Ahoy there, matey!
I’ve been sailing the Sea of Thieves for a few weeks now, and am tantalizingly close to becoming a Pirate Legend. It was an incredibly long journey – one which would have been a lot smoother had I known everything that I do now when I started. As such, I wanted to share some of what I learned, so that other fledging pirates are able to avoid many of the same stumbling blocks that I ran into.
Raise Your Sails to Turn Faster
If you’re at all familiar with sailing then this will be fairly obvious. If you’re not, then you’ll spend as much time as I did bumbling around with the sailing in Sea of Thieves.
Rare tried to make the sailing in Sea of Thieves as realistic as possible. To that end, the length of your sail has a dramatic effect on your ability to control your ship. At full mast, your ship has a very wide turning arc, while it can perform much sharper maneuvers when the sails are lowered. Savvy players can use this information to get the most out of their boat while casually cruising between islands, or confronting other players at sea. It’s a neat bit of game knowledge to have, and significantly reduces the effort it takes to actually control your ship.
Buy Promotions to Unlock Better Quests
As you complete voyages for each of Sea of Thieves’ trading companies, you’ll level up your reputations with them. After five levels, players can choose to buy a promotion to increase their standing within said trading company. This provides access to an array of different themed cosmetic items, and, more importantly, it also unlocks more rewarding voyages. Each time you promote your pirate up a rank, the potential reward pool from quests increases, and your chance of finding more valuable loot also goes up. Level 25 is of particular note, as it unlocks advanced quests which provide much better rewards, while generally being more challenging. For this reason, it is imperative that players stay on top of their promotions, so they’re always receiving the best rewards for the time they’re investing.
You Can Chain Emissary Flags
Speaking of promotions, once you hit level 15 with the Merchant Alliance, Order of Souls, or Gold Hoarders then you’ll be able to fly an Emissary Flag to represent them. By flying an Emissary Flag, you’ll accumulate a bonus to both your gold, and reputation earned while selling items related to the faction who’s flag your flying. As an example, if you’re flying the Gold Hoarders’ flag, then all the chests that you sell will earn you a larger reward.
How much extra gold, and reputation you earn depends on the flag’s level. However, you’ll receive the maximum bonus once you’ve collected enough loot to get your Emissary Flag to level 5. Once this happens, you’ll receive a special Emissary Voyage, which provide high quality loot that is relevant for the faction you’re currently representing. The loot is so high quality, in fact, that if you trade-in your current Emissary Flag for reputation, and start from scratch, you’ll have another level 5 flag by the time you’re done collecting all the loot from the Emissary Voyage. In this way, you can repeatedly raise Emissary Flags, and earn a ton of gold, and reputation for a given faction.
This is by far the easiest way to power-level the three main trading companies. Use it to your advantage when grinding out reputation on your path to becoming a Pirate Legend.
Sloops Can Outrun Bigger Ships
I was surprised to learn this, but it turns out there’s a way to outrun the giant Brigade, and Galleon ships with the tiny Sloop. This was likely added as a balancing change to help solo players, but Sloops travel faster than any other ship type when sailing into the wind. Both of the larger ship variants take huge movement speed penalties when doing this, but not the Sloop. As such, if you ever find yourself getting harassed by large ships in Sea of Thieves, you can high-tail it by sailing directly into the wind.
Trust me – this one is a real life saver.
Captained Ships Save So Much Time
When your first starting out, you’ll be stuck using rental ships. However, eventually you’ll be able to afford your own ship, which is referred to in-game as a Captained Ship. The main benefit of these ships is that players will be able to start buying supplies from the Shipwright before setting out to sea. Instead of having to scrounge around your starting outpost looking for supplies, you can simply buy fruit, repair boards, and ammo. This is a nice timesaver, and allows players to quickly jump into the action.
The other benefit of the Captained Ship is that it can sell all goods to the Sovereigns. These NPCs tend to sit on the backside of most outposts, and will distribute any loot you give them to their constituent trading companies. No longer will you need to run around like a chicken with their head cut off when you’re trying to sell your ill-gotten gains. Instead, you can simply drop by the Sovereigns, and sell it all in one go.
Captained Ships may seem expensive at first, but they’ll save you so much time in the long run. You should save up for one as soon as you can, and start taking advantage of all of the time saving benefits they provide. It’ll shave hours off your journey to become a Pirate Legend since you’ll spend way less time farting around on things that don’t actively contribute to forward progression.
Well, that’s all I’ve got. I keep thinking about how much smoother things would have been for us, if we’d known some of these things sooner. At least we figured them out eventually. Hopefully you’ll find them as useful on your journey as we did on ours.
Frostilyte Writes 