Dreadmoor Crafting & Upgrades Overview

Your trawler is DREADMOOR's progression hub. Official material confirms a full crafting-and-upgrades loop: salvage materials and fish resources go in, equipment and ship improvements come out. This page is the combined overview — the dedicated pages carry each half in depth.

The short version of how the two halves meet: scavenging and fishing feed the same workbench economy, the workbench arms the fisher, and the dry dock armors the boat that makes every next expedition possible. Upgrades are not cosmetic here — the official dev diary calls the trawler your survival lifeline, and every module on it exists to push a little farther from the safe zones and get back.

How crafting fits the loop

Official descriptions chain crafting directly into survival: salvaged materials, blueprints, and fish resources are the inputs; bait, lures, medicines, tools, and ship upgrades are the outputs. Fishing is the resource engine, scavenging is the other half, and the workbench is where both pay off.

Exact recipes, material lists, and workbench tiers are not published and will be verified in the October 6, 2026 demo — the crafting guide tracks them.

Confirmed trawler upgrades

Official demo news names four trawler upgrades and one upgrade system. These are safe to plan around:

Upgrade	What official material says
Hull Armour Mk I	A confirmed hull upgrade — the "Mk I" naming implies a series.
Engine variants	Multiple engines exist; exact stats are unconfirmed.
Fish storage upgrade	Increases how much a trip can bring home.
Roof-mounted lantern	Supports night operation — and nights are dangerous.
Ship Upgrade Skill Tree	A confirmed progression track for the ship itself.

How these upgrades are acquired (purchase, blueprint crafting, or quest reward) is not confirmed — the boat upgrades guide tracks every lead.

The shared currency: torn pages

One collectible funds both halves of this page. Torn pages found while exploring unlock bait recipes on the Fishing Skill Tree and buy ship upgrades on the Ship Upgrade Skill Tree — playtest footage shows pages purchasing hull protection and an upgraded engine, and the same pages unlocking wound bait at the workbench.

That makes torn pages the resource your first sessions revolve around. Every page spent on the boat is a bait recipe delayed; every page spent on bait is a hull upgrade delayed. The upgrade table above tells you what is worth buying; the pace of torn-page acquisition is what tells you when. The demo is where the actual costs — and whether they differ between the trees — get verified.

Ship maintenance is a real system

DREADMOOR treats the trawler as a ship that wears out: ship maintenance is explicitly confirmed. Practical implications for planning your first demo sessions:

• Damage and wear between trips appear to be part of the economy — maintenance likely competes with upgrades for your resources.
• Pushing farther from safe harbors raises the cost of a failed trip, not just the chance of one.
• The lantern plus hull armour together define whether night expeditions are sane.

Exact durability rules and repair costs are unconfirmed — we will measure them in the demo. The same goes for engine stats (speed, fuel use, noise) and the Ship Upgrade Skill Tree's nodes: nothing has been published, so this page will not invent numbers. Expect the skill tree to gate hull, storage, engine, and utility improvements — that is inference until we can verify it node by node.

Blueprints deserve a note of their own: official store copy ties them to scavenging ("scrap metal and forgotten blueprints are often worth their weight in gold"), which implies they matter to one or both halves of this page — probably as unlock materials for recipes or upgrades. Where they are spent, and whether they compete with torn pages, is the single most useful crafting question the demo can answer.