The Curse of Resources in Sea of Thieves

In the Sea of Thieves, there are multiple curses that can affect your character, altering how you look and completely changing your body. The Ashen curse looks like there is fire surging through your veins, while the Gold Curse is Midas’s Touch gone both right and wrong. There are also new curses, the skeleton curse from joining the Servants of the Flame, and the ghost curse from the Guardians of Fortune. But there is one curse on the Sea of Thieves that isn’t mostly cosmetic.

I’m talking about the Curse of Resources.

Funnily enough, I never noticed this curse at first. It’s not something you can instantly recognize. I originally caught on to this curse while watching streamers on Twitch.tv, while waiting for drops and the like. I could have just muted Twitch and left it in the background, but these guys were taking part in some contest. They had to sink as many ships as possible.

At first though, they weren’t exactly flush with resources. They had just server-hopped after a bad sinking, and only really grabbed resources from the first outpost they appeared on. Amazingly though, despite the lack of resources, they dived into PvP (literally) and started up a new fight. The battle didn’t last for long, but when it came to looting the sunken ship’s supplies, they found so many cannonballs. So many in fact that their storage crates were struggling, and they had to leave some stuff behind. With so much stuff, this crew could now do multiple battles without having to restock.

Unfortunately, the very next battle they did, they sunk, and fast. And thus lost all the resources they had spent ages grabbing.

I thought the whole situation was pretty ironic. I don’t know what happened to the ship that sank the streamers, but they probably rejoiced at having tons of resources. However, the streamers called this bad luck the “curse of resources”, and now had to start again from scratch. Later on, I went back to the same stream, only to find that the streamers were in a similar position. After a good battle which netted them a ton of resources, they found themselves stuck underwater, waiting a long, long time for someone new to fight. Again, the streamers claimed it was a curse of some sort.

I didn’t think much of this until I played Sea of Thieves myself later on in the day. Playing with my buddy, we did a Veil voyage, but we weren’t flush on supplies. We’d just grabbed the first few bits off the outpost we spawned on, then made our way to the worst islands available for the Veil voyage. The voyage actually went pretty smoothly, so we quickly made some cash. After that though, we decided to become Reapers, and do some killing.

The Reaper stuff went along fine, until we defeated someone and ended up with tons of resources. The ship we sank was overflowing with cannonballs and wooden planks. We also managed to find a storage crate with almost too many cannonballs in it. Now that we were flush with resources, it was time to go hunting.

Except, well, there was no one to hunt. The only other emissary was a rank 1 Reaper who had been sitting at the same outpost for 45 minutes. We counted. Hunting down the Reaper was easy enough, but then we went back to having too many resources and no one to hunt again. We had been hit with the curse of resources ourselves.

Is it just coincidence that things go quiet when you’re ready to fight? Probably. But it does very much feel like the game conspires against anyone who has too many cannonballs…