Uncharted Waters Origin Ships and Shipbuilding Guide

There are many ships in the game. You can find out a lot of details about most of the ships from the blueprints section. I’ve copied some data from there into the table below for ease of reference. I’m ignoring the special ships in this guide, but do cover both eastern and western ships.

Additionally, the captain’s cabin of every ship provides a large bonus to some stat that varies by ship. All ships give a 10% bonus to your supply stat, plus a numerical bonus to some other stat. The Korean wiki lists all of them, but Google can’t translate some of the names, so I’ve verified the stat bonus for many low grade ships myself so that I can see the proper translation of the ones that Google can’t handle.

It was necessary to split the table because Steam caps the length of a single section.

There are no ships with a captain’s cabin that give a statistical bonus to support, scouting, trade, or negotiation. Combat ships always give a bonus to their combat type. Adventuring ships usually give a bonus to nature, though there are three each that give a bonus to supply or aesthetics.

Apart from grade 1 ships, all ships have level requirements in order to use the ship. The ship has a much higher level requirement for the ship type (i.e., adventuring, trade, or combat) than for the other two levels. The level requirement is for a ship’s captain, not for other mates on the ship.

If a ship’s captain does not meet the level requirements, you can still use the ship, but the ship’s stats will be decreased by 5% for each level requirement not met. You’ll likely want to use some medium grade ships for quite a while while missing the high level requirement, but the other two are much easier to meet. Here’s a table of level requirements by ship grade.

In order to build any ship, you must have a sufficiently high shipbuilding level. For the low grades, I’ve listed the amount of experience required to advance from one shipbuilding level to the next. I’ve only been able to see it so far for the low ranks. Your shipbuilding level is tracked separately for eastern and western ships.

I’ve also listed the amount of experience that you gain from building a ship. You gain this much per ship, until the ship blueprint level reaches 20. At that point, experience per ship drops to 10% of the original. You gain double experience the first time you build a particular type of ship.

Finally, I have listed the time required to build each ship, in minutes.

Building a ship requires materials, blueprints, and ducats. You must also be at a shipyard that can build the particular type of ship that you want. The blueprints section has a map pin marker that will show you the locations where each ship can be built, so I won’t replicate that here. It takes 10 blueprints to build a ship, but I don’t focus on how to get them here.

I will, however, list the materials required to build each ship. The materials always require one keel, as well as some wood, masts, and gun ports, with only the exception that grade 1 ships skip the masts and gun ports. I’ll list the quantities first, then come back to what the materials are and how to get them.

The materials required vary by ship. For grades 1-4, that is, the small ships, the materials are purchasable in unlimited quantities and in many shipyards. Furthermore, you can buy the blueprints for those ships in unlimited quantities in any shipyard that can build them. For this reason, when trying to level your shipbuilding level, it’s usually best to max your blueprint level in all ships of grades 1-4, at least apart from the golden ships for which you can’t buy the blueprints.

Grades 1-2 require cedar wood, cedar wood masts, and training gun ports. Grades 3-4 require spruce wood, spruce wood masts, and small gun ports.

Materials for most higher grade ships can be purchased in various ports. It generally requires some amount of investment in order to unlock the ability to purchase the parts. Even one the investment is done, you can only purchase a limited amount of each material per port per week. Besides the keel, the other three materials for a given ship grade can be purchased in the same ports.

For each set of materials, I’ll give a table with the required investment to unlock a part (in millions of ducats), the price per item to buy it once it is unlocked, and the quantity that you can buy per week.

I’ll also list the ports where you can buy the items. I know the English names for all ports in Europe or northern Africa, but Google translate botches names of some others, so there is some uncertainty for some of the ports.

First of all, the medium keels require military investment rank 2 in order to purchase. Once that is done, they cost 1.24 million ducats each, and can be purchased in London, Amsterdam, Lisboa, Seville, Constantinople, Abidjan, and Santo Domingo. That is, all of the starting capital cities, plus two other ports.

Grades 5-6 require pine wood, pine masts, and medium gun ports. These are available in London, Amsterdam, Lisboa, Seville, Constantinople, Candia, Bremen, Ceuta, Edinburgh, Casablanca, Abidjan, Luanda, Santo Domingo, and Port Royal.

Grades 7-8 require alder wood, alder wood masts, and improved medium gun ports. These are available in Syracuse, Bergen, Timbuktu, Rio de Janiero, Buenos Aires, Mozambique, Massawa, Baghdad, and Calicut. I’m not entirely certain that I have the right port names for Massawa and Calicut.

Grades 9-10 require beech wood, beech wood masts, and enhanced medium gun ports. These are available in Copenhagen, Beirut, Valparaiso, Lima, Icapa, Suez, Malacca, and Jakarta. Icapa is likely to be the incorrect port name. It might be Cape Town, though that’s not quite the right spot on the map. Regardless, it’s something in modern South Africa. Gun ports require military investment level 4 in the port to unlock rather than personal investment.

Grades 11-12 require rosewood, rosewood masts, and special enhanced medium gun ports. These are available in Venice, Nassau, Porlamar, Merida, Copiapo, Tumbes, Calcutta, Aceh, Palembang, and Manila. Calcutta may be spelled Kolkata, as both spellings seem to exist in English. Aceh is probably the wrong port, but it’s something on northern Sumatra near Aceh. Gun ports require military investment level 7 in the port to unlock rather than personal investment.

Grade 13 requires teak wood, teak wood masts, and large gun ports. These are available in Lubeck, Marseille, Trujillo, Banjarmasin, and Pangkalpinang.

Grade 14 requires walnut wood, walnut wood masts, and improved large gun ports. These are available in Kokkola, Veracruz, Panama, Hanoi, and Okinawa. The port name for Okinawa is likely wrong, but it’s something on that island.

Grade 15 requires ebony wood, ebony wood masts, and enhanced large gun ports. These are not available for purchase in any port.

Every ship has several cabins. All ships have a captain’s cabin, as discussed earlier. In addition to that, there are five different types of cabins. For lack of an in-game name, I’ll call them A, B, C, D, and E. Types A, B, and C allow you to assign a mate to the cabin, in addition to giving some stat bonuses. Types D and E only give stat bonuses, but do not allow you to assign any mate.

There are two major benefits to assigning mates to cabins. One is that it makes the mate active so that he’ll gain experience from the various things that cause you to gain experience as you play the game. The other is that it adds the mate’s personal stats to the ship stats, as well as making his skills available to the ship. For adventuring and trade stats and skills, this generally makes them available to the entire fleet. Combat stats and skills are specific to the ship.

All assignable cabins have some stat rates for adventuring, trade, and combat mates. These are multiplied by a mate’s corresponding type when the mate is assigned to a cabin. You usually want to switch cabins from the default to something that gives 100% for some type of mate, and then assign that type of mate to the cabin.

It’s important to understand that the rate is by type of mate, not by skill. For example, a medium rowing cabin is rated at 100% adventuring, 50% trade, 50% combat. An adventuring mate will apply his full stats of all types, including trade and combat, to the ship. A trade mate will only provide 50% of his stats to the ship, even adventuring. Thus, for this type of cabin, an adventuring mate is likely to contribute higher trade stats than a trade mate of the same grade.

Some cabins are available from the start, while others are available only after you increase your blueprint or understanding level for a ship far enough. I list cabins available from the start as A, B, C, D, or E, and then those that require higher blueprint or understanding level as B+, C+, D+, and E+. The number of cabins per ship, by ship grade:

As you can see, the number of cabins tends to increase as the ship grade does. However, grades 5 and 7 have more assignable cabins at blueprint and understanding level 1 than the other medium ships do. Thus, you may wish to stick with grade 7 ships for a little longer rather than upgrading to grade 8 or 9 ships as soon as you possibly can.

Type B and C cabins have the same options regardless of ship grade, at least up to grade 8. The other cabin types of different options depending on whether you have a small or medium ship. They’re analogous options, but the medium ship options give higher stats.

You can change the cabins from among various options for each type. Changing a cabin on one ship changes all cabins for the same type of ship. For example, if you change a schooner’s old aide’s cabin to an accounting room, that will change the corresponding cabin for all schooners that you have or will build in the future. Schooners have three type C cabins, however, so each of those three must be changed independently.

It typically costs about 10k ducats per ship grade to change a cabin on a small ship, or 100k ducats per ship grade for a medium ship. The exception is that some options for type A cabins cost 10 blue gems per ship grade for a small ship or 20 blue gems per ship grade for a medium ship. Large ships are probably more expensive in both cases, but I haven’t yet seen the price tags.

For type A cabins, the options available depend on whether the ship is an adventuring, trade, or combat ship. Old rudder and old deck are available on all ship types, but the other options all have stat rates of 100%/50%/50%, and cabins with a stat rate of 100% on some mate type are only available for ships of the corresponding type.

I have a list of cabins recorded, but it’s going to be some work to copy it here, so I’ll stop here for now.