Corsair Cove: building costs, outputs and hub scores

The wiki’s building tables tell you what a building costs to construct and what it produces per minute. (One frequently-asked exception to the “blank Effect” principal-building rows further down: the Great Lighthouse’s own page states its effect outright — reduces Crew Upkeep by 50% — though it doesn’t say whether that stacks if you build more than one; see the dedicated section below.) What the tables don’t tell you is which buildings actually matter to your wider economy — a building whose output feeds six other production lines is a different investment decision than one whose output goes straight to storage. That’s the join this page adds: for each of Corsair Cove’s 77 production buildings, drawn from the Corsair Cove Wiki’s Buildings page and its List of buildings sub-page (restructured into per-category tables on 7 August 2026), read on 22 August 2026 against game version 1.1.4.242868 (Patch #4, 18 August 2026), we count how many other buildings consume its output as an ingredient, turning a flat spec sheet into a dependency ranking. This is the publisher’s own wiki — a semi-primary source — so building costs and outputs may drift from what you see in a live save if a balance patch changes them after this read.

How the hub score is computed

For every production building, we take its listed output resource(s) and check every other building’s input list for a match. A building’s hub score is the number of distinct other buildings that need its output to run. Woodcutter produces Hardwood and nothing else, but Hardwood feeds into Cooper (Barrel), Hardwood Workshop (Wooden Awl), Sawmill (Planks), Tar Kiln (Tar), Master Carver (Figurehead), Master Shipwright (Silver Lining), Limb Maker (Prosthesis), Copper Smith (Copper Lamp) and Charburner (Charcoal) — nine separate downstream buildings, more than any other single production building in the game. Of the 77 production buildings, 39 have a hub score of 0 (their output is a finished good nothing else consumes), and only 13 have a hub score of 3 or higher — the small set of buildings that function as chokepoints for the entire economy.

Hub ranking: the buildings everything else depends on

Notice that 8 of these 13 hub buildings produce raw or near-raw materials with no input at all (Woodcutter, Quarry, Leafcutter, Lime Kiln, Herbalist, and — one tier down — Cistern needs nothing either). That means the highest-leverage buildings in Corsair Cove are mostly the cheapest, simplest ones to build: Woodcutter costs nothing at all in the wiki’s Building Cost column (None), Quarry costs 25 Planks, and Cistern costs 20 Planks. The economy’s real chokepoints aren’t its expensive end-product buildings — they’re a handful of unlocked-early, near-free extraction buildings whose output every other chain quietly depends on. If one of these nine goes down (destroyed in a raid, or simply outpaced by demand), the failure cascades into every building on this list downstream of it, which is the practical reason to duplicate Woodcutter, Charburner and Cistern before scaling into depth-3/depth-4 goods (see the chain depth matrix for which resources sit that deep).

Full production building matrix (all 77)

One caveat on two specific rows above: Patch #5 (v1.1.5.244734, 3 September 2026) fixed a bug described in its own changelog as “Fixed the ‘Iron Mine’ and ‘Iron Caster’ buildings requiring hardwood instead of planks for construction.” The wiki’s Iron Caster page (last edited 30 July 2026) and Iron Mine page (last edited 12 August 2026) (read 2026-08-22, pre-patch), already list the Building Cost as Planks + Stone Blocks in the table above, matching what the patch made the live game do — so this table should already reflect the post-Patch #5 state, but since our read predates the patch we can’t confirm the live game matched the wiki before 3 September. This bug was about construction cost material only; Iron Caster’s production Input/Output (4 Iron Ore + 4 Charcoal → 8 Cast Iron) wasn’t named in the changelog.

One row is worth calling out on its own: Sawmill’s Building Cost is listed as 10 Hardwood while its Input requirement is 4 Hardwood — the only production building in the set whose construction cost and running input are drawn from the same resource it doesn’t itself produce. Every other Materials building either costs Planks/Stone Blocks or nothing at all.

Two buildings — Tinkerer and Spyglass Maker — both produce Spyglass from different input mixes (2 Tools + 2 Lime vs. 8 Lens + 4 Leather); the wiki lists them as separate production buildings rather than one recipe with two paths, which we’ve preserved here rather than merging, since the game apparently treats them as distinct build options.

Great Lighthouse: what it actually does

One capstone building gets asked about often enough to answer directly, since the joined table below leaves it blank: the Great Lighthouse’s own wiki page (not the List of buildings summary table) states its effect in one line — “reduces Crew Upkeep by 50%.” That page does not say whether the 50% reduction stacks if you build more than one Great Lighthouse, whether it is capped at one per island, or whether it applies to Hand upkeep, Crew upkeep, or both categories the wiki tracks separately elsewhere (see the crew upkeep matrix for that split). We checked the building’s individual page directly (read 2026-09-13, last wiki edit 3 August 2026) rather than guess — a build-limit or stacking rule isn’t stated there, so treat it as unconfirmed rather than assuming either answer.

Principal (unlockable, non-production) buildings

Separate from the 77 production buildings, 30 more buildings unlock through Compass progression (see the progression path comparison for the point costs) and don’t produce a resource — they’re capacity, cosmetic, or functional buildings tied to Notoriety, Empire, Seafaring or Wealth thresholds:

Every single one of these 30 rows has a blank “Effect” cell in the wiki’s List of buildings summary table specifically — confirmed by checking the raw table structure directly (the cell renders as an empty icon slot, not missing text). That is not the same as “undocumented,” though: we checked two of the 30 buildings’ own individual wiki pages directly (Great Lighthouse and Salvage Dock, both read 2026-09-13) and both do state a one-line effect there — Great Lighthouse reduces Crew Upkeep by 50%, Salvage Dock reduces ship construction and repair costs by 20%. We have not checked the other 28 individually, so we can’t say the whole column is empty at the source, only that the joined summary table the rest of this section draws from leaves it blank. What is verifiable from the cost column alone: the four Tier-5 (20-point) capstone buildings — Military Fortress, Ocean Colosseum, Great Lighthouse, Golden Palace — all cost either 1000-2000 Coins plus Stone Blocks/Tabby, roughly 2-4x the Coin cost of any Tier-3 building, and every path’s cheapest two unlocks (its Banner at 3 points, costing only 10 Coins) are effectively free compared to everything else on this list.

What the 30 principal buildings don’t say about themselves

• What any of the 30 principal buildings actually do. The wiki’s Effect column is blank for all 30 rows as of this read — we can report the unlock cost and requirement, not the function.
• Production cycle time (seconds per batch) for any of the 77 production buildings. The wiki states per-minute rates only; whether Woodcutter produces 8 Hardwood in one large batch or eight small ones per minute is not specified.
• Whether “Downstream buildings” as computed here matches in-game UI labeling. We derived hub score purely from matching output resource names to input resource names across the two tables; the game itself may or may not surface this as a stat to players.
• Balance changes since the 2026-08-22 read. Patch #4 (18 August) predates our read, but any patch after that date could change these costs; check the patch timeline tracker for what’s shipped since.

Sources

• Buildings and List of buildings (restructured into per-category sub-pages 2026-08-07), Corsair Cove Official Wiki (Hooded Horse), read 2026-08-22.
• Game version at time of read: 1.1.4.242868 (Patch #4, 18 August 2026).
• Great Lighthouse and Salvage Dock, Corsair Cove Official Wiki — individual building pages, last edited 3 August 2026, read 2026-09-13.
• Patch #5: Auto-Trading, Ship Repairs, Event Improvements and More, Steam news, appid 1368140 (3 September 2026), read 2026-09-13 — Iron Mine/Iron Caster construction-cost fix quoted above.

Related

• Corsair Cove: all 77 resources ranked by chain depth
• Corsair Cove profit-per-minute vs. cohesion tradeoff
• Compass progression paths compared
• Corsair Cove patch timeline tracker
• Everything else we have on Corsair Cove