Anno 1800 asks the same question twice: is this production chain efficient? In the Old World the answer usually turns on labour tiers and electricity; in the New World it turns on fertility, field tiles and the cost of getting a finished good onto a ship. The two regions use the same buildings, the same Bright Harvest modules and even some of the same items, yet they reward opposite layouts. This comparison assumes the game as it stood after Game Update 17, the final major PC update, released 4 April 2023, with the Season 4 DLC installed — New World Rising for New World electricity and Artistas, Empire of the Skies for New World workforce pooling, and Bright Harvest for the farm modules discussed below.
What this covers: how Old World and New World supply chains differ in workforce, module unlocks, land cost and shipping, and which region each chain belongs in. Why it matters: the same building behaves differently depending on where you place it, and a chain parked in the wrong region leaks efficiency for the rest of the save. Who should pick this: Anno 1800 players past their first Artisans who are choosing where to expand next.
The two regions at a glance
| Dimension | Old World | New World |
|---|---|---|
| Population tiers | Five — Farmers, Workers, Artisans, Engineers, Investors | Two — Jornaleros and Obreros; a third, Artistas, arrives with New World Rising |
| Role in the empire | Turns imported raw goods into finished goods, and consumes them | Grows the crops and raw materials the Old World cannot |
| Electricity for factories | Standard, via Oil and Gas-Fired Power Plants | Only with New World Rising — the Manola dam or oil-fired Power Stations |
| Electricity for crop and animal farms | Never | Never |
| Cross-island workforce pooling | Commuter Piers (Farmers through Engineers only) | Airship Platform with a Commuter Station (Empire of the Skies) |
| Classic choke point | Workforce starvation at a lower tier | Cross-region shipping lag and Obrero labour |
The wiki is blunt about the division of labour: “The main role of the New World is to support the Old World population with required resources.” The flow is two-way, though. The New World sends cotton fabric for fur coats, rum, coffee, gold ore for pocket watches and jewellery, oil for power plants, caoutchouc for penny farthings and steam carriages, pearls for jewellery, cigars and chocolate. The Old World sends back steel beams, windows, reinforced concrete, steam motors and weapons as construction materials, plus sewing machines and beer. Almost every late-game build is therefore a two-region build.
Workforce: five tiers against two
Workforce in Anno 1800 is an island-wide resource, not a local one. Buildings anywhere on the island draw from the same pool; insufficient workforce is shared between every building that needs that tier, so a shortage lowers efficiency everywhere rather than just at one factory. A fishery needs 25 Farmers specifically — no other tier will do — and having less than 25 proportionally lowers its productivity. A surplus, by contrast, has no downside, which is why buffering each tier is the safe habit.
The two regions differ in how far that pool reaches. In the Old World and Cape Trelawney you connect islands with Commuter Piers, pooling workforce across them. Only four of the seven population tiers can be shared that way: Farmers, Workers, Artisans and Engineers. Investors, Tourists and Scholars cannot be pooled at all. In the New World there is no commuter pier; the equivalent arrived with Empire of the Skies as a Commuter Station module on the Airship Platform, which “functions similarly to the Commuter Pier” and combines the workforce pools of the islands that have one.
The critical limit is regional. Workforce is shared between islands only within one region — Old World labour cannot be sent to the New World, or the reverse. That single rule decides most placement questions in this article: you cannot staff a New World coffee plantation with Old World engineers, and you cannot run an Old World factory off Jornalero labour. Each region needs its own housing and its own tier buffers. If you are still tuning those buffers, the workforce-surplus method in the Anno 1800 Investor supply-chain guide is the place to start.
Modules: the same boost, gated differently
Bright Harvest was designed as “a farming analogue to electricity”, and its two modules work in every region that has farms — Old World, New World and Enbesa. The effect numbers are identical wherever you build. What changes is the unlock gate and the fodder.
| Module | Effect | Input | Old World unlock | New World unlock |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Silo (animal farms) | +100% productivity, +1 ton every third cycle | Grain | 300 Workers | 1 Obrero |
| Tractor Barn (crop farms) | +200% productivity, −50% workforce, +50% more fields, +1 ton every third cycle | Fuel | 500 Engineers | 600 Obreros |
The wiki puts the silo’s practical result at roughly 2.66× a farm’s base output and the tractor barn’s at 4×. The catch sits in that “+50% more fields” line: the Bright Harvest dev blog states plainly that tractors let you “construct 50% more fields per farm, which you will need to boost the efficiency of the farm to 300%”. A tractor barn does not shrink a farm; it enlarges it. Each crop farm can hold one tractor barn, and a single Fuel Station feeds up to 20 of them, but if the fuel runs out the farm reverts to its un-modded state.
Because crop and animal farms cannot be electrified in either region, these modules are the only lever that raises a farm’s ceiling. The trade-off is land. That matters more in the New World, where the islands are the tighter of the two and where the crops themselves already demand more room.
Where the arithmetic diverges
Fields are the clearest regional difference. A crop farm’s productivity “decreases proportionally to the amount of missing fields”, so the field count is effectively a per-building land tax. The wiki’s building pages list these totals for full productivity:
| Crop | Region | Field tiles |
|---|---|---|
| Potatoes | Old World | 72 |
| Hops | Old World | 96 |
| Grain | Old World | 144 |
| Sugar cane | New World | 128 |
| Cotton | New World | 144 |
| Coffee beans | New World | 168 |
| Tobacco | New World | 192 |
A New World coffee plantation wants 168 field tiles before a single module; an Old World potato farm wants 72. Adding a tractor barn raises both by half again. So the New World’s fertile-but-space-hungry plantations carry a heavier structure cost per ton of raw input than the Old World’s compact food crops — and the Old World generally does not need its farms at all once it imports the finished good.
Coffee is the textbook case. The New World’s Coffee Roaster is 5×6, costs −150 credits in maintenance and −150 Obreros in workforce, turns 2 tons of coffee beans per minute into 2 tons of coffee, and unlocks at 300 Obreros. It is the single building most likely to drain a New World labour pool. The Old World alternative, the Advanced Coffee Roaster from Land of Lions, turns Malt into Coffee at the same 2 tons per minute but requires electricity, carries a −3,500 maintenance tag and needs a research permit per building.
The wiki’s own strategy note on that building lays out the trade fairly: the Advanced model “provides massive simplification of logistics” by removing the cross-zone shipment, but traditional New World chains “are much more scalable; further, if New World Rising is installed, the ability to electrify Coffee Roasters allows them to double the production of the Advanced model.” New World Rising does bring electricity to the region — the Manola dam or oil-fired Power Stations — and many factories can be electrified to raise productivity. The coffee roaster is one of them; the coffee plantation is not, because crop farms never take power.
Both regions buy back some of this cost with Trade Unions. A union has a 15-tile radius, holds three items (four with the Union Subsidies Act palace policy), and only one union can affect a given building. Items can substitute a building’s workforce entirely, cut the workforce needed, add extra goods every few cycles, or change the number of modules required. That is how a coffee roaster’s 150 Obreros becomes manageable — at the price of influence, since each union costs 20 influence to place.
The logistics bill
Inside an island, transport is automated: carts shuttle goods between buildings and warehouses without input. Between islands, transport is not — ships and their trade routes are set up and maintained by the player, and goods produced in one region and needed in another have to cross by sea. That is the fixed cost that a labour saving has to beat.
Two mechanics make the crossing more expensive than it looks. First, carts hold only 10 tons, and a horse cart spends 20 seconds loading or unloading at its destination; electrifying a building turns its carts into trucks that take 2 seconds and move faster. A building also gains an extra cart only at each +100% productivity step. The New World’s plantation economy, which cannot be electrified at the farm level, therefore runs the slower cart model on the leg that ships its raw goods out. Second, warehouses and trading posts have a limited number of loading ramps, so carts queue when too many buildings service one. Neither cost appears in a building’s headline output.
The result is a clean rule of thumb. A worker saved in the New World is worth less than it looks if it lengthens a shipping route, and a credit of maintenance saved in the Old World is worth more than it looks if it removes a ship. When the product is a high-demand finished good — coffee, rum, fur coats — the Old World’s Land of Lions alternatives trade maintenance and a permit for the elimination of one cross-region leg, and that is often the better arithmetic even though they look more expensive per building.
What to build where
- Old World: finished goods and the tier ladder. Five tiers, the power grid and the commuter pier network all sit here. Chains that consume electricity and need Engineers or Investors belong here by default.
- New World: fertility and raw goods. Sugar cane and rum, cotton for fur-coat feedstock, coffee, cocoa, tobacco and cigars, pearls and gold. Plant these where the fertility is, not where the city is.
- Old World: the shipping-free variants, when the route is the bottleneck. The Advanced Coffee Roaster, and its Land of Lions siblings, exist to delete a crossing. Take them when the good is in permanent demand; keep the New World chain when you need volume.
- Either region: modules before more buildings. A silo or tractor barn multiplies an existing farm for one module tile and a small input stream. Building a second farm is usually the slower, more expensive answer.
- Either region: unions before promotion. Workforce-substitution and workforce-reduction items relieve a tier shortage directly, which is cheaper than promoting or demoting population to chase a balance.
Before you place the next chain
- Ask whether the output crosses a region. If it does, price the ship, not just the building.
- Check which tier the chain employs and whether that tier is shareable. Investors cannot be pooled, in either region.
- Check the field count before the footprint. A 192-tile tobacco plantation plus a tractor barn is a land decision, not a building decision.
- Check the module gate. A tractor barn needs 500 Engineers in the Old World but 600 Obreros in the New World; if neither exists there yet, the module is not available.
- Confirm the farm can be electrified. It cannot; only factories can. If you want the farm to produce more, the module is the only path.
- Re-check the statistics production tab after each change. Rounded bars hide small deficits that compound over an hour.
The regions are not a difficulty slider and they are not interchangeable. The Old World is a labour market with a power grid bolted to it; the New World is a fertility map with a shipping bill attached. Build each chain where its constraint is loosest, and pay for efficiency with modules and unions rather than with extra buildings.
Next read
- For the workforce-buffer and trade-union method that keeps either region fed, see Anno 1800 Investor Guide: Trade Unions and Shipping.
- For the next game in the series, see Anno 117: Pax Romana.
- For the same supply-and-demand thinking in a modern city, see Cities: Skylines 2: Industry and Tax Revenue.
- For the macro version of the same loop, see Victoria 3: Construction Sectors and GDP.