A strong Jackdaw trivialises the map, so spend your plunder here before anything else. Upgrades need metal, wood, cloth and reales — all of which flow from the ships you sink and board.
Priorities
- Hull Armour first — survivability lets you fight bigger, richer prey.
- Broadside Cannons and the Ram for raw offence.
- Mortar and Swivel Guns for range and clean boarding setups.
- The final elite upgrades need Ultimate Upgrade Plans, which come from shipwreck dives and treasure maps.
Upgrade tree
🛡️ Hull & Ram
More health and a stronger ram — the foundation for taking on frigates and forts.
💣 Cannons & Mortar
Broadsides, heavy shot and mortar upgrades scale your damage across every fight.
⚙️ Elite upgrades
The top-tier hull, cannons and mortar each need an Ultimate Upgrade Plan, found at dive sites and in treasure-map chests.
⚓ Cosmetics
Sails, figureheads and wheels are pure flair — buy them once the combat upgrades are done.
Funding upgrades
Metal and wood come from boarding merchant ships; reales come from selling cargo and running contracts. Convoys (three-ship groups) are the richest early targets — disable the escorts, board the loaded merchantman, and one fight can fund a whole tier of upgrades.
Where blueprints come from
- Underwater shipwrecks (via the diving bell) hold many of the elite upgrade plans.
- Storming a naval fort reveals region loot and opens that region's Fleet missions, but the plans are not fort rewards.
- The rest of the twelve plans sit in buried treasure-map chests, not on Legendary Ships.
- Buy any remaining upgrades with reales from selling cargo and running contracts.
What a fully upgraded Jackdaw costs
Worth knowing the whole bill before you decide what to skip, because the plans at the end are
not something you can buy your way to.
| Resource | Total for every upgrade |
|---|---|
| Reales | 315,800 |
| Metal | 4,755 |
| Wood | 2,750 |
| Cloth | 550 |
| Ultimate Upgrade Plans | 12 |
Sources put this Reales total at 309,800 (PowerPyx's Ultimate Upgrade Plan guide) or 315,800 (PowerPyx's
ship-upgrade guide, which counts buying the Diving Bell). The bell costs 5,000, so it explains 5,000 of the 6,000 gap;
no source accounts for the other 1,000. The Metal, Wood and Cloth totals agree
exactly across both.
In Resynced you can only upgrade while docked, at a port’s
Harbourmaster. And the Harbourmaster itself has three levels, each unlocking a further tier
of upgrades — so a tier you cannot see is not a resource problem. Upgrade the shop at Great
Inagua, which opens after Sequence 04 – Mission 01: This Old Cove. That mission is the real
gate on this whole page.
The twelve plans, and where they split
| Six of them | The other six |
|---|---|
| Underwater chests at shipwreck dive sites, once Sequence 06 – Mission 01: Diving for Medicines has opened diving | Buried chests, found by decoding Treasure Maps |
Half your elite upgrades are underwater, and that is the half people leave. The
treasure-map six come to you as you sail; the wreck six need a deliberate diving campaign — see
diving and shipwrecks. A Jackdaw stuck one tier short is almost always
missing plans, not reales.
Still to verify
Cross-checked on 5 September 2026 against PowerPyx and allthings.how — which agree exactly on 4,755 Metal, 2,750 Wood and 550 Cloth for a maxed Jackdaw, put the Reales bill within 6,000 of each other (the Diving Bell's 5,000 explains most of the gap), and agree on the three-level Harbourmaster gating at Great Inagua after Sequence 04 – Mission 01: This Old Cove and the 6 + 6 split of the 12 Ultimate Plans. Re-checked on 26 September 2026 against Vandal’s and EliteGuias’ Resynced guides, which place all twelve plans at dive sites and in treasure-map chests; the tips that credited forts and Legendary Ships with plans were corrected. The priority order on this page is still community consensus rather than a stated ranking. What is still unverified is the only thing reading cannot settle — nobody here has played it.