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Ship Design: Frigate is the blueprint item for the Frigate hull in Windrose. It is sold by the Brethren of the Coast Provisioner at Reputation Rank 4 for 3,000 Piastres. Sometimes shortened to "Ship Design: Frig" in community writeups; the in-game item name is Ship Design: Frigate.

Purchase Details

Design vs. Craftable Ship

As with the Brig design, purchasing the Frigate design only unlocks the recipe. Crafting the Frigate requires Cursed Swamps-tier materials including Mire Metal Ingot. Players who buy the design before clearing the Cursed Swamps typically cannot build the ship until deep into the late game.

Frigate Specs (Stock Variant)

The Frigate is the largest of the three playable ship classes. Its combat role is ship-of-the-line fleet engagement rather than quick scouting: the hull is slow but carries enough firepower and crew capacity to handle 1v2 or 1v3 fleet actions.

Strategic Note

Do not buy Ship Design: Frigate before verifying you can reliably farm Cursed Swamps materials. At 3,000 Piastres, it is the single most expensive blueprint in the game, and the design sits idle in inventory until the materials are available. Most players hold the 3,000 Piastres as a Cursed Swamps priority unlock and push other faction content first.

See Also

• Brethren of the Coast — vendor faction

• Ship Types — full ship progression

• Ship Design: Brig — earlier tier

• Shipwright's Workshop — crafting station

• Mire Metal Ingot — primary material gate

Why Upgrade to Frigate

Community guides consistently describe the Frigate as the late-game combat ship, not the mid-game cruising option. The single most cited reason for the upgrade is heavy cannon access. Frigate hulls can mount the heaviest cannon weight classes in the game; the starter Ketch and the mid-game Brig are weight-gated into smaller cannons with lower per-shot damage.

The jump from 24-pounder to 36-pounder broadsides is not just a numerical damage bump. Larger cannons mean each broadside volley does more hull damage per pass, which translates into fewer rotations around a target to reach the boarding threshold. In fleet engagements where multiple enemy ships are firing at you simultaneously, reducing the time-to-boarding on the flagship is often what keeps your hull alive long enough to finish the fight.

Heavy Cannon Access

The weight-class progression is enforced by hull limits. Full details are in Cannon Types, but the summary:

Only Frigate-class hulls can carry 36-pounder broadsides without overweight penalties. Attempting to mount 36-pounders on a Brig (or 24-pounders on a Ketch) either refuses outright or applies a sluggishness penalty that cancels out the damage benefit. The Frigate unlocks the top cannon tier; the blueprint is therefore the gate that separates mid-game damage output from late-game damage output.

Starter Ship Is Not Enough

The Ketch starter ship is intentionally outmatched by late-game enemies. Community reports confirm that an unupgraded Ketch cannot reliably trade broadsides with level 4-plus Transport Ships, Interceptors, or Blackbeard Brigs. Even with fully upgraded 12-pounders, the weight-class damage ceiling keeps the Ketch below the per-pass damage needed to reach boarding threshold before the enemy sinks you.

The practical sequence most players follow is: Ketch (tutorial through early Blackbeard Transport fights), Brig (mid-game after the first Foothills expedition), Frigate (once Cursed Swamps materials are reliably farmable). Skipping the Brig and trying to stay in the Ketch until Frigate materials arrive is technically possible but sacrifices weeks of real-time grinding because every mid-game fight takes significantly longer without the Brig's 24-pounder broadside.

Material Requirements as Progress Signal

Buying Ship Design: Frigate before you can reliably farm Cursed Swamps Mire Metal Ingot locks 3,000 piastres into an item you cannot use. The same signal that applies to the Wharf upgrade flow applies here: if the recipe asks for a material you have never seen, that is the game telling you to progress further in the story first. Push the Cursed Swamps main-quest path, confirm you can reach the material node reliably, and only then commit the piastres to the blueprint.

Players who buy the design early and then struggle with Cursed Swamps often end up re-farming the full 3,000 piastres later because the in-world economy pushes them into other spending priorities (Naval Tactics from the Smugglers at rank 3, faction-variant cannons from the Buccaneers at rank 2) before the Mire Metal farm becomes sustainable.

Frigate Crew and Tactic Slots

The Frigate gets the highest number of Naval Tactics slots of any ship class and the largest NPC crew capacity for boarding. Because tactics are whole-ship passives, more slots means more stacked passives; because crew capacity scales with hull, the Frigate can board tougher ships and sustain the melee phase against larger enemy crews. The Ketch and Brig are acceptable damage platforms, but the Frigate is the only hull where all three upgrade pillars (cannon weight class, tactic slot count, crew capacity) hit their ceiling simultaneously.