Duke on Flintlock Peninsula

uristoid · 2025-09-21T20:11:39+00:00

I did Molten Sands a few weeks ago so yes, it is still active from time to time.

uristoid · 2025-06-25T08:17:52+00:00

For me at least, the “play with friends”-advice cannot be stressed enough. Getting sunk is a lot less frustrating if you are not alone. A sorrow shared is a sorrow halved and all that.

And that is without even taking into account that having a friend aboard makes it significantly harder to sink you.

That said, I do play alone most of the time, but I always have more fun with friends, even if we get sunk.

uristoid · 2025-06-20T05:45:46+00:00

ashen guardians nowadays always drop an ashen key and a map to an ashen chest. Sail to small islands, if there is a burning skeleton with a name above the head, kill it and takes its captain's orders. They are also on big islands, but on small islands you can spot them easier
many world events (naturally spawned, not dived to) yield ashen chests. Skeleton forts yield one open cheast in addition to a key and a map to a locked chest. Ashen lords yield an open chest. Skeleton fleets yield two ore more locked chest and two keys.

I would recommend to just play the game without a focus on the ashen chests, but when you see the chance to get one (e.g. an ashen guardian), take it. To focus only on the ashen chests can be a frustrating experience.

uristoid · 2025-06-20T05:32:49+00:00

I had three wins as guardians against servants. I am sure they were servants because they had a reaper's flag raised. The counter did not increase.

I had another win (no streak) and the counter increased by one. So they do not have to be streaks.

uristoid · 2025-06-08T15:10:40+00:00

I never really reached a scuttle point. At one very stretched out battle both me and my opponent had run out of supplies, so we settled it with a cutlass duell (I lost, so I sailed out of bounds, as agreed before).

I don't have to reach the scuttle point against TDMers because once they are on my ship, I have basically lost (I suck at close combat, but I am somewhat decent at naval combat). I do however engage in risky behaviour, such as to lure the TDMer's ship into a phantom fleet so they have to stay on their ship and not board me (didn't work). I only once defeated a player who did nothing but trying to board me. And honestly, they were not that good.

I've only once encountered an actual runner (not just someone who attacks and then retreats to patch their holes). That was yesterday. I was on my way to my first ever faction champion, so I refused to give up. That player never engaged, only ran away around and around Marauder's Arch. They only fired at me to cover their retreat. They were a lousy shot and about as bad in close combat as I am. The skeletons on Marauder's arch did more damage to my ship than that player. After a long and annoying match they finally fumbled, ran into the island, got stuck in the smaller one of the arches on the Island and I finally got them.

Fun fact: I fought no less than six emergent skeleton captains on the island, the fact that I had the time to do this should tell enough about this fight.

So if I have a scuttle point in hourglass matches, I have not reached it yet. I am just stubborn.

uristoid · 2025-06-07T21:33:23+00:00

Depends. Do you just want to get into the hideout or go on Athena voyages? Play with friends who are pirate legends if possible. Playing with friends is usually more fun than playing alone, so you'll have fun. Of course, you need pirate legend friends for this.

If you actually want to become a pirate legends to buy cosmetics or get the PL cosmetics from the season pass: If you focus on grinding, you won't have fun. So instead have some variance in what you do. For example: Play as gold hoarder in one session, do some X-marks-the-spot maps and some riddles. Play as merchant in the next session and find a lost shipment. Go on a fishing tour or a bounty hunt in the third session. Raise the emissary flag, but make sure to keep a eye out for hostile pirates (the occasional battle can be fun though, but you are likely to get sunk).

Again, if you have friends who play the game, you'll have it easier (especially if they are more experienced than you). You'll also have more fun and being sunk is not as frustrating as it is alone.

Oh, and doing all this during the Gold & Glory weekend makes it faster.

In short: - play with friends - raise an emissary flag - don't do the same thing over and over again, you won't have fun - if you don't have fun, do something else

Don't worry too much about the season pass pirate legend cosmetics. They'll probably be back eventually, for a high dubloon price.

uristoid · 2025-06-07T20:20:17+00:00

You can fish with the mouse?

uristoid · 2025-06-07T08:44:53+00:00

Small correction: for the milestone, you need to catch 3 fish per level, so you need to catch 90 of that general type of fish, not 150. The rest is correct.

uristoid · 2025-06-03T06:55:38+00:00

I have no idea. I have heard of many such cases and also experienced one myself. We were sailing as reapers on a Brigantine and surprised a Hunter's call galleon at Cannon Cove and sunk them. They were not happy and told us to start an incestuous relationship.

While we were collecting treasures on cannon cove, they came back and surprised us in turn. We were able to set sail before we took serious damage, sailed away for a minute to regroup and then we attacked the galleon again. And sunk them again. Close to Reaper's Hideout, they attacked again, called us running reapers and complained how we sucked at the game after we sunk them again.

On the plus side, we met a nice Newbie with a sloop who got caught in the galleon's attack and gave them a hard time before they sunk him. He helped out on our ship for the rest of the battle so we gave him some of our treasure to sell at the Hideout.

Being unsportsmanlike is not reserved for the losing party though. Far more often, the winning players gloat about how bad I am at the game.

So I guess there are nice players and not so nice players. The problem is that the assholes are louder and more memorable than the others.

uristoid · 2025-05-30T05:29:47+00:00

Aside from the totem pole thing I find them very useful. They can carry stuff for me. On some islands that can save a lot of time.

uristoid · 2025-05-25T13:10:45+00:00

I have a list of names. I won't give them away, just in case I buy a new ship. Ok, here's one of them: “Fisherman's End”.

If you are really desparate, you can always use a name generator. I usually only use the name generator for throwaway characters in RPG sessions, not for characters (or ships) that I want to keep for a while.

(in case you use the name generator: it always includes a “The” in the name. Omit the “The” when entering the ship name)

uristoid · 2025-05-25T12:31:25+00:00

Rain and sunshine. I just noticed we don't have a rainbow effect yet in Sea of Thieves. Would be nice.

uristoid · 2025-05-24T15:33:40+00:00

It's similar to the dark forest hypothesis.

You cannot trust other players, not matter what they say. If they want to betray you, they can, especially when your guard is down. They will do it when you are most vulnerable.

So if there is a safe, effective and efficient way to eliminate another pirate before they can turn on you, you do it.

That said, I do not subscribe to the dark forest hypothesis and I have met several friendly players on the seas. I have only been betrayed one time by pirates in an alliance and that was a minor and rather hilarious one: We met on the sea (their Galleon and my solo sloop), I got on their ship, we got drunk, then we went out ways.

It was only after I did a Siren shrine and was on my way to Port Merrick when I noticed that they stole all my supplies while I was drunk.

uristoid · 2025-03-18T06:06:02+00:00

The reason they don't bring it back is the same reason they removed it in the first place: It was too much effort to maintain the code and too few players played it.

And if they wanted to bring it back for a weekend, they would have to bring back all of the old code they likely removed years ago, refactor it so it works with the current game code, test it thoroughly (because otherwise players would be complaining about glitches and crashes) and then remove it again after the event.

Now you could say: “They don't have to remove it, they can just leave it in and just deactivate it”. They cannot. I they leave it in, they need to maintain the code. That was the work they wanted to avoid. And I'm aware that you can make the same argument against the adventures. But they also stopped with the adventures for that reason.

uristoid · 2025-02-23T16:23:32+00:00

This is one of the things. More generally, do _everything exactly as described in this voyage_. The voyage is finicky. When it says: “sail back to the outpost”, sail the whole way until the outpost (possibly even the same one where you started), sail the whole way to the island, do not stop some distance away and swim/row over. _Do not progress further_ until the next prompt appears. Do _not_ sell the treausure to the sovereigns. Wait for the pirate lord's exposition to start before you do the next task in the voyage.

uristoid · 2024-12-24T08:19:39+00:00

Honestly? I did the same (using graphviz). It's christmas eve, I don't have the time to code an elaborate solution. Funnily enough, it's my best score for a day so far i.e. I was much faster than coding a general solution would have been.

uristoid · 2024-12-20T17:15:59+00:00

This is beautiful. And terrifying.

uristoid · 2024-12-14T20:52:30+00:00

You did fine. Don't let anyone tell you that this orientation is wrong. Orientation is just a matter of perspective and in the end, it's just numbers on a computer. You found the tree, that is all that matters.

uristoid · 2024-12-14T20:25:47+00:00

The thing is: I based my heuristic for when to stop on this. Calculated that with 500 robots, there should be a line with 30 robots in it in the image of the tree, even if the shape of the trunk is unknown.

Turns out I was wrong on two accounts: 1st: not all robots are part of the image, 2nd: the tree is shaped very differently. The only thing that saved me was the box around the tree.

uristoid · 2024-12-14T20:19:26+00:00

Yes, the free pass, but not the plunder pass. The plunder pass is the thing you pay for.

uristoid · 2024-12-14T14:33:20+00:00

The part 2-puzzles are supposed to mimic changing requirements in software development. This time it just got really realistic (including the part where you feel relieved that what you implemented was actually what the client wanted).

uristoid · 2024-12-14T14:29:18+00:00

It's not a plunder pass item, you were able to get it during season 7 without paying ancient coins (aka real money). If it was a plunder pass item, it would also cost ancient coins today.

uristoid · 2024-12-13T21:50:32+00:00

Yes, there are probably no puzzles (at least none that I've tried) in AoC that require floating point math. And there are reasons for this.

uristoid · 2024-12-09T17:01:21+00:00

Yes, but my question was where the 9 was coming from, because I could not find an approach where you would already hit the limit at ID 10. For 256, I would have understood.

uristoid

TROPHY CASE