Introduction to PotBS production lines

This is a PotBS economy guide explaining the game's basic production lines, the economy being divided into different specializations. While playing the game, you will often hear newbies ask how to craft ships. This guide aims to illustrate how it's impossible to mass produce them by yourself and will help you choose your path. Not your exact production setup but the different production categories available. We will outline the different production lines and suggest how to setup your production if you're alone or in a group of 3.

At first, the economy in this game may seem to have a steep learning curve but it's actually fairly simple. In most other MMORPGs, players aren't limited in the number of tradeskills they can learn which means that you can be nearly self-sufficient. If a high-end item requires sub-combines from 4 different tradeskills, you can make them yourself. In PotBS, however, it is impossible to do all the sub-combines yourself because you're limited to 10 slots per account. Of course, it's a different scenario if you have access to multiple accounts. In that case, simply refer to our section referring to groups of 3.

Producing ships require 4 levels of materials, which explains why you can't mass produce them alone. Think of it like a pyramid. The first layer is raw materials of different sorts: Oak logs, iron ore, limestone, wheat etc. The second layer is manufactured products: combining iron ore and limestone to make iron ingots, combining oak logs to make beams and so on. The third layer is finished products such as hulls, provisions. And finally when you have all the required finished products you can combine them with some basic / manufactured products like sulfur and hemp rope to produce ships.

As you can expect, producing everything, starting from raw materials, would require much more than 10 slots. This is why you have two choices:

• Specializing, producing sub-combines and selling them at a profit.
• Focusing on the top-tier of the pyramid, producing ships after buying sub-combines someone else made.

The PotBS economy production specializations

There are 4 large specialization categories (which include the raw materials):

• Iron products: cannons, ammunitions, anchors, nails, ballasts, etc.
• Wood and sails: hulls, planks, sails, fillin-frames, transoms.
• Provisions: Provisioning, rum, wine, wheat flour, barrels.
• Shipyard combiner: Ships, hulls, mostly.

Iron Products

In this PotBS production lines guide, we would like to argue that Iron is the backbone of the economy. The need for iron is massive because crafting pretty much anything requires a large quantity of iron. Ships require plenty of cannons of all sizes. This is an excellent specialization for players who don't want to spend much time crafting while making good money.

The main advantage is that it's very simple and quick. You can either focus on making iron ingots to resell, or you can focus on making cannons. This build requires four types of buildings:

• Iron mines to produce iron ore (240 per day each)
• Limestone quarries to produce limestone, needed in the iron ingot combine (60 per day each)
• Forge needed to produce iron ingots as well as nails, anchors and some others shipwright items
• Weaponsmith required for all cannons and for ammunitions

Your strategy is simple. You go to the warehouse where you have your iron mines, you extract iron ore, cargo it to your main warehouse where you have limestone quarries, forges and weaponsmith. Then you combine them and make profit. That's all there is to it, it's that simple.

Wood and sails

This second specialization focuses on wood products and on sails. It's another relatively simple production line which means that it's perfect for players who don't really care about the game's economy. On the other hand, it's not as popular as iron because the uses are more specialized. While everyone needs iron ore, fewer people need transoms and frame-filings. That doesn't mean those aren't profitable, because they are. You just won't sell as quickly as you would sell iron ingots.

For this specialization, you have the choice between selling subcombines like planks and stuff like that or crafting all the way up to hulls. I highly recommend building hulls because you get added value and since that requires a shipyard, you'll be able to buy the materials you don't produce yourself and make batches of ships. This is the main advantage to this build. The disadvantage is that you need to buy every materials from the other specializations which means an inflated price. It requires four types of buildings:

• Logging Camps (oak, teak, ironweed, fir) to produce logs
• Lumber Mills to manufacture those raw logs
• Textile mills to produce sails
• Shipyard to transform all the materials into hulls

Provisioner

This is arguably the most complicated production line. It requires many types of raw materials so you can't streamline it like iron production and only have one type of mine and one type of quarry. On the other hand, you can produce provisions for about 1500 doubloons and sell them consistently for 4000-8000 depending on the server's economy (it was the case throughout beta). With such a high percentage of profit, you will have enough savings to buy whatever you need.

There are a couple different variations to this build. Some players choose to sell rum exclusively, others only do wine, some do a combination of many sub-combines. In our case, since we're group oriented, our Provisionner doesn't do all the sub-combines since we need a large amount of provisions each day. This means abandonning low value raw materials and the buildings that produce them, such as Plantations (General). The reasoning is that these require 4 hours of labor to produce abundant quantities of low-cost items which have a small market. You can usually buy these cheaply on the auction house if you're willing to travel, so there's no point in occupying 2-3 slots. Since not many players buy beans and crap like that, you can get them on the AH dirt cheap.

Because of the multiple different paths you can choose, we choose not to give specific details about each of them in this economy guide. They will be available in another section of the website. However, these are some of the main buildings in the production lines:

• Provisioner, which has the Pack Ship Provision
• Rum distillery, to make rum
• 
  
• Plantation (General) to make wheat, maize, beans, cattles

In a group of 3 or more, they'll be expecting at least 12 provisions per day so you will want to avoid as many of the raw materials as possible. Again, buy from the auction house. One of the problems we've seen is a lack of affordable wheat and wheat flour. A ghetto solution actually works well : freetraders can trade in 10 small pennants for 24 wheat flour. You can attack fleets of low level enemies and quickly earn enough to get a decent amount.

Shipyard combiner

This last specialisation needs to be taken into account both for the solo player and the organized production line. It's the player who will combine all the sub-parts provided by his teamates. At low levels, this assignment isn't required because small shipyards only take 1 slot. On the other hand, larger ones require multiple slots. This player is in charge of assembling all the materials required for hulls, and then comining all the combines into batches of ships.

As a solo player, this is a very expensive but very fun specialization. It costs a lot because you have to pay for lots of materials, all of which include the profit the sellers took. The major advantage though is that not only are you keeping every doubloon of profit for yourself, you're totally self-sufficient. Whether you're in need of a popular ship or some noone else makes, you'll always be able to do it by yourself. Of course this freedom of choice comes at a price: your profit on each sale is much smaller than if you're in a group building from the ground up.

Aside from iron ingots, since you need forges anyway, you will only focus on the top tier combines. This means ignoring all of the raw material buildings such as mines, quarries, logging camps, plantations etc. At low levels, these are the buildings you will need:

• 2 forges to make iron ingots, anchors, ballasts etc
• 1 weaponsmith to make cannons
• 2 lumber mills to craft wooden products
• 1 textile mill to produce sails
• 1 provisioner to make provisionings
• 1 shipyard (small takes 1 slot, medium takes 2 slots, large takes 3 slots)

Conclusion to PotBS economy production lines guide

This concludes this introduction guide. As you could see, as a rule of thumb it's generally preferable avoiding raw materials. While they're needed, they have low value and all the people who aren't reading guides like these have no idea they aren't worth producing. We'd rather pay 2 doubloons per "Logs, common wood" than waste a slot for it! We're convinced you do too. Focus on the value-added combines and you will strike it rich in the game Pirates of the Burning Sea. For specific details about very specialized one man production lines (such as rum or leather making), you'll be able to view another section of PotBSMatey with that information soon.