5.4 Hull Materials

Ships in Letters of Marque are not bought as finished stat blocks. They are built from parts, and the material chosen for each part contributes to what the finished ship becomes. Two hulls of the same class can differ noticeably because they were built from different woods.

5.4.1 The woods

The market and crafting interfaces organise shipbuilding materials into five kinds:

• Teak
• Mahogany
• Cedar
• Pine
• Exotic

These are categories rather than a single tree species each, and materials also carry a rarity, so “a piece of teak” is not always interchangeable with another. Availability is part of the design: what you can build depends on what the local market and your warehouse actually hold.

5.4.2 The six components

Material is not chosen once for the whole ship. It is chosen per component, and the game recognises six:

Two of these deserve a second look.

Frame and planking are separate choices. A ship’s ability to resist penetration and its ability to hold together under punishment are not the same property, and they are specified independently. This is a real decision, not a formality.

Crew is a component. It sits in the same list as the timber, which fits a game that models crew capacity, boarding attack and defence, and musket fire. Crew is part of the ship’s specification, not a number that comes free with the hull.

5.4.3 How materials reach the stat sheet

Material choice does not appear as its own line on the ship’s Stats tab. It arrives folded into the figures already there: protection, sail and mast durability, handling, and the rest. The way to evaluate a material decision is therefore the same as evaluating equipment — look at what the resulting statistics do, using the preview described in Refits & Equipment.

Expect trade-offs rather than upgrades. A material that improves one property will generally cost you something elsewhere, and stacking several sources of the same bonus may return less than the arithmetic suggests. A ship built to maximise a single number is rarely the ship you want to sail.

5.4.4 Finding materials in port

Shipbuilding materials are traded like any other goods. The market separates Woods from Crafting supplies, Ingredients, and finished Products, and complete Hulls are a category of their own — so you can buy a ship outright or assemble one from parts.

Because stock and price vary by port, material availability is a genuine constraint on what you can build and where. A build that is easy in one port may be impractical in another, which is one of the forces that makes goods worth moving. See Port UI for working the market and crafting panels.

5.4.5 Choosing materials

1. Decide the ship’s job before choosing any material.
2. Identify which components matter most for that job — planking and frame for a ship expected to take fire, masts and keel for one expected to run.
3. Check what the local market and your warehouse actually contain, including rarity.
4. Preview the result and read the Stats tab instead of trusting a reputation.
5. Sail it before committing to the same specification again.

The materials are how a hull class becomes your ship. Treat the choice as design work, not shopping.