Short answer: a ship upgrade is never just the hull price. Each tier gates on three things at once — the right pier, a crew rank you may not have food for, and at least one material you were not making before. Tier 4 needs a Trade Pier; Tier 6 needs a Deep-Water Pier whose cost includes 100 Silver, a resource with no production building.
Below is what actually changes at each step, derived by diffing the construction-cost lists tier by tier rather than reading them one hull at a time.
The tier gates
| Tier | Pier required | Hull cost (baseline hull) | New material vs. tier below | New crew rank introduced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Shallow Pier (30 Planks) | Landlubber: 15 Planks | Planks | Swabbies |
| 2 | Shallow Pier | 10 Planks + 20 Rope | Rope | Picaroons, Scallywags |
| 2 ”+” variants | Shallow Pier | 50 Planks + 50 Rope | none - same materials, 5x the quantity | same |
| 3 | Shallow Pier | 50 Planks + 50 Rope + 30 Sails | Sails | Bombardiers, Crow’s Eyes |
| 4 | Trade Pier | 75 Planks + 75 Rope + 50 Sails + one of: 10 Figurehead / 60 Pitch / 50 Fittings | Figurehead, Pitch or Fittings depending on hull | Buccaneers, Navigators |
| 5 | Trade Pier | 125 Planks + 125 Rope + 100 Sails + hull-specific + 40 Jolly Roger / Naval Gun / Steel Chain | Jolly Roger, Naval Gun or Steel Chain | Marauders, Renegades |
| 6 | Deep-Water Pier | 175 Planks + 175 Rope + 150 Sails + hull-specific + 30 Silver Lining or 75 Copper Lamp | Silver Lining, Copper Lamp | Corsairs |
Two gates dominate everything else on that table.
Tier 4 is the pier wall. Everything from Landlubber to Tier 3 sails from a Shallow Pier that costs 30 Planks. Tier 4 demands a Trade Pier: 60 Planks, 60 Stone Blocks, 20 Rope and 500 Coins, staffed by 10 Builders. That is the first time the game asks for Coins and a serious Builder commitment in the same breath.
Tier 6 is the raid wall. The Deep-Water Pier costs 120 Planks, 90 Stone Blocks, 20 Rope, 60 Tabby, 500 Coins and 100 Silver. Silver is one of six resources the wiki files under Raid Resource, with no production building, no ingredients and no output rate. You cannot farm your way to a Deep-Water Pier.
The four hull roles, read off the stat table
New players see Prowler, Destroyer, Hunter and Reaver and get no explanation. The stat tables make the split unambiguous — each type puts its tier’s headline number into exactly one stat, and the pattern holds identically from Tier 2 through Tier 6:
- Destroyer — Gun Damage, and Armour equal to it. The stand-off gunship.
- Reaver — Boarding Damage. Everything else is baseline.
- Hunter — Speed.
- Prowler — Manoeuvrability, which scales to the largest raw number of the four.
The Tier 2 Iron Fist (Destroyer) reads 13 Gun Damage and 13 Armour with 2 Boarding; the Tier 2 Sharktooth (Reaver) reads 13 Boarding with 2 Gun Damage. At Tier 6, Wrath Bringer reads 78 Gun Damage and 78 Armour, Loki reads 78 Boarding. Same shape, bigger numbers. The ”+” variants at Tiers 2 and 4 spread the points across two stats instead of one, at a materially higher build price — the Tier 2 ”+” hulls cost 50 Planks and 50 Rope against the plain hulls’ 10 and 20.
How much of a hull’s printed stat you actually get depends on crewing it to capacity, which is its own trade; the crew scaling breakdown has the per-slot returns.
Do not build the hull before the pantry
Each tier introduces crew ranks that will not work below it, and every rank carries permanent upkeep. Bombardiers arrive at Tier 3 and need Medicine and Boots — an Apothecary plus a Cobbler, which itself needs a Tanner and a Hardwood Workshop underneath it. Buccaneers arrive at Tier 4 and need Tobacco, another raid-only resource.
The rule that follows: check the upkeep chain before you check whether you can afford the hull. A Tier 4 Sea Dragon you cannot feed is worse than a Tier 3 Yoke Breaker you can. Every rank’s supply tree is mapped in the crew upkeep matrix, and the factories behind each new material are priced in the building cost matrix.
What the wiki does not say
Ship unlocks also cost Compass points on a specific path, and the ships table’s “Principle Path” column is blank for all 29 hulls — the icons render but no text was extracted, and no text is published. The path assignments are recoverable from the Compass unlock lists instead, which the progression path comparison works through. The ships table also carries no Effect text and no build time, so nothing here estimates how long a hull takes to construct.
More Corsair Cove reference pages are on the game hub.
Sources
- Corsair Cove Official Wiki, List of ships — all 29 hulls, construction costs, pier requirements, crew types and full base/max-crew stat tables (wiki last edited 2026-08-01, read 2026-08-23)
- Corsair Cove Official Wiki, List of buildings — Shallow, Trade and Deep-Water Pier costs and Builder counts (wiki last edited 2026-08-07)
- Corsair Cove Official Wiki, Resources — Raid Resource category, including Silver and Tobacco (wiki last edited 2026-08-22)
- Corsair Cove Official Wiki, Pirates — crew rank to ship tier eligibility (wiki last edited 2026-07-29)
