A Right Proper Gigakegging

Season 17 of Sea of Thieves has admittedly been disappointing so far. The whole gimmick of the season is picking up loot from one person and delivering it to some other guy halfway across the sea. It’s basically Merchant stuff except more annoying, and there’s some glaring flaws, mostly that the stuff you are smuggling has zero value to anyone apart from the smuggler NPCs. So there’s not much point stealing someone else’s smuggler loot and trying to sell it to anyone – not even the Reapers, who accept literally anything apart from meat, will accept smuggler loot. There’s also no new faction to level up, the smuggler loot has no value and is annoying to move (especially the three types of bottles, which all instantly break if you jump or fall once), the new smuggler loot is literally everywhere and delivering it is tedious, as every smuggler NPC is hidden in a cave where ghosts and skeletons constantly spawn and set off the tons of traps that you have to awkwardly jump over.

You make okay gold by doing Smuggler stuff but it’s slow and tedious and you’re better off just doing an emissary and selling Orbs of Secrets once you’re at rank 4 or 5. And also, the whole smuggler thing makes no sense. You’re just delivering one pile of loot from one island to another, the same way you would do as a Merchant doing shipments.

But it’s also dangerous work, this smuggler business. Because one of the smuggler items is the Black Powder Barrel. Every smuggler run you do, you generally have to take one of these massive black kegs and deliver them from one smuggler to another. However, Black Powder Barrels are basically nukes. If you set them off, they will utterly destroy whatever is caught in their blast radius. In fact, me and my crew, we’ve been calling them Gigakegs. Because they make the megakegs (the Athena’s Fortune kegs found occasionally in the Fort of the Damned and in ) look like the bog-standard baby kegs you find almost everywhere.

And, speaking of normal kegs, these barrels are almost as common as them. Anywhere there’s smuggler loot, there’s a chance for a gigakeg to spawn. I’ve found multiple gigakegs in shipwrecks. However, they do somewhat have downsides. The fuse on a gigakeg is a lot longer if you set it off manually, and it takes more gun shots to set them off. They are set off quite easily though by cannonballs, and since skeleton ships sometimes carry them, you can actually end skelly ship fleets (or at least randomly spawned ship) far more quickly than normal.

Of course, you can use these on player ships too. I’ve actually gone and done this. I found a keg on a skelly camp, and, while Bacx and Zach did the camp, I grabbed the gigakeg and slowly swam it over to a sloop parked at a nearby ghost fort one island over. I was actually seen, thanks to my mermaid, but I dropped the gigakeg below deck and ran off as a distraction while one guy shot at me. The keg went off, killing a player and a shark, and I boarded the sloop and killed the other guy, keeping the pressure on until they sank.

It was very cool. So cool in fact that I kinda… failed to screenshot the explosion. Well, I tried, but I was too slow and only got a picture of the fallen mast. I also didn’t bother with their loot, because we were playing as Merchants. I just saw an opportunity and took it. For once, it worked.

All that being said, I do have a massive complaint about gigakegs. They seem to scale based on the size of the ship you blow the gigakeg up on. Put the gigakeg on a galleon and it does way more damage than it does on a sloop. And because you respawn faster on a sloop than you do a galleon or brig, you respawn fast enough to start bucketing and repairing your ship. Not only does the gigakeg cause more holes on a galleon, hitting the bottom deck even if you use the keg on top deck, but it also more likely kills everyone on board (unless you run up the nose of the ship and jump off) so you can’t really recover. It feels a bit unfair to change the size of the explosion just because you’re kegging a smaller ship. If you’re going to use a nuke, it should be consistent, and it’s not.

Honestly though, I don’t think I’ll be doing much more smuggler stuff. Doubly since it’s taking up normal spawns as well – a lot of loot is being replaced by smuggler loot, and if you’re not doing smuggler stuff, then it’s just a hindrance. It’d be okay if we could sell this crap to Reapers or whatever, but no, it’s all just sitting on our decks or dumped outside Sovereigns, gathering dust.