As with other Uncharted Waters games, many inns have a named employee available that you can meet and befriend. About half of the cities in Europe and the Mediterranean do, as do about a quarter of the cities elsewhere in the world.

Each employee has a friendship rating that is initially hidden. If you reach 1000 friendship with an employee, she'll offer you a quest. At 2500 friendship, she'll offer a second quest. At 5000, she'll offer a third quest. The third quest in a line generally offers a B-grade piece of gear. The story of the third quest will always involve the employee traveling with you for a while.

Like UW New Horizons and unlike UW Online, in UW Origin, friendship only goes up and never down. Like UW Online and unlike New Horizons, it takes quite a lot of points to max friendship. In New Horizons, the cap was 40. Like UW Online and unlike New Horizons, most but not all of the employees to befriend are female. In New Horizons, they were all female.

After you complete an employee's quest line, the game will display her friendship value, which will initially be 5000, as it is capped there until you complete the third quest. That's how I know the number of points that are gained for various things.

There are three ways to increase friendship with an employee: give her gifts, tell her about your discoveries, or chat with her. Gifts are generally items that you obtain by land exploration. They can also be given to C-grade mates that you want to recruit.

You can only tell one employee about each discovery that you make. Unlike New Horizons, you can report a discovery to an estate and also tell an employee about that discovery. Rather, the restriction is that you can only tell one inn employee about Stonehenge, for example.

Each employee has two favorite types of discoveries or gifts. You gain 2.5x the friendship points for discoveries or gifts of the employee's favorite type. The junk that you can obtain in large volume from land exploration generally counts as treasures. Thus, it's easiest to max friendship with employees who are fond of treasures.

The game discovery encyclopedia has six main types of discoveries, each of which is divided into 2-5 subtypes. An employee's two favorite types of discoveries will be two subtypes in the same main type. For plants, artifacts, and treasures, there are only two subtypes, so an employee who likes one will also like the other. For architecture, there are four subtypes, but no one likes cities or villages, so everyone who likes one of the other two types will like both. Nature and animals have more subtypes, however. For the other four types, I'll only list the main type of discoveries that the employee likes.

When chatting with an employee, she'll ask you a question, and you have three answers available. If you choose her favorite answer, it's similarly worth 2.5x the friendship points of a wrong answer. Whether you get the first question right or wrong, you can then chat two more times for friendship, without the favorite bonus.

You can only chat with an employee three times in a day, and only the first of those has a question to which you can give her favorite answer. You can give unlimited gifts or discovery reports in a day, however. It costs 1 energy to unlock any of the options for an inn employee for a day, but once unlocked, you can use multiple options. The daily reset is at the same time as for attendance, dailies, and so forth.

The number of friendship points for various things:


The game does track half points, but does not display them.

There are ten questions that inn employees can ask you. The first time you chat with one in a day, she'll pick one at random to ask. Some of the questions have some slight variants, but they're so close as to be effectively the same question. There are five possible answers to each question. The game picks three of those five to be available to you. The correct answer that the employee wants to hear is always one of the three, and then the other two are chosen randomly.

There are effectively five different employee personalities. Each of the five possible answers to a question is the favorite of one of the personality types. Once you learn which personality an employee has, that uniquely determines her preferred answer to all ten questions. I list her favorite ship type as the personality type because it's the easiest question for which to shorten the answers unambiguously.

Admiral, which ship do you think would suit me if I go on a voyage?

I can’t sleep at night. Do you know a good cure?

I don’t know why it’s so hard to get up in the mornings recently. Maybe my stamina has run out?

Did you hear the rumor? Robbers have been appearing in the area.

I want to learn a new hobby? What hobby should I take up?

I can’t stay at the Inn the whole time. Where should I go if I leave on a journey?

I can hear a puppy whine every night. Maybe there’s an abandoned puppy?

I received a rather awkward gift from a customer. What should I do…?
Yes, "Throw it away." and "You'll have to throw it away." are separate options and choosing one answer for an employee who prefers the other will get a negative reaction.

There are times when I don’t feel confident about my choices. What should I do?

Recently, there’s a customer who’s been getting on my nerves. What should I do?

Below, I list the employees available in the game. The list of ports and their favorite discoveries is taken from the Korean wiki. Their answers from chatting and the English names are from my own observation. A * on the port name means that you can only talk to the employee if the correct admiral is active.

The comp column says whether the quest line is currently completable. An answer of "yes" means it is completable at 65 seaworthiness or less. "no" means that there is only one quest in the line, not three. A number means that some quest requires at least that seaworthiness, though it may not be the highest in the line. Numbers are only listed if the seaworthiness requirement is higher than the port where the employee resides.

The "join" column is whether the employee can join your crew. "yes" means that she can be recruited at the local inn after completing her quest line, though she'll have perhaps a 1% chance of appearing at all. "$$$" means that she can only be recruited by paying real money. For quest lines that I've completed, I add a very brief explanation of what the story is about in the story column.


Ingeborg's first quest says that it requires 85 seaworthiness, but this is an error. It only requires 55.