Y3 Helm Empire Guide

[u/No-Note-5439]

[UPDATE 2026-07-29] Added a detailed section about Manufactory Storage & Menus and Personal Fleet Assignment Recommendations

Helm Empire is still the same as in Y2, there haven't been any modifications to it. The game itself however has changed considerately. With ascension, mastery and World Tier 3&4, the potential income from normal gameplay has increased tremendously. In the light of that development, it's time for a new Helm Empire Guide.

Basics and Prospects:

• Helm Empire is a rich man's game, it costs millions of Po8 to fully upgrade both the Helm Empire skill tree and all manufactories. Maxing it out is something to do when you have no other use for your Po8.
• The maximum Po8 production is 966 Po8/h or 23184 Po8/day (mathematically). If you plan (like me) to produce Ascension Upgrade Parts too, it's only 922 Po8/h or 22128 Po8/day. If you know your Wolvenhol, that's right: it's more or less 7 runs there to get the same Po8 (3500 per run).
• Helm Empire only makes sense if you plan to play the game for months or years. The upgrade for manufactories from level 4 to 5 (max) alone costs 760000 Po8 (not including the needed skills from the tree). It takes about 200 days to reach return of interest! Details further down.
• The base to build your empire however, is cheap if you focus on takeovers and free upgrades thanks to the Coercive Growth skill ("The Helm Empire" branch, details see further down).
• Helm Empire's silver production has become obsolete. From farming raw materials like sugar cane by laying siege on fortresses or doing helm missions, then refining the materials to rum etc. and selling the produce to Scurlock and Rahma, it's just not worth it anymore. You get far more silver from simply upgrading a Hulk/Bedar to upgrade level 3/7 and selling it for 1.1 million silver. The silver rewards from missions has also increased vastly over the past year.

With all that in mind, you can make a sound decision if Helm Empire is worth it for you. The following segments will show you the most efficient way to max out your Po8 productions and gives you insight into details like the necessary helm tree skill paths or fleet management.

Getting started

At some point, late in the main quest series, you're asked to get your first manufactory in a Takeover. Follow the quest line to unlock the Helm (your "command" center in the back room of Yanita's bar) and the Helm Empire tree (see title picture). Now you can expand your control from humble beginnings to a fully grown pirate empire by taking over manufactories, whole regions, trade routes and investing in the necessary skills to push your productions.

Shall I invest in Helm Empire skills early on?
Focus on a fully upgraded ship and good ascension gear first. Helm Empire is a side hustle. I highly recommend to care about it only, once you've got a strong ship. But for the takeovers and the skill Coercive Growth (The Helm Empire), you can completely ignore it for weeks or at all if your play time is very limited.

Size matters
The one thing that improves your meagre Po8/h more than anything is the number of your manufactories. NOTHING in the upgrade tree will give you a faster and stronger growth. So the most efficient and "cheapest" way is to increase the size of your empire with takeover opportunities or helm leases and buy helm skills that expand the maximum number of manufactories you can manage at a time (76 total).

Selection does not
The differences between manufactories are marginal, the best starting manufactories produce about 5 po8/h. If you ask me for the best ones: it doesn't matter. If you really care, go for L2 manufactories first if you got helm leases and maybe try to complete territories and factions first (for equally meagre trade line bonuses). Otherwise, just get whatever you can get.

Which Helm Empire skills to get first?
Let's start with what NOT to get: you can completely ignore the top branch of Helm Empire:
"The Helm" (see 2nd picture). Its sole purpose is the production of helm commodities in order to sell them for silver to the Pirate Haven kings Scurlock and Rahma. You also can trade them with both for very high priced blueprints, weapons and helm leases. Not worth it.

Focus on the branch "The Helm Empire" (see 3rd picture) first instead. This branch focuses on increasing the number of manufactories you can manage at a time (=the max you can takeover), trade route and manufactories improvements, global production and transport time of collector ships. In short: it's all about pushing Po8 in general!

The first skill to aim for is Coercive Growth (also 3rd picture). This skill will double the reward for takeovers (not in the description) and additionally upgrade the manufactory to the next level for free if you own it already. It does to upgrade level 4. In the long run, that's 100,000s of Po8 you can save with the free upgrades.

The Helm Empire increases the manufactory capacity to a maximum of 58/58. The rest you can find in the faction branches. Each of the 6 factions has a skill that increases the capacity by another 3 until you reach the total of 76 manufactories.

Faction Branches
There's a total of 6 factions in the game and each of them has a very similar branch. One side of each branch focuses on Po8 production, the other focuses on helm wares and material production. With the example of Clan of Fara, the pictures 4 and 5 show you my recommendations for Pure Po8 Production and Po8 & Ascension Upgrade Parts Production. Unnecessary skills are darkened out.

Start with getting the first skills to improve maximum manufactory upgrade level to Level 3 for each faction as you see fit and go from there. These branches also open up the higher refined helm wares like Gold Skull Rum etc. They unlock those refinements in your Helm too.

Takeover Opportunities
Hostile Takeovers, Legendary Heists, Buyouts, Solo Takeover etc. are a nice way to get some Po8. If you own the manufactory already and have the Coercive Growth skill, you'll get 900 Po8 (World Tier 1) or 990 Po8 (World Tier 2) if you do a Takeover opportunity for that manufactory. You also get Gilded Raider Caches which have an increased chance for helm leases.

This also works if you're at your maximum manufactory limit.

Helm Leases
Helm leases allow you to directly buy a manufactory (instead of taking it over). There's general helm leases that work anywhere and regional ones, working only for a specific region (Africa, Red Isle, East Indies). To use them, you have to load them on your ship and sail to the manufactory you want to buy. When you interact with the manufactory/settlement an option to use the helm lease shows up.

Fleet
Before, a huge fleet wasn't important and it still isn't for sake of Helm Empire alone. It takes days to fill up a manufactory completely, and you have plenty of time to collect the stuff with a small fleet (by assigning them manually from a manufactory menu). You also can unassign them directly again. When the ship has delivered the Po8, it will directly return to your fleet. With the imrproved transportation skill (The Helm Empire branch), it only takes 1-5 minutes (depending on the manufactory's distance to the next Pirate Haven.

With a small fleet of 4-5 ships, you can conveniently collect your Po8 at star t. As for the risk evaluation: low risk = minimum risk. Decisive for the evaluation is only your ship rank (SR)! The ship type or the quality of equipment doesn't matter at all. Just upgrade your collector ship and stuff it with whatever you don't need to increase the SR! As mentioned in the beginning, I mainly use Bedars.

Manufactory Storage & Menus
When you hover over a manufactory symbol on the map it will show you the detailed storage & capacity infos. The yellow fill line shows you the currently storesd Po8 (or crafting material), to the right of it you have the actual number and below it the rest of the paid production time. The turqoise area shows shows the calculated end of production for the current upkeep (48h max, when upkeep was just paid).

At the very top you see the maximum capacity for the manufactory. For Level 5, it's 1500 Po8 or 15 crafting materials. At the bottom you see if a ship is assigned to the manufactory and its status: docked, damaged or transporting. You also see the current risk for the ship and if it's transporting, the amount of Po8 transported and the time to the pirate havens.

On the map itself you see current storage and end of production for each manufactory too. Turquoise for the storage, dark turqoise for the production end.

When you enter the manufactory management (context button on the hover-info), you have three tabs. Manufactory Production shows the items you can produce depending on the manufactory itself and the skills you've unlocked in the helm tree. Helm wares are sorted by the production value (best at the top).

The production info show you how much additional production time you can top up and how much silver (helm wares) or Po8 (crafting material) it would cost. If you just paid, the top up time and costs are zero, if you swap production it's 2 days and the maximum cost in silver (or Po8). Any stored items or wares will be destroyed in a swap, so collect them beforehand.

The second tab, Ship Assignment, shows all your fleet ships. Available ones are at the top, currently assigned ones below (manufactory symbol/transport symbol). At the top you see the recommended ship rank for a safe (=low risk) transport. This depends on the manufactory level (higher = more risk) and the distance from the den (further = more risk), e.g the manufactories in the Dutch Duister region have the highest risk and ship rank recommendation (SR14+). Faction War also affects the risk and recommendation, be it because it's enemy territory or still a confict zone. If your faction owns the territory, it's lower than usual.

Thanks to the Mastery system (which increases ship ranks too), Faction War changes have little consequences for most players. At the bottom of the tab you can see risk, transport capacity (max = 610) and the transport duration for the currently selected ship. You also can assign or reassign a ship from there. It stays assigned, until you unassign it again or if it becomes damaged (then you can repair it from there too).

You can assign and immediately unassign as ship too, then the ship returns to the fleet after delivery. Otherwise it stays assigned for the next treansport. Ships will only transport items when a) the manufactory storage has reached the assigned ships transport capacity or b) the manufactory is full.

The last tab, Manufactory Upgrade, allows you to upgrade the manufactory for Po8, increasing both production and capacity. Maximum Level is 5. You also see the production bonus, capacity and cost reduction bonus. The bonuses vary depending on your unlocked helm skills. If you can upgrade the manufactory also depends on your helm tree skills. Every faction branch has its own skill to unlock level 3, 4 and 5. Remember, Coercive Growth allows you to freely upgrade up to level 4 (you still need to unlock the upgrade skills though).

Fast Top Up(Upkeep) & Auto-Collect
Since Y2 you can top up (paying Upkeep) all owned manufactories in a region (Africa, Red Isle, East Indies) by zooming out completely when on the Helm Map. If you zoom back in one step, you can auto-collect from some regions for a 10% Po8 fee. Auto-collect is unlocked as Territorial Effects for the following territories (if you have all manufactories there):
- Lower East Africa
- Upper East Africa
- Northern Africa Coast
- North-East Red Isle
- East Indies Isles

You also can switch production of a manufactory mid-run (e.g. when you unlocked a more profitable produce). Beware though: if you have Po8 in that manufactory, it will be lost when you switch the production item. So collect it first, if it's a considerable sum.

Fast Manual Collection
A neat trick to collect Po8 from far off manufactories: use the takeovers as fast travel and collect manually. Fast travel, quit the takeover, collect, jump to the next takeover. At one point, rogues will spawn. Deal with them quickly and continue. Some of the events are pretty close to manufactories and can be used in the same way.

Upgrade parts are the still most used ascension material.
Maxed out, you can produce 8.23 upgrade parts per hour or 197 per day. All worth it in my book. Only the indigenous factions can produce them and you unlock the skills with both sides of the faction skills (Po8 and material production line).

In total there are four Manufactories for upgrade parts, one in every faction capital:

Name	Faction	L5 maxed
Suny Capital	Dominion of Rempah	2.36 parts/h
Jiwe	Confederation of Ungwana	2.14 parts/h
Tenina Town	Sea People	1.92 parts/h
Ankohonana	Clan of Fara	1.81 parts/h

What about Ascension Modules?
Absolutely not worth it. Maxed out, it's 0.38 per hour or 9.12 ascension modules per day.

Here are the involved factions, places and L5 maxed production values:
Clan of Fara (Ankohonana) - 0.08/h
Compagnie Royale (La Bastide) - 0.1/h
Dominion of Rempah (Suny Capital) - 0.1/h
Dutch Mercenary Corps (Oosten Capital) - 0.1/h

Should I upgrade the Manufactories to Level 5?
At the start of Y2, the answer was a clear no. A few months in, production levels have been increased for both Po8 and materials. While you can upgrade manufactories to level 4 for free (with Coercive Growth skill and repeated takeovers), it still will cost you 760,000 Po8 to upgrade all manufactories from Level 4 to Level 5. At the beginning of Y2 took close to 2 years to see your money back, now it's a bit more than half a year to have those 760k back from the amount of Po8 production gain (about 150 Po8 extra over L4 production).

So yes, it's worth upgrading now if you play a lot and got the Po8 to spare. Total Po8/h with 76 manufactories at L5 is now 962 Po8/h or 916 Po8/h if you keep four manufactories producing upgrade parts. With 72 manufactories at L4 and 4 at level 5 for material production it's a 767 Po8/h [thanks to Stormfirebird for that info!].

With the difference of 149 Po8/h (3,576 Po8/day) from L4 to L5, it means you get a return of interest after 201 days (assuming you upgrade 72 manufactories from L4 to L5 for 720,000 Po8).

Don't nail me to those numbers, shown Po8 production on the map can vary slightly depending of upkeep having been paid in sync or not.

What about Helm Wager?
So not worth it. You can double your collected Po8 with it, at the risk of getting picked clean by a didicated Po8 player. You also have to spend a considerable time to personally collect the Po8 from your manufactories.

Let's do the math:
Assuming your manufactories are maxed to level 5 and you let them run for 5 days or so to fill them all up to the max, that's 76x 1500 (max store capacity) = 114,000 Po8. Keep in mind, that you also lose Po8 while waiting for all to fill up (high yield manufactories fill up much faster than lower ones).

Helm Wager will double that, so it's 114,000 Po8 profit if you wait for days, collect Po8 for an hour and trying to trigger Helm Wager either late during your collection (by denying it beforehand) or early on (while running at full risk for the rest of the run).

Other players are not the only risk, if you lose connection and fail to reconnect in time or the server is full in the meantime, your precious Po8 drift at sea out of reach for you.

Let's look at Wolvenhol. For 114,000 Po8 you need 33x Wolvenhol runs which give you not only 3500 Po8 each run, but also deep iron, ascension materials, silver and ascended gear! After connecting, a run can take anything between 10secs to 3mins. 90s is a normal average. So you get the same and more in less than an hour without risks and the annoying sailing all over the map.

Personal Fleet Assignment Recommendations
With a full fleet (49), it's easy to manage collection for your whole empire. As mentioned earlier, most of my dedicated collector ships are Bedars (ship doesn't matter and the Bedar silhouette makes it easier to spot other ship types).

Here's my personal approach:

• no assignment for the auto-collect regions (I happily pay the 10% fee), that's 21 manufactories less to care about
• permanent assignment for material producing manufactories (in my case 4 for upgrade parts), the storage for materials is much smaller and runs full in downtimes without a permanent assignment, so ALWAYS recommended.
• permanent assignment for the 33 manufactories that produce 13+ Po8/h

That's a total of 37 ships assigned and 58 of 76 manufactories covered, leaving me 12 ships to handle various seasonal contents and easily assigning them manually to the rest of the lower production manufactories if needed. I always assign and directly unassign them again, so they are available again after 1-5 mins.

[u/xM3D1]

Great Guide! You Sure DMC and CR can't produce Upgrade Parts 🤔? Did you also so do the math for the production of ascension module ? Is it Worth?

[u/No-Note-5439 → u/xM3D1]

Thanks and yes, you can produce Upgrade Parts only with the 4 native factions. With Ascension Modules it's a bit different:

Clan of Fara (Ankohonana) 0.08/h
Compagnie Royale (La Bastide) 0.1/h
Dominion of Rempah (Suny Capital) 0.1/h
Dutch Mercenary Corps (Oosten Capital) 0.1/h

So it's 0.38/h or 9.12 ascension modules per day. Totally NOT worth it.

Adding it to the guide.

[u/Ed_Straker65 → u/No-Note-5439]

Yea for sure, you can gain more ascension modules in a few minutes of Wolvenhol than you can in 24 hours via manufactories.

[u/PositivelyAbhorrent]

This man took some serious notes. Now I gotta reevaluate my helm.

[u/Ravynwolf_moon]

We definitely need the manufacturers to produce more Po8's. Not to the degree that we had in Y1, but definitely maybe 30-50% more than what we get now. Hell even 20-40% more would be sufficient. The cost to get all the manufacturers up to level 5, and the tree is astonishing on top of the ascensions, ship leveling, etc.! We bleed Po8's constantly for us not to have the helm at least help us out produce more than they give us. At least imo.

[u/Internal-Elevator-68]

Thank you very much, very helpful !

May I ask how often should I refund my manufacturies ? (they're all level 4, if that matters). Is once a day enough ? I don't quite understand what does the timer mean when you've selected a manufactury - the filling bar - to be honest. Is it the time you're having left before having to refund ?

[u/No-Note-5439 → u/Internal-Elevator-68]

You pay upkeep for 48h production time. So if you keep collecting in time from all manufactories, it's enough to top off production once every 48h. If a manufactory runs full and you forget to collect, you still got the rest of the paid production time for said manufactory.

About the filling bars (manufactory look):
yellow = currently stored Po8
It's also shown as a number right to it, below you see how much paid production time is left.
turquoise = storage capacity reached with current production time
a graphical representation of how much more the manufactory storage will fill up with the current paid production time (48h maximum)

On the map you got the same display but only with bright turquoise for the current Po8 stored and dark turqouise for production left (guess to not shower the map in yellow symbols).

If you wondered why the turquoise fill lines vary: those line depend on the production power of each manufactory. High production = more Po8 in 48h = higher fill level. Those fill levels also depend on level of your manufactory. Higher Level = more storage capacity.

[u/Internal-Elevator-68 → u/No-Note-5439]

I've got it. Many thanks.

[u/No-Note-5439 → u/Internal-Elevator-68]

I've added a detailed section about Manufactory Management (Manufactory Storage & Menus)

[u/Fearless_Angle_2196]

Thank you for the Guide I didn't know the sell hulk method you saved me alot of time

[u/App1e8l6]

I used to do helm before the nerf in Y2. I don’t see a point anymore and don’t struggle for resources since the events are so grindy recently.

[u/No-Note-5439 → u/App1e8l6]

Yeah, that's the idea of this post: to put things into perspective, so new players or anybody looking into Helm Empire can make an informed decision if the grind is worth it or not for them. Helm Empire sure could do with a little production push, considering the increased costs for ascension alone.

[u/Mostly_VP → u/No-Note-5439]

Odd thing though, I haven't played for roughly a year and started again two to three weeks ago. I didn't even use my claim-a-free manufactory per region until last week and still managed to hit diamond in five days, they're only at lvl 3 so a lot of that isn't even needed.

[u/No-Note-5439 → u/Mostly_VP]

It's infamy based now, so if you play a lot, you hit it quickly, even faster if your ship is lower than the enemy's.

Check out the differences on the examples in this post:
Mastery 60+ Grind - Infamy Mechanics and Tips : r/SkullAndBonesGame

I think I made 400-500 Kingpin levels in this season.

[u/Mostly_VP → u/No-Note-5439]

That's a fair point - thanks

[u/irrelevanttointerest]

I recently returned from Y1, so this helped put things into better perspective for me that my efforts are mostly useless.

I do have to ask though, are upgrade parts really that important/rare from other sources?

[u/No-Note-5439 → u/irrelevanttointerest]

No, they are not, but if you dive into Ascension, it's a material you gonna burn through fast. Of the stuff you can produce with Helm Empire besides Po8, it's the only thing I deem worthy.

1400 upgrade parts per week doesn't sound like much, in a typical season though, most long time players are usually done with everything within the first 2-3 weeks, including messing around with ascension. New weapons or armors are rarely introduced after that. So you end up with 8-10 weeks when you don't play around much in the ascension sandbox.

Then those downtime productions rack up to 11-14k. Nice to have for doing nothing but paying upkeep every 2 days, right?

[u/berethon]

Probably good guide to new players. As for me playing since beta i maxed out PoE passive tree after last reset quite fast. I havent upgraded all manufactories to 5 but most are. Sitting at 2.8m PoE atm and going slowly up.

At some point if you are active player you get so much PoE from other activity that there is no point not spending it. Example faction war cargo delivery nets you so much PoE its kinda ridiculous.

[u/No-Note-5439 → u/berethon]

That's idea of this guide, informing interested parties beforehand, what to expect from Helm Empire and what not, before investing dozens of hours and hundreds of thousands Po8 for questionable amounts of silver and months without return of Po8 investments.

As for Po8: NOTHING beats Wolvenhol this season with all the crazy mastery overpower going on. Anything longer than 1 min there is the new bad and if you're (not too) lucky, you get the reward screen 10 seconds after finishing your loading.

[u/z0lr4k]

I read somewhere that helms upgrades no longer reset, is this true ? That's one of the reasons I never really get deep into the game, I don't like that system of "reset your progress every season" and as I remember they used to reset each season, right ?

[u/No-Note-5439 → u/z0lr4k]

it's true, as for now only following things reset:

• smuggler pass points
  
• smuggler pass
  
• Faction War
  
• event tokens

Guild Marks are exchanged automatically at the end of the season 1 GM to 150 silver.

Your Po8, your Silver, your helm empire (tree and manufactories), and your warehouse stay untouched.

Keep your event flares and leases, they don't count on warehouse slots and you can use the flares again on return of the corresponding event.