On Getting the Gold Curse

Curses in the Sea of Thieves are always hard to obtain. Apart from the Order of Souls Curse. That kinda only requires you to do one easy Tall Tale. The Ashen Curse isn’t much harder, although it does require you to do three different obstacle courses and repeat a timed escape thingy three times. However, there are three curses that are genuinely a pain in the ass to get. The Ghost and Skeleton Curses are rewards for reaching level 100 in the two PvP factions, but, if you are patient, you can slowly earn these without winning a single match. Or, at least, you could, until pretty much everyone stopped playing Hourglass and the wait times got annoyingly long.

While the Ghost Curse is cool, the Skeleton Curse kinda dropped the ball, since it’s less of a curse and more of a separate costume system with only some limited components to choose from. You lose all of your pirate’s customization and you can’t wear your other, hard-earned clothes with it. Plus, the options aren’t great. The Ghost Curse on the other hand is kinda just a green filter slapped all over you, and, annoyingly, you can’t wear both at the same time, despite one being a filter and one technically just being an item of clothing.

But for a long, long time, the real show-off curse was the Gold Curse.

For me, getting the Gold Curse was kinda a pipe dream. Normally, when we play Sea of Thieves, we already have goals in mind and there’s stuff that needs doing, like the Ledger, or limited events. But all of a sudden, we kinda had nothing important to do, Zach and I had time on our hands and Bacxaber was around with his SSD to instantly log in and out, allowing us to abuse the check points he had to do Tall Tales more efficiently. Because, frankly, using checkpoints is the ONLY way to do these Tall Tales.

Thing is, to get the Gold Curse, you need every single commendation for every single Shores of Gold Tall Tale. And every single one of those 9 Tall Tales has a commendation that says “complete this Tall tale 5 times”. It would take foreeeeeeever to do that manually, so the best way to get around it is to use a checkpoint. If you get the last checkpoint and someone in your crew disconnects, they keep that checkpoint and the rest of the crew can complete the Tall Tale. When the leaver reconnects, you can just restart the Tall Tale from the leaver’s last checkpoint, have them leave again and, again, finish the Tall Tale. Considering that each Tall Tale takes at least an hour to complete and you need to do all 9 Tall Tales 5 times each, doing things normally is just unfeasible. Sure, some Tall Tales are fun but they’re not THAT fun.

The only tedious ones for me though were Wild Rose and the Shroudbreaker. For some reason, the checkpoint we had for Wild Rose for stage 4/4 kept on breaking, meaning we needed to repeat stage 3 as well. Which would have been fine had the skeleton captain in question spawned nearby, but it kept on spawning on really far away islands. Shroudbreaker on the other hand only has one single checkpoint, halfway through the quest, and it takes a LONG time to repeat the long, boring parkour puzzles and defeat Gold Hoarder, who has tons of health. I also think Graymarrow, in Revenge of the Morningstar, was bugged, since 1. he had a Blunderbuss (which does a ton of damage and has stupidly high accuracy – there was a reason why blunderbuss bosses were removed) and 2. he kept on repeating every animation twice, meaning he’d heal for twice as much, summon twice the amount of enemies and do double damage. But luckily we only had to fight him once since the checkpoints worked for that Tall Tale.

The worst thing though is all the journals. Some Tall Tales are somewhat reasonable with their locations, even if the books are quite hidden. Other ones though, the journals are located on islands that have NOTHING TO DO with the Tall Tales in question! Some journals are hidden away in really out of reach places on islands that are really far away from the main tales. Luckily, you only need to find all 5 journals in a Tall Tale once for the commendation, but it’s still a pain. Really, the combination of the journals and the needless repeating are the main reason why most people don’t have this damn curse.

Was it worth it though? Yeah. My pirate is now gold and blind, a recurring theme among the Stormcloud crew and the members of the Calcium Kings guild. I’ll definitely be wearing the Gold Curse for a while, and I might wear the Gold Hoarder jacket to go with it.

That being said, I already kinda miss my Ashen Curse. Sure, it’s the second easiest curse you can get, but I feel like it’s more… alive. The Gold Curse looks great but it’s also rather flat, while the Ashen Curse makes you glow and gives you cool orange eyes. It also better matches the Reaper’s Bones titles I normally use.

Still, I’ll bask in gold for a little bit. After all, not many people have this curse, if Steam achievements are anything to go by.