Greenhands and Masterhands — pays 1 Housing per minute as upkeep, permanently. Run out of housing capacity and you stop being able to staff buildings, which stops production, which is how most first runs quietly stall.
Cost per capacity, all nine housing buildings
Capacity and build cost are the wiki’s listed values; the cost-per-capacity column is computed here. Mixed-cost buildings are shown as two figures because Coins and materials are not interchangeable.
| Housing | Capacity | Unlock | Build cost | Cost per capacity |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Tent | 2 | None | 2 Planks | 1.0 Planks |
| Fancy Cabin | 12 | 3 Wealth | 12 Coins | 1.0 Coins |
| Fancy House | 25 | 7 Wealth | 25 Coins | 1.0 Coins |
| Classy Cabin | 12 | 3 Notoriety | 5 Coins + 10 Stone Blocks | 0.42 Coins + 0.83 Stone Blocks |
| Classy House | 25 | 7 Notoriety | 10 Coins + 25 Tabby | 0.4 Coins + 1.0 Tabby |
| Bloody Cabin | 8 | 3 Empire | 30 Stone Blocks | 3.75 Stone Blocks |
| Bloody House | 20 | 7 Empire | 30 Tabby | 1.5 Tabby |
| Salty Cabin | 8 | 3 Seafaring | 10 Planks + 15 Rope | 1.25 Planks + 1.88 Rope |
| Salty House | 20 | 7 Seafaring | 30 Rope + 20 Sails | 1.5 Rope + 1.0 Sails |
Three things fall straight out of that ranking.
The Wealth path buys housing with money, nothing else. Fancy Cabin and Fancy House are the only buildings here whose entire cost is Coins. If you are short on Planks, Stone Blocks or Tabby — which you always are before Tier 3 — that matters more than the raw number.
Cabins are worse per head than Houses in every line. Bloody Cabin is 3.75 Stone Blocks per capacity; Bloody House is 1.5 Tabby per capacity. Cabins exist to bridge you from Compass tier 2 to tier 3, not to be scaled up.
Salty housing is the expensive one. Salty House wants 30 Rope and 20 Sails; Sails come from the Sail Maker at 4 per minute from 8 Fabric, which itself sits on a Weaver fed by Wooden Awls and Fibre. That is four buildings deep for a housing unit. Which Compass path you take therefore changes what housing costs you, and the Compass path comparison lays out what else each path buys at the same point cost.
What each Hand role actually does
The Pirates page defines five Hand-class roles, and the distinction matters because you cannot reassign freely:
- Drifters — automatically assigned to any available job. Your general labour pool.
- Builders — automatically construct production buildings. Community buildings list a dedicated Builder count, not a Greenhand count.
- Fetchers — automatically transport resources between buildings. Nothing moves without them.
- Greenhands — work Simple Production Buildings.
- Masterhands — work Advanced Production Buildings.
How many slots you actually need
Adding up the wiki’s dedicated-worker columns gives a hard floor for a fully built island:
- 179 Greenhand slots across all 77 production buildings (from 1 for a Jeweller or Rotisserie up to 6 for a Steel Foundry)
- 54 Builder slots across the 15 community buildings, of which the Trade Pier and Deep-Water Pier take 10 each
Nobody builds all 77, but the shape is useful: production staffing dwarfs everything else, and the piers are the single largest Builder sink in the game. Budget housing accordingly before you commit to a Deep-Water Pier.
One documented inconsistency to know about
The Pirates page says Masterhands work Advanced Production Buildings. But the buildings tables list Greenhands for all 77 production buildings — there is not one Masterhands entry, and no column marks any building as Advanced. So the wiki tells you Masterhands exist and never tells you where they work. Masterhands are also the most expensive Hand to keep (1 Housing, 1 Roast Bird and 1 Booze per minute, versus a Greenhand’s 1 Housing and 1 Stew), so this is not a trivial gap. Treat any specific claim about which buildings need Masterhands as unverified until the wiki fills that column in. The full upkeep picture is in the crew upkeep matrix, and the build prices behind every figure above are in the building cost matrix.
More Corsair Cove pages are collected on the game hub.
Sources
- Corsair Cove Official Wiki, List of buildings — housing capacities and costs, community and production worker counts (wiki last edited 2026-08-07, read 2026-08-23)
- Corsair Cove Official Wiki, Pirates — Hand-class role definitions and upkeep (wiki last edited 2026-07-29)
- Corsair Cove Official Wiki, Compass — tier point thresholds for housing unlocks (wiki last edited 2026-08-22)
