All The Commendations and Achievements

One of the more common sounds you’ll hear in the Sea of Thieves is a faint scribbling sound, the sound of pen writing on parchment. You’ll hear it quite regularly, especially if you are bringing treasure aboard your ship, are cooking and tinkering around your ship or you just happen to be eating something. The scribbling sound is the sound of things being added to your log. The log seems to track all sorts of stuff. It will track you as you find treasure, as you put the treasure on your ship, or even track your treasure if it is picked up by another ship, rather daintily written down as “treasure donated”. The Sea of Thieves in general seems to track a HUGE amount of things. In fact, it’s probably one of the more statistically heavy games I’ve played.

Part of the reason behind all these statistics is one of the main gameplay elements of the Sea of Thieves. While the common goals are getting rich, completing adventures, a lot of content is locked behind Commendations, which are basically achievements. Get your commendations done and you can unlock more clothes, weapons and cosmetics in general. And there are achievements and rewards for everything. And I mean EVERYTHING.

Let’s take Athena’s Fortune as an example. Athena’s Fortune is the company technically run by the Pirate Lord himself, and is one of the harder factions to level up, since it’s tied to specific quests and can only be leveled up with rare purple items. Athena’s Fortune also has a lot of commendations tied to it. One of the commendations I have been working on is completing Veil quests, which can take anything between 15 minutes and three quarters of an hour, depending on the steps required (which are partially random). I need to do Veil quests 50 times, and in doing so, I will unlock a very nice hat. But not only that, but there are commendations for picking up specific Veil loot, doing things as Reapers and doing other quests. One commendation involves finding the SoT equivalent of jars of women’s bathwater 50 times.

And all the factions are like this. Each faction has a fuckton of commendations tied to them. Some commendations are quite simple, like completing various missions a certain number of times. Others though are based on luck. There are commendations for killing every type of Megalodon, but they vary between pretty common, to being so rare that having played for 4 years, some people haven’t even seen one.

But things got more complicated with the Captaincy update. Not only are there commendations for you to complete, if you have a named, captained ship, you have commendations and milestones for your ship as well. Which means doing even more stuff. Okay, granted, some of the milestones are pretty easy, like cannons fired or days spent at sea. But there are also commendations for things like sleeping in your bed, playing instruments and refilling your mugs with grog. These things take forever. For a long time, while playing with Bacxaber and his ship, Stormcloud, we had to take over steering while Bacxaber drank tons and tons of grog, going for these ship commendations.

And what do we get after we achieve all these commendations? It really depends. Sometimes you get a title, sometimes you unlock a magnificent hat, rarely, you unlock a curse. A lot of the clothing gets unlocked, but you have to then purchase them with gold. For ships, you can unlock trinkets, which then cost a small fortune to level up. But some commendations don’t have any rewards at all. And to that, I wonder, why should we bother with them?

Either way, Sea of Thieves is an achievement hunter’s nightmare. There are just so many commendations, and some of them can’t even be completed, because they were tied to events in the past.

Oh well. At least some of them unlock some cool stuff. Like this damned hat for completing 50 Veil missions, which I need to complete my pirate’s look.