Black Flag's West Indies is stuffed with collectibles, and 100% means gathering them all. Most become trivial once you buy the region map upgrades — here's every type, what it's worth, and the painless way to sweep them.
The collectibles
🎵 Sea Shanties
Floating music sheets on the water; sail through them. Your crew sings the ones you collect — the easiest type.
💰 Buried Treasure
Dig sites found by decoding treasure maps looted from chests and ships across the world.
🏛️ Animus Fragments
Glowing motes on rooftops and islands — pure collectible count for completion.
📜 Manuscripts & plans
Mayan stelae rubbings, chest maps and upgrade plans that feed gear and the big quests.
🎁 Chests
Reales and crafting materials in towns, forts and underwater — the bread-and-butter loot.
Sweeping them efficiently
- Buy every region's map upgrade first — collectibles then appear as icons, so no blind hunting.
- Capture a region's fort to reveal its viewpoints and surrounding collectibles.
- Grab shanties and chests opportunistically as you sail between missions.
- Bank treasure maps and dig their sites when you're passing nearby rather than backtracking.
Region-by-region approach
- Work one region at a time: buy its map upgrade, take its fort, then sweep.
- Do the fort first so viewpoints and collectible icons light up the map.
- Use a fast route that chains shanties, chests and contracts in a single loop.
- Tick each region to 100% before moving on so nothing gets forgotten.
How many of each, in Resynced
Do not use a 2013 guide for these numbers. Resynced changed them, and the
old totals are still the ones you will find first: the original had 200 Animus Fragments, this has
100. Every figure below is the Resynced one.
| Type | How many |
|---|---|
| Sea Shanties | 45 — the 35 classics plus 10 new ones |
| Animus Fragments | 100 |
| Regular chests | 84 |
| Secrets | 105 |
| Shipwreck chests | 61, across 7 underwater wrecks — counted separately |
«Secrets» is a bucket, not a type. It folds together Treasure Map pickups,
Bottled Letters and the larger Special Chests — the ones holding equipment, manuscripts, cosmetics, Art Pieces,
trinkets, Map Pieces and Ultimate Plans. So a Secret can be anything from a scrap of paper to a Jackdaw upgrade, which
is why the count is worth clearing rather than skimming.
The 61 shipwreck chests are tracked on their own. They sit behind the diving
bell rather than the map upgrades, so they are the one category the sweep above will not pick up as you sail —
see diving and shipwrecks.
Still to verify
The Resynced totals. They differ from the 2013 game and are the figure most likely to move again with a patch, so a mismatch in-game means this table has aged. Written from public sources, not from a playthrough.