On Lava and Looking Hot

Sea of Thieves has quite a lot of different cosmetics. Absolutely tons of gear to customize your character. While the character creation screen is one of the strangest I have ever seen in a video game, at least Sea of Thieves makes up for it by having a ton of cosmetics that can be bought or unlocked. However, you can also unlock Curses, which are basically TF2’s Unusual gear except for your skin. Curses look really cool, but they are obtained by doing all sorts of difficult tasks. So, when I next played with Bacxaber and his crew, we all decided that I needed to unlock a curse of my own.

So that’s what we did.

Turns out, the Ashen curse, which makes one look very hot and fiery, was where we planned to start. Apparently the Ashen Curse is one of the easier ones to obtain, but Sea of Thieves is very hush-hush when it comes to quests and stuff, so a guide was definitely needed.

Really, the whole thing was quite simple. We’d visit a cave on a small island and find a mysterious key, then sail to where the bad guy’s base was, which was inside a volcano. Inside were three paths, all with different dangerous and all three leading to not so much a boss fight but more of an escape sequence. To obtain the Ashen Curse, I had to not just travel down one of the paths, but complete all three paths and read several books scattered around the place.

But before we could do that, there was one obstacle in my way.

Fuck lava

Inside this volcano base, there are three doors, three paths to traverse. But to get to them, you must jump over a pool of lava, via a couple of rocks sticking out of the fiery pit. It was a bit of a long jump, so one would need a run-up.

I swear, I fucked up this simple jump like 10 times. And we hadn’t even reached the more bullshit parts of this quest. What made things worse though was being unable to be revived. Attempting to revive me after a failed jump would simply and instantly kill me again, because I was still in the lava. I did eventually managed to get over this small hurdle, but the fun was about to begin.

Difficulty Spikes

There are three paths inside Flameheart’s volcano base. The first one we did was also the most tedious, especially since it contained a lot more jumping over rocks and lava. Inside were not just fire traps but all sorts of insta-killing stuff. Spike traps, rotating streams of fire, big crushing spiky thingies… Not to mention that we also had to fight off monsters. If anything, the monsters were probably the easier part of the first path. Or, at least, they would be. For reasons unknown, although this quest was skeleton-orientated, we found ourselves fighting ghosts and crabs as well.

The other two paths though were much easier. I even managed to do that jump at the beginning as well, without dying. Sure, there were a handful of times where I fucked up and got myself killed, but the spiky path and the saw blade path were much, much easier than the lava path. After each path, we’d get to Flameheart’s lair, stop the ritual then run away with a chest that constantly needed to be dunked in water. This involved more parkour, but it was much easier than the three paths. By then though, I was pretty tired, tired enough to stop overthinking every single movement. Thank fuck for check points as well.

At the end of each run, after stealing Flameheart’s magic chest, we’d meet up with Pendragon, a guy who is  a ghost. We give him the chest and he magically opens it up, freeing the souls of his fellow ghost buddies. There’s some touching dialogue to be heard, but I mostly missed it because ghosts and skeletons kept on spawning behind him.

We got there in the end

Eventually, in about 4 hours, we saved Pendragon’s friends three times, via all three paths, and I could finally collect my reward. Well, I got my reward delivered to me. And of course I put that curse on straight away, no questions asked. We’d obtained some gold and treasure as well, and I also somehow managed to fall out of the world map briefly. But we did it and everything was awesome. Awesome but repetitive.

It had been a long, tiring evening, especially since it was about 6am when we finished. But it was worth it. In Sea of Thieves, it’s not just about the gold, it’s about looking awesome as well.

Seriously, I look so damn cool now. Despite the fact that I’m still basically wearing starter clothes. As to what we’ll be doing next? Who knows? We might do some Reaper stuff, maybe go fishing or perhaps go on some voyages. But no matter what, I’ll look cool doing any of those things…