Black Flag's West Indies is stuffed with collectibles, and 100% means gathering them all. Most become trivial once you synchronise a region's viewpoints — 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
- Synchronise every viewpoint in a region first — most 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: synchronise its viewpoints, 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 (Vandal’s Resynced guide lists 42) |
| Animus Fragments | 100 |
| Regular chests | 84 |
| Secrets | 105 |
| Shipwreck chests | 61, across 7 underwater wrecks — counted separately (68 with the 7 secret ones; Vandal’s wreck-by-wreck count comes to 66 with them) |
«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 a viewpoint sync, so they are the one category the sweep above will not pick up as you sail —
see diving and shipwrecks.
Still to verify
Cross-checked on 5 September 2026 against ConsolePulse, bfresynced.com and VULKK — which agree on the Resynced totals: 45 Sea Shanties (35 classic plus 10 new), 100 Animus Fragments, 84 regular chests, 105 Secrets, and the 61 shipwreck chests tracked separately across the 7 dive sites. They also differ from the 2013 game and are the figures most likely to move again with a patch, so a mismatch in-game still means this table has aged. Re-checked on 26 September 2026 against Vandal’s Resynced guide, which lists 42 shanty sheets and 66 shipwreck chests; the table now gives both counts rather than picking one. Re-checked on 26 September 2026 against EliteGuias' and Vandal's Resynced guides, which reveal collectibles by synchronising viewpoints; the tips that told you to buy regional map upgrades now say that. What is still unverified is the only thing reading cannot settle — nobody here has played it.