preface: i know i yapped a fair bit, there’s a TLDR at the bottom if you wanna skip it all.
With the introduction of the fleet system, I can’t help but feel that charting, as a whole, is mostly useless. That is, until you hit level 7+ charting where you can suddenly unlock mythical or even lost charts. Assuming that the fleet system will never give you gilded gear or lost knowledge, I’m glad that charting at least has these incentives to try and get players to dig around for treasure because outside of that? Unless you’re trying to rapidly level up a new file, you’re kind of just shit out of luck when it comes to finding genuinely interesting items. Exploring with the new fleet system naturally nets you lots of modified items, which disincentivizes any reason to chart on your own after you get a half decent fleet, unless you want to go through the absolute slog that would be grinding out all of charting to charting level 7 or 10 to get the new gilded gear (which people are questioning the usefulness of outside of the existence of gilded envoy due to the questionable efficiency) and lost knowledge. So, with that entire ranty paragraph out of the way, I think one of the best ways we could go about this is to give anybody who’s charting an incentive to go charting that can never be replicated by the fleet system (not counting reputation for guilds).
I got inspired by the new cargo rarities found at ship wrecks and thought:
Why not make it so that you can get new rarities of sealed chests too?
As you do higher and higher tiered charts, you could get regular old sealed chests, or you could get new rarities (names are not final) scaling from archaic, to vintage, to bountiful, to regal, and finally, gilded.
I imagine it would work in a way similar to how new chest rarities are functioning right now, with better “sealed” chests providing either more resources, or possibly even entirely new items that can’t be gotten in any other way that are a pretty good sidegrade to some of the best ship parts in the game, essentially acting as the ship part equivalent of sunkens, or lost equipment.
Also, as a final note, I think it could even be interesting if modified ship parts were added that had no stat benefits over regular ship parts. Instead, they would exist for drip purposes alone, because otherwise it’d just be a race of everyone trying to get a full set of turning speed or sailing speed ship parts, and then being done with maxing out their ship. On top of this, I would suggest adding ship vanity slots for parts.
TLDR: Charts can now give new rarities of sealed chests similarly to new cargo rarities/new chest rarities that could have new really rare but powerful ship parts for really rare sealed chests, add modified ship parts with no stat bonuses that look different to let people make a more unique looking ship, none of that should be gotten from the fleet system.