Last night a friend and I did a long session, travelling from island to island digging up treasure (the riddle maps are fun to do!) and following the quest’s we’d find in bottles along the way.
We had a quest to take out 4 skeleton pirate captains on Scorched Pass. First time we’d travelled into the volcanic area. We pulled up to the target island and not only had to battle strong enemies but also the elements as geysers would randomly burst underneath your feet on the island launching you high into the air and damaging you as you land.
We carried on the battle, kiting back to the ship for food and ammo to sustain us when the nearby volcano erupted and sent flaming rocks flying into the air. These started to rain down and the next thing we knew our shop was on fire. The hull was also damaged and taking on water from the impact of the rocks. Frantically we bailed the water and threw it on the fires on deck. Once the ship was safe we carried on our bounty quest, the neighbouring volcano having gone quiet.
Much later after collecting treasure from a wreck and the local islands we sailed our heavily laden ship to an outpost to sell off the riches. Just as we were approaching the outpost the Megalodon reared it’s head. No ways a crew of 2 of us, on a 3 player ship, would be able to defeat him and with all this loot we didn’t even want to risk it so we ran. Soon we came close to the shallower water around the island and the mega shark left us alone. But now we were going too fast to stop in time and despite dropping the anchor in haste our ship launched itself up over a piece of land, scraped along some rocks and got stuck in a small pool of water hemmed in by rocks. It was completely stuck, but stable at least, so we started offloading.
We were about halfway in selling our treasures when the game decided the ship was unrecoverable and needed to be reset. Pop! No more ship and we lost our grade 4 emissary status before we could lower the flag and collect the bonus. Still a good haul but not quite what it could have been.
We were left with a reaper’s bounty chest and 2 emissary flags (one our own) which we could then sell to the Reapers faction for big money. The problem was our ship had respawned somewhere else on the vast map. My friend used the friendly mermaid teleport system to get back to our ship while I was tasked with guarding the remaining items. The Reapers bounty chest being a highly desirable item.
Our woes continued in that my friend was many nautical miles away with the ship and after a good long wait for him, he realised he’d been sailing to the wrong outpost, in the wrong direction 
With it being so late we decided to cut our losses and head to bed. Another crew had logged in and spawned at the island I was on. They were using text to speech to communicate and at first were crying out “Enemy!” I used the in-game gestures to indicate I was friendly and though wary they relaxed. I decided to give them the bounty chest so they could at least benefit from turning it in. I picked it up and carried it onto their ship, earning a point towards a generosity achievement.
I had to laugh at their words as they prepared to sail off. The one guy said, “Come with us!”
The other responded: “No.”
And added, “He is the protector of this island. He must stay.”
