Workers are hireable camp specialists in Windrose who improve a matching station after being assigned at base. The current live set consists of four named station workers, Rosalinda Mercer, Jasper Crowe, Black Axel, and Mortar Joe, plus the Farming Contractor, who uses a different hiring system and automates crops rather than boosting a normal craft station.
How Hiring Works
Travel to the worker's home settlement or vendor.
Pay the required currency, 500 Piastres for the four named workers or 10 gold coins for the Farming Contractor.
Return to your base.
Open the relevant station and assign the worker through the station interface.
Hiring alone is not enough. A worker's perk only turns on after that worker is assigned to the correct station.
Named Workers
Worker | Location | Cost | Assigned To | Confirmed Effect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
500 Piastres | Doubles Clay Bottle production and has a 30% chance to craft an extra elixir | |||
500 Piastres | 30% chance to recover resources spent on upgrades | |||
500 Piastres | 30% chance to craft an extra portion of food | |||
500 Piastres | Boosts gunpowder production at the Millstones |
Farming Contractor
The Farming Contractor is not one of the normal 500-Piastre station workers. It is purchased from the Recruitment Vendor in Tortuga for 10 gold coins and runs timed crop jobs from the base farming bench.
Each job uses 50 seeds of one crop and 20 silver coins.
Jobs run for about 8 hours of real time.
The contractor returns the input seeds along with the harvested crop output.
The cycle continues while the player is offline.
Best Early Hiring Order
Rosalinda Mercer if alchemy and healing supplies are already part of the base loop.
Jasper Crowe if armor upgrading is the immediate bottleneck.
Black Axel once cooking becomes a regular prep step before bosses and long sails.
Farming Contractor for players who want passive crop income between sessions.
Mortar Joe once gunpowder production becomes routine rather than occasional.
Worker Limits
Workers stay at base. They are not field companions and do not join ship crews.
Each worker is tied to one station type only.
The more often a matching station is used, the more value the worker returns.
See Also
Worker Locations at a Glance
Rosalinda Mercer and Jasper Crowe are the easiest pair to pick up on the same Tortuga visit because both are town-side hires with the same Piastre cost.
Black Axel is part of the Tortuga-side economy but physically stands at the People of Tortuga main base rather than in Tortuga proper.
Mortar Joe is the outlier among the named workers because he belongs to the Brethren of the Coast hub.
Farming Contractor comes from the Recruitment Vendor instead of a named worker NPC and uses gold coins rather than Piastres.
Why Assignment Matters
The worker system only pays off if the camp loop already exists. Rosalinda Mercer is strongest once the player is regularly making bottles and elixirs. Jasper Crowe becomes more valuable the longer an upgrade stretch lasts. Black Axel depends on the player treating cooked food as a real preparation step rather than an occasional convenience craft. Mortar Joe only starts returning steady value once Gunpowder is part of the normal combat or ship loop.
Named Workers Versus the Farming Contractor
The four named workers improve an existing station. The Farming Contractor is different: it runs its own long-duration crop job. That makes the contractor a lifestyle tool for players who log off between harvest cycles, while the named workers are pure efficiency multipliers on activities the player is already doing manually.
Choose Rosalinda Mercer if alchemy is the current bottleneck.
Choose Jasper Crowe if the current bottleneck is upgrade material drain.
Choose Black Axel if cooking is already part of every expedition or boss setup.
Choose Farming Contractor if the goal is passive crop generation between sessions.
Choose Mortar Joe once the camp is already producing gunpowder often enough for the Millstones bonus to matter.
Notable Workers
Most workers pay back their 500 Piastre hire fee within a handful of crafts, but a small group stand out because their bonuses compound the most over a full campaign. Players who skip these in the early game often regret the missed savings later, since the bonuses scale with how often the matching station is used. Hire the matching station's worker before any extended grind, not after.
Worker | Cumulative Effect |
|---|---|
30% chance to refund all materials spent on an armor upgrade. Because each tier of upgrades takes many crafts per piece across all five slots, hiring Jasper before a long upgrade stretch saves a large amount of resource grinding over the course of the campaign. | |
30% chance to produce an extra elixir or potion per alchemy craft, plus doubled clay bottle output. Stockpiles roughly grow faster than the listed rate would suggest, since both bottles and elixirs are bottlenecked together in normal play. | |
Increases gunpowder production at the Millstones by +50%. Critical for sniper or firearm builds that burn through powder per fight, and for ship combat loops that consume cannon shot. | |
30% chance to craft an extra portion of food at the Cooking Fire. Effectively turns prep cooking before bosses or long sails into a duplication loop, so kitchen runs go further per ingredient stack. |
Of these, Jasper Crowe and Rosalinda Mercer are the two most universally recommended early hires. Both stand on the same Tortuga visit, both cost 500 Piastre, and both target craft loops nearly every player runs many times across a 60-plus hour playthrough. The materials saved on armor upgrades alone usually outweigh the hire cost within the first tier of upgrades.
Assigning Workers
Hiring a worker from a provisioner puts the NPC on the camp roster, but it does not turn the bonus on by itself. To activate the perk, return to your base, walk up to the matching craft station, and open the station's interface. Each station's UI exposes a Worker tab alongside the recipe list. Open that tab and select the matching worker to bind them to the station.
Each worker locks to one station type only, so the Worker tab on the Anvil will list only workers that are valid for the anvil, and the same is true for the Millstones, the Cooking Fire, the Alchemy Table, and the Upgrading Station. A worker that has been hired but not yet assigned to a station will sit idle at base and contribute nothing, which is a common reason new players report that their bonus does not seem to work after a successful hire.
Reassignment is allowed: revisit the station's Worker tab to swap which hired worker is currently active there. Most players will only ever fill one slot per station, but the option to swap is useful when a higher-tier worker is unlocked later in the campaign or when a different perk fits a temporary objective like a long gunpowder run before a sea siege.
Quick checklist after a fresh hire: travel back to base, find the right station, open it, click the Worker tab, pick the worker by name, then leave the station. The bonus is live the next time you craft at that station.