A shipyard is a building at a colony where ships and ground defenses are built. Each shipyard adds military space to the colony and reduces the proportion of the other development indexes.


Click shipyard from the colony homepage, then select a shipyard from the secondary menu. Idle ship yards appear at the top of the list. Use the dropdown menu to choose which ship design you would like to build.


Same procedure as for ships but note that Ground Defenses take a lot longer to build than ships due to the paperwork involved in planning permissions.


The number of workers at the particular shipyard you choose, the number of vessels to build, and its efficiency vs the mass of the design, determine the construction speed of the construction project at that shipyard.

The Military Development Index further reduces production time.


The Industrial Index can reduce production cost.


A shipyard can only operate if you have enough people on the colony available for the job. About 25% of your colony needs to be available for tasks other than ship construction so the effective number of available workers will be 75% of your population minus any number of workers already working on shipyard projects.


All ships you own cost a daily upkeep. While part of that upkeep goes to the crew and as such only applies to fleeted ships, even mothballed ones incur maintenance cost. You can view your upkeep cost in the shipyard or the command center fleet view.

You can click the "Buy Resources" button just like in Construction, to pre-fill the order for potentially missing materials at an available trade outpost.