The Great Works
All 14 wonders, the build-then-cooldown pacing that makes them a deliberate long-game commitment, and a build order that actually pays off.
Wonders are the big one-of-a-kind megaprojects — each a single purchase you can never own two copies of. There are exactly 14 unique wonders in the catalog; the catalog itself is your ceiling, not something you stack indefinitely.
The catalog
| Wonder | Cost | Effect |
|---|---|---|
| Museum of the Drift | $25,000,000 | +3.0 happiness, plus a dynamic income bonus that grows with your unique recovered artifacts |
| Beacon Eternal | $80,000,000 | +2.0 happiness, +3% income |
| Hanging Kelp Gardens | $95,000,000 | +2.5 happiness, +80,000 food/tide |
| Desalination Cathedral | $110,000,000 | +2.2 happiness, +90,000 water/tide |
| The Salvage Spire | $120,000,000 + 3,000× your strength | +1.5 happiness, +4% income |
| Storm Wall | $135,000,000 | +1.8 happiness |
| Moonpool Observatory · Drifting | $140,000,000 | +3.5 happiness — expires after 60 tides |
| The Drowned Archive | $160,000,000 | +2.0 happiness, +2% income |
| Mars Relay Buoy · Drifting | $170,000,000 | +15% income — expires after 60 tides |
| Grand Bazaar | $190,000,000 | +8% income |
| Leviathan Drydock | $210,000,000 | −12% bills |
| Brine Exchange | $230,000,000 | +10% income |
| Deepwater Reactor | $280,000,000 | +12% income, +5% bills, +35,000 water/tide |
| The Convergence Engine · Capstone | $800,000,000 + 6,000× your strength | +4.0 happiness, +10% income, −5% bills, +45,000 food/tide, +45,000 water/tide |
Two wonders — Moonpool Observatory and Mars Relay Buoy — are Drifting: they expire after 60 tides and remove themselves from your owned catalog, which is what makes them the only two wonders you can ever rebuy. Every other wonder, once owned, is permanent.
The pacing rules
- Building takes 7 tides. Buying a wonder charges the full price up front and lays the keel — none of its effects, its tile, or any expiry clock start until it actually finishes 7 real tides later.
- The cooldown is 60 tides, and it starts at completion, not purchase. That's one new wonder roughly every 67 tides at the fastest possible pace — a deliberate, spaced-out commitment, never something you stack or rush.
- You cannot own duplicates. Buying a wonder you already own is refused outright.
- Only the two Drifting wonders ever expire and can be rebuilt. Every other wonder is permanent once it graduates.
Working through the math: owning all 14 unique wonders back-to-back at the fastest legal pace takes roughly 878 tides, assuming affordability was never the constraint (the base costs alone sum to over $2.7 billion, before the two strength-scaled wonders' variable premium on top). Past that point, a maximalist can only keep cycling the two Drifting wonders through their 60-tide cooldown — a genuine long-game project, not a mid-game checklist. In practice, affordability is the constraint that actually binds — but it's a reachable one, not a whale-only wall. In our 20-commander playthrough, played under a growth-first solvency doctrine, the first wonder (the $25 million Museum of the Drift) laid its keel around day 842 — roughly 2.3 years into a disciplined economy — and by the end of the run four flotillas had one graduated, with three more sitting within a single purchase of their next. Treat your first wonder as a long-game trophy earned by steady growth, not a mid-game step, and not an unreachable one either — a commander who spends down their ledger chasing military or festivals before their income can sustain both will simply never get there.
Upkeep
Every wonder you own costs $250,000/tide in upkeep, flat, forever — and that bill grows with every completion, not just how many you have standing at once. A wonder has to earn its keep: don't buy one your ledger can't sustain just because the cooldown finally cleared.
A suggested build order for a growing city
Percentage-income wonders (Mars Relay Buoy +15%, Convergence Engine +10%, Brine Exchange +10%) scale with your flotilla's size and compound over every tide that follows — the earlier one lands, the more total value it produces over a campaign. Flat-yield wonders (Hanging Kelp Gardens' +80,000 food, Desalination Cathedral's +90,000 water) are worth relatively more to a mid-game flotilla whose provisioning margin is still tight than to a megacity already producing millions of units per tide from tech-scaled production buildings. The general shape worth following: sequence flat-yield wonders before percentage-income ones, mirroring the same lesson as the housing multipliers in Population — a multiplier is worth more the earlier it lands, since it compounds over more remaining tides. Save the Convergence Engine, the capstone, for when your economy can genuinely absorb its scale.
The Museum's artifact-driven income
Museum of the Drift is the one wonder without a fixed percentage-income figure — its income bonus is dynamic, scaling with how many unique archaeological artifacts you've recovered from wreck expeditions (duplicates give bragging rights, not more money), capped once your collection is deep enough. Build it early to start banking the collection, or late once you've already amassed a meaningful haul from expeditions — either way, it's the one wonder whose real value depends on a system outside itself.