The Dark Sea, as I’m sure everyone agrees, is a time-consuming activity. It’s a lengthy exploration time for some valuable rewards in the dark sealed chests you find. However, I’ve noticed something. Why does it seem like everyone explores faster than I do? When comparing average loot results with friends, mine is always abysmally lower than theirs, and I really can’t determine why.
Group Explorations: Whenever I go as a group, usually with one or two friends, I’m almost always the slowest to get to the chests. Sometimes I’m scaling an island with a tall ledge-less wall, and in the time I get to the top, my friends are coming back with two chests. These aren’t the stupidly tall mountains either, I’d say around the height of Shell’s cliffs from the beaches. Neither me nor my friends have climbing speed on gems, yet I see them scale up those walls like nothing as I try to smash a hole in the sometimes-unbreakable walls.
I have two ideas for this.
1: I don’t have any agility in my build. I don’t know if my friends run agility, or how much, but if they do, then I feel that does partly contribute to the slow climbing.
2: Lag. My game runs kind of slow in the DS; frames sometimes get choppy, I get lag spikes, and sometimes I climb up the wall at the pace of a snail. I’d say I average 200-300 ping, but sometimes it gets worse, usually 400-500 in laggy periods and worse is lag spikes. Somehow, stam drain doesn’t seem to slow, but climb speed does.
Which one (presumably) causes slower climbing?
No Agility
Lag
Both roughly equally
Other?
0voters
Solo Expeditions: Sometimes my friends and I compare our DS runs, and, well, on average, they get a good 25-50% more chests for roughly the same expedition time.
For example, they’re telling me they get 20 in an hour, while I often take at least an hour and fifteen to a half more minutes.
Now, the possible causes:
RNG, obviously. However, this appears to happen at a consistent basis across runs, rather than one or two specific instances, so I don’t think it’s that.
Ship speed. My ship runs about 101? agility and 100 res. I have a master navigator on board, and I use her skill whenever I can. My ship usually does not get low enough to be slowed down by HP, as I have 21k hp with a master shipbuilder.
Island looting speed. I skip the stupidly tall mountains (and volcanoes and rifts obviously), and I usually loot the other islands. This kind of ties into the climb speed thing from earlier. I also don’t really move fast either, because of the lack of agi, and it generally can take quite a few minutes to explore, check, and loot the whole place. On the multi disconnected islands, sometimes I fall into the ravines cause my dodge reflex combo doesn’t make it that far.
Atlan ships. I don’t fight them past sinking their ships for ship repairs. Do they fight them? I don’t know. But I do know they give 2-3 chests if somehow you kill them solo.
A few things to note: There’s a climbing tech where you can high jump parallel to cliffs, allowing for maximum jump efficiency with little to no loss in height every jump. If you’re not aware of this then that might be the culprit.
200 agility bypasses this by granting vertical jumps at all times.
Additionally, stamina foods can treats enhance stamina economy while exploring
Also, getting no vs many sirens can be the difference between an amazing or mediocre run, tbh
I just run a boat with 125 speed, 100% resilience and 102 turning speed with 432 agility and in just an hour around the first range, I can get around 20-30 sealed chests which is the recommended amount before turning them in.
30-40 in an hour if I go from second range and above since the boat is fast enough and I have enough agility to keep going from island to island. Oh yeah, skip the atlanteans by just having invisibility 1 pots, you can farm jade pearls easily since their respawn time is only a minute.
Very important thing to note. Ship speed doesn’t have much of an effect on how fast you get chests, unless you are specifically going for a certain range. My ship has 58 speed and I can still get around 30 sealed chests in an hour. Slower speed makes the islands closer together since you don’t move as far between them spawning.
Seems the same to me on how they spawn ngl, if you found a server with no dark sea rain and turned your graphics to 8+, you’ll be able to see dark silhouettes that are actually islands, this way you dont need clearsight 5 pots. I had a boat with max 30,660 defense but with 62 speed and goddamn does it take long to reach the island in the distance
People underestimate how good durability builds are for the dark sea because “speed must mean that you find islands faster right?” A large amount of the time spent in the dark sea is spent on the islands anyway, where ship speed isn’t useful. Being able to dodge waves is a nice benefit of having a fast ship but its even better to be able to completely ignore them and just heal back whatever damage they do for free at the press of a button.
Yeah I noticed durability builds can easily tank weather type damages since maintenance heals a whopping 3K+ hp for free but like it takes time to reach the island when you see one in the distance.
Not to mention, it takes a lot of minutes to get back on the main seas in my experiences meanwhile a fast boat only takes 1-2 minutes to get back from each range. Yeah a lot of time goes on the islands itself but that problem is resolved by having max agility, you don’t even need more defense since if you’re too used on how to do dark sea like me, all you need is invisibility 1 potions and a few healing potions in case you get hit by lightning.
I switched ship builds for the reason that going anywhere is so goddamn slow
But if people dont want to keep wasting money or time on repairing their ship then yeah, go with a tanky boat
I mainly use the tanky build because its fun. I don’t mind the long travel times. It’s also undeniably the best build for dark sea fishing, since if you don’t get attacked you can stay in the dark sea for as long as you want with a shipbuilder deckhand.
Frrrrrrrr, managed to get me all the massive ocean fish variants when I was luck 4 fishing in the dark sea paired with max crew fishing speed. All I need to get now are warm and cold pond variants but im running out of galleons to buy legendary scales
im ngl if you cant even get 20 sealeds in an hour thats a skill issue
even if you only loot the first range you should still def be able to get 20 in an hour no excuse
i swear some of the islands need to be changed because i’m running 100 agility and still have to skip islands sometimes because they’re too tall. i came across an island that seriously was just an endless spire that i couldn’t even get halfway on top of
atlantean ship spawns should just be chalked up to sheer random number generation because in a full 1-hour run through the insanity 1 range, i only encountered one ketch
