Which xp farm are best
You can farm gunpowder barrels for lots of easy exp as shown in this guide
playing the game
what sane person would actually do that what the hell
Do laps around ravenna collecting barrels
There’s three outer islands that spawn em so you get 13 total per lap
That gets you 100 levels in 2-3 hours (regardless of your level)
(don’t do this, people will just be assholes and blow up your ship)
Hasn’t happened to me even in bloated servers. You can just find a lower level server anyway
And honestly, on top of the fact that you can just sell regularly, this is so much faster than every other method that even if you lose time it’ll still be 5x faster
for me it’s always do the story and side quests and do exploration tasks
In other words play the game
I did that on my first file and it’s definitely the most fun, though I like rushing to the max lvl on side files cause I delete them very often so I don’t want to spend that much time on them
right now, it’s definitely collecting barrels 
exploration can also be good if your level is already really high. also since full release, i don’t think there’s been a new level up to 175 guide like youtubers made guides back then (im gonna miss the frostmill ice mines quest, for sure)
ketch/caravel (try to get some speed on the parts) → story part where you spawn at ravenna (ignore if past ravenna) → join any empty server → collect gunpowder barrels from the islands around ravenna and hope you get the imbued/arcane ones for faster leveling
The fact that people want to blow right on through the lower levels of the game speaks volumes about how well its design holds up at said levels (it doesn’t).
I don’t think people can blow up barrels on your ship, but if they can then oh boy…
I don’t think the barrels with PVP off doing damage to other players is disabled either, at least to other boats (and what I was mainly referring to).
they can blow them up
and they do deal damage to you and your ship even if you have pvp off
I mean when I level up with exploration task I often really enjoy it, problem is that that’s fun the first time, so I’d rather do a braindead task for 3 hours than a semi interesting one for like 15 (slight exageration)