Corsair Cove Route Efficiency Checklist

Use this checklist while playing the Corsair Cove demo or planning a full-game restart. Work top to bottom; skip a step and red routes usually return once population scales. For context on why logistics dominate the demo experience, read Demo First Impressions first.

How to use this checklist

Pause the game or open this page on a second monitor. Each section ends with a pass/fail gate. If you fail any gate, fix it before unlocking the next production tier or assigning more specialists.

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Section 1 — Read route colors correctly

Corsair Cove visualizes hauler efficiency with colored connection lines between buildings.

• Identify every red route on your island. Red means travel time is high enough to bottleneck chains — previewers consistently report red as “downright problematic,” not a cosmetic warning.
• Audit yellow routes on food, planks, and rum. Yellow is acceptable for low-priority goods but risky for galleys and high-throughput sawmills.
• Prioritize green routes for stew ingredients, plank output, and anything feeding multiple consumers.
• Trace routes from source to warehouse, not from tavern to warehouse. Finished goods and raw materials originate at production buildings; routing from the wrong node creates false “efficiency” that collapses when demand spikes.

Gate: Zero red routes on food, plank, or rum chains feeding your main camp.

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Section 2 — Pirate camp range and connectivity

Buildings must maintain valid connections to a pirate camp — your original base or an established satellite camp — or goods stop flowing. This rule is easy to break during redesigns.

• Confirm every production building shows a connected path back to a camp.
• After any demolition, rebuild camp links before assigning new specialists.
• Place satellite camps before sprawl pushes harvest sites beyond practical range.
• Check zipline and bridge endpoints — a broken middle segment orphaning a cliff-side still counts as disconnected even if icons look adjacent.
• Avoid “islands” of housing without production links; pirates generate visual clutter connections you may need to delete manually.

Gate: Click each major chain building and verify camp connectivity in the UI before adding a third warehouse.

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Section 3 — Warehouse placement

Warehouses buffer goods between production and consumption. Poor placement is the most common source of demo restarts.

• Place warehouses near outputs, not near taverns or decorative clusters.
• One warehouse per dense production cluster beats one central mega-depot spanning cliffs.
• Route finished goods shortest path: still → warehouse → galley, not still → distant warehouse → backtracking galley.
• Separate low-priority storage (moonshine overflow) from stew-critical storage if distances force yellow routes.
• Rebuild warehouses when you relocate sawmills or farms — moving production without moving depots recreates red routes instantly.

Gate: No hauler crosses more than one major elevation change for staple goods unless a zipline or pulley shortens the path.

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Section 4 — Galley and tavern connections

Galleys feed crew morale and productivity; taverns tie into Notoriety progression. Both are consumption sinks that punish bad upstream routing.

• Connect galleys on green or yellow routes to food and stew sources.
• Verify rum or booze lines if taverns support Notoriety milestones.
• Count galley coverage — multiple camps may need dedicated feed lines rather than one cross-island stew haul.
• Assign enough haulers after galley upgrades; building upgrades without route upgrades causes invisible starvation.
• Check Wealth tree goals that reward efficient galley routes; use them as objective benchmarks.

Gate: Crew mood panels show stable food and drink supply during a population increase.

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Section 5 — Vertical connectors (bridges, ziplines, pulleys)

Corsair Cove’s cliff terrain makes connectors mandatory, not optional cosmetics.

• Add a vertical shortcut wherever red routes appear across elevation gaps.
• Prefer direct lifts over long ramp switchbacks when hauler count is limited.
• Unlock ziplines from the tech tree before sprawling to distant iron or fiber deposits.
• Avoid redundant parallel routes — multiple yellow paths to the same warehouse confuse troubleshooting.
• Test connectors after storms or combat if future patches add disruption; note baseline paths now.

Gate: Every cliff-separated production pair has an intentional connector, not an accidental long walk.

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Section 6 — Pre-scale review (before naval unlock)

• Run the checklist again at double your starting population.
• Delete superfluous housing connections that create visual noise and extra hauler trips.
• Snapshot layouts (screenshot or save) before naval missions pull specialists away.
• Cross-check Updates for demo patches that tweak hauler speed or camp rules.

Final gate: Stable production during a manual “stress day” — pause assignments, then unpause with all chains running.

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When to restart vs repair

If more than three staple chains stay red after two connector passes, a controlled restart often beats hours of patchwork. Corsair Cove’s demo is short enough that learning from a clean layout is cheaper than rescuing a sprawl. See Tools hub for future layout templates after launch.