Adventures On… Not the Stormcloud?
Normally, when we play Sea of Thieves, we sail on Stormcloud, one of Bacxaber’s three ships. Occasionally we’ll sail on my Little Stormcloud, a brig, or if Fox is around, we’ll sail on one of his five billion different ships, all of which are unique. But lately, we’ve been taking out some of my other ships. The other day, we got to sail on my sloop, The Daily SPUF, but recently, we played with one of Bacxaber’s old friends, a guy called Lego, who hadn’t played Sea of Thieves for over a year, and even then, they were still very new. And the ship we took was Arkay’s Fang.
Now, Arkay’s Fang is a ship with an obvious motif. It’s named after the tooth of a death god and is decked out in Reaper cosmetics. But on this adventure, the plan was to do Gold Hoarders. After all, I was desperate to get my first Distinction, getting to level 100 and resetting my rank, earning a special ring in the process. And our plan was especially simple: we were just going to do Vaults.
Vaults are pretty easy, but they can take time. You basically follow a compass and find pieces of a treasure map, which has an X on it that leads you to a vault key. Sure, you can hand that key back to the Gold Hoarders for gold, but you can also take the key to a vault, loot the vault and then sell a fuckton of chests to the Gold Hoarders for a fuckton of gold. In the past, we’ve sank people and stolen their keys, but most of the time, we just do the voyage as normal. And on this particular adventure, while we were waiting for Lego to get online, we actually managed to find the vault key… literally 5m away from the vault entrance. Lego joined while we were moving loot to the ship, we went to sell then started a new Vault.
On the second Vault though, we noticed that the Reaper that had been roaming around the centre of the map had changed direction. They briefly stopped by New Neo Port Merrick Golden Sands but had decided to try and attack us, now that they were rank 5 Reapers and could see other emissaries on the map. Bacxaber did consider trying to keg them, since they had to sail around Mermaids’ Hideaway to get to us, but we couldn’t find one. Instead, we pulled away, ready to fight, with me on the helm and Lego and Bacxaber on the cannons, sailing off to get some space for ourselves. However, the sloop wanted us dead and we weren’t going to let that happen. And at the same time, a brig with white sails came out of nowhere, chasing after both us and the sloop.
Suddenly, we were in a 3v5 battle, since the sloop and the brig seemed to be working together to take out a Gold Hoarder emissary using a Reaper brig. Luckily, the brig wasn’t very smart and they crashed into the sloop, while I steered around them and Bacxaber boarded, stopping both ships from repairing. Lego kindly helped with repairs. Although both these ships sank (with the brig sinking first), all we got out of it was a Reaper flag. It seemed that none of them had any loot.
We went back to New Neo Port Merrick Golden Sands to sell, then decided to grab an Emissary Voyage. This took us to some nearby islands where we dug up some chests, and that went by rather smoothly. Thanks to the Emissary maps, I hit rank 101 on Gold Hoarders and unlocked a ring, resetting my rank to 1. I had to pay 100k gold to get the damn ring (good thing I’m rich) but it was pretty fucking awesome.
After that, we weren’t really sure what to do. I equipped my ring (one on each hand) and the emotes that went with it, and, because it was kinda late, we decided to just do a short voyage. We did consider doing some maps that we had stolen off the Reaper sloop, but the first item we dug up was some low tier Merchant crap, so we didn’t bother. As we finished the short voyage though, we spotted a Gold Hoarder sloop and decided to go and say hi.
They immediately ran away. So we gave chase. The sloop decided to sail towards another sloop, another Reaper, which decided to attack us. We chained the sloop and Bacxaber boarded them to stop them from repairing, however, I had to spin the ship around to make sure that the Reaper sloop couldn’t attack us. Then, suddenly, a THIRD sloop appeared and joined in on the carnage, this one with the Ferryman sails, which stuck out brighter than the Reaper sails on Arkay’s Fang. While the Gold Hoarder ship did sink, the other two sloops kinda backed off and started fighting among themselves. We grabbed the flag, then sailed off, before changing our minds, turning around and sailing back to battle.
The two sloops kinda panicked and stopped their fight, but for the Ferryman ship, it was already too late. We sailed by, tore them to pieces and tried to circle, but, annoyingly, they managed to one-shot me and destroy the wheel at the same time, so, while Bacxaber again boarded and went on a murderous rampage, Lego revived me and I hurriedly repaired the wheel. Sure, we crashed into a rock, but we salvaged the situation. The Reaper sloop was pissed and charged at us, but that did very little as we littered their ship with cannon fire. They finally sank, but I kinda sailed a bit too far and had to do a u-turn to pick Bacxaber up.
With everyone else dead, we decided to just grab the flag from the Reapers and sail to the nearest outpost to sell up and lower our own flag. However, the Reapers wanted revenge and charged at us from the outpost we were going to. They lasted about three seconds, their ram-strat failing miserably. We didn’t bother with their loot and instead just went to the outpost to sell.
In total, we sank six ships (one ship sunk twice) and didn’t sink at all, despite having a relative newbie on the crew and having an idiot like me on the helm.
It was a great session. But also a weird one, since we were Gold Hoarders, not Reapers.