To the poor Legendary Pirate crew that decided to greet the mighty Battletoad’s Wrath with cannonballs, I’m not really sorry for our overzealous greeting in return...
It has been my experience that the standard greeting between pirates in this game is to either launch a broadside of cannonballs at the friendly pirates waving at you, or to dive under their ship and release a barrel of gunpowder. With very few exceptions. I’ll detail both below.
This is a very unusual form of greeting and I’m curious to discover its origins, but when in Rome, it is best to do as the Romans do…
Hopping into the Sea of Thieves with me mate, Skinny Pete, we quickly robbed the outpost we were at of anything not nailed down, loaded everything onto our ship, the Battletoad’s Wrath, and set forth to locate some buried treasure.
As a side note, I think the NPC’s at the outposts are secretly some form of cursed, immortal demon. They never move from their spots and repeat themselves over, and over again, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. What kind of hellish curse did Rare unleash upon these poor b******s!?
Yet I digress, my apologies...
So me mate decided that he needed to eat dinner and passed the controller to his 9-year old son, whom I enjoy playing with. It was decided that since he had neither a driver’s license, a sailing license or a Veteran Pirate’s License, that he would perform the role of Lookout while his dad finished dinner.
We sailed forth to an island to dig up some treasure and while I ran around the island madly stabbing at the earth with a gold-lined shovel and cackling madly, he would keep an eye out for enemy pirates.
I was on the island for less than five minutes before he found the grog…
As I’m madly tossing mounds of earth about, I hear him giggling like a crazy person and laughing so hard he can’t even speak straight. Curious, I started back to the boat when I hear him say “No officer, there’s no chickens here.”
That statement caused me to stop and blink for a second.
“I’m drinking Grog, officer.” followed by “I’m 9 years old.” are the next two comments I hear as I’m rushing back to the ship. How am I going to explain to his father that I left the boy alone with a barrel of alcohol for him to consume and somehow the cops got involved?
I rush back to our ship to see another sloop pulled alongside us, blue and orange lights flashing and I can hear the stern voice of another pirate talking to me mate’s boy. (For the record, the other pirate was creatively alternating between the ships lantern and his Order of souls lantern to create the effect of police lights. Well played, sir.)
I soon hear “No, we don’t have any chickens for you to inspect. Have a nice night.” and see the other ship sail away.
Just as I arrive at the ship with my loot, Skinny Pete takes over again. “What kind of adult are you!? I can’t leave my son with you for five minutes without you getting him drunk!?” I tried to explain that He was supposed to be in the crow’s nest keeping an eye out, but to no avail. I was the responsible party. Sigh.
We left the island after finding a barrel of gunpowder and an empty pig’s crate and decided to stop by the outpost on the way to our next island to continue our search for treasure. We turned in our chest and made it back to our sloop as a galleon pulled up. It was pretty. It had a blue and gold hull, a unicorn and the blue admiral sails. I immediately knew it was the ship of a legendary pirate and I started waving enthusiastically from our ship so that I might have a word with this pirate of legend and congratulate him on his success.
Their response was to unleash a broadside into the Battletoad’s Wrath. Being somewhat savvy pirates, we quickly dropped sail and as they went around the island, we deftly maneuvered in the other direction. The galleon sailed on, but I realized that we still had a barrel of gunpowder on board. A few minutes later we patched all the holes in the ship, bailed out the water and located the galleon that had greeted us with a broadside. They had anchored at a nearby ship wreck that me mate and I were going to check out.
Not wanting to be rude (we do try to be friendly pirates, as the readers of my previous posts can attest to) we decided that we should greet this galleon in return. Properly. We sailed by at full speed with Skinny Pete hanging off the side, gunpowder barrel on his back. As we neared, Skinny Pete leapt off, sailed under their ship and unleashed a greeting of his own. By the time I had circled around the legendary galleon was sinking into a watery grave.
I sailed next to Skinny Pete without slowing down and he managed to climb back on board. Then we noticed a few chests floating in the water. And some very angry looking pirates. We decided to be polite and wave at them while slowly circling them. They seemed to be having so much fun playing with the sharks that we felt it would be rude to simply jump in the water and join them without being asked to do so. So, after they had finished playing with the sharks we grabbed all the chests that they had so kindly left floating about for us, stopped by an island to grab another gunpowder barrel, returned to the outpost and sold our loot. We were just getting ready to sell the gunpowder barrel when the galleon returned and gave us another greeting. This time the mighty Battletoad’s Wrath took a tour of the ocean floor.
We sold the barrel and took the Mer-Uber back to our ship, which was parked at a nearby island. And would you know it? There was two gunpowder barrels on the island.
We decided to set sail again and began heading to the island we needed to get more treasure. About half way there we noticed that the legendary galleon was on an intercept course for our little sloop. Clearly we were having some sort of communication error. I felt that we had both greeted each other properly, but I had no desire to be rude, so I set course to meet and greet them.
With Skinny Pete hanging off the side of the boat, gunpowder strapped to his back. As we passed, Pete leapt off and both ships exchanged broadsides. I got three holes to their two. I heard Pete’s curse of “I missed them!” and set the ship to turn back around while I patched holes and bailed water. I pulled alongside Pete without slowing down and set course to try and catch the galleon again, only to notice that it was sinking. Apparently the crew of the Legendary galleon had been so busy manning the cannons that they didn’t check for holes in their ship.
We set sail again, finished finding our treasure, turned in our loot, and decided to explore a nearby island before calling it a night.
Guess what? Anchored at the same island we were heading to was the same galleon! What a stroke of luck! Surely we had all greeted each other properly enough that we could all enjoy a good conversation and talk about the nifty ship decorations that the galleon had, right?
So we sailed up to the galleon, Pete hanging off the side with gunpowder, yet hidden from view of the other ship, and cried out “Ahoy!” We were greeted with cannonballs. Pete returned their greeting with gunpowder and sank their ship. For a third time.
I’m hoping that this post will serve a number of purposes. Don’t leave a small child alone on a ship filled with grog and make sure you greet other pirates (and their ships) the same way you would wish to be greeted.
Until next time!
For other adventures, follow the links below:
DO Not Laugh (https://www.seaofthieves.com/forum/topic/40513/do-not-laugh)
Episode 2 (https://www.seaofthieves.com/forum/topic/41447/the-water-weasel-episode-2)
Chickens, Blunderbusses and Overwhelming Firepower https://www.seaofthieves.com/forum/topic/46492/chickens-blunderbusses-and-overwhelming-firepower
They call me Chicken Chaser (https://www.seaofthieves.com/forum/topic/48447/rare-i-deserve-an-achievement/4)
The Dread Pirate Blunderbritches (https://www.seaofthieves.com/forum/topic/52546/please-advise#)
