Everything that makes you a stronger captain, plus the full spread of things to collect across the West Indies. Understanding how these systems feed each other — plunder funds upgrades, upgrades unlock harder content, harder content gives the best gear — is the whole game in a nutshell.
The pirate systems
⛵ The Jackdaw
Your ship. Upgrade hull, cannons, mortars, ram and rigging with metal, wood and cloth looted at sea.
🪝 Boarding
Damage a ship to boarding range, then complete objectives (kill the crew, break barrels) to plunder it and optionally add it to your fleet.
⛴️ Kenway's Fleet
Send captured ships on trade routes for extra gold and unique rewards.
🎯 Wanted level
Aggression and restricted zones raise it; hunter ships spawn until you escape or clear it.
🧑✈️ Officers (Resynced)
Three new crew members join the Jackdaw in the remake, each with their own recruitment questline and a permanent ship perk once you win their trust.
Meet the officers
🔨 Lucy Baldwin — Shipwright
Grants Perfect Brace, a timing-based upgrade to bracing that almost completely nullifies incoming broadside damage when timed right.
⚔️ The Padre — Master-at-Arms
Unlocks Ram Dash: the Jackdaw surges forward into a target for heavy collision damage, and he personally joins your boarding parties.
💣 Tobias "Deadman" Smith — Master Gunner
Grants Extra Salvo, an additional broadside volley on a short cooldown, and later unlocks Deadman's Cohort — an alternative Carcass-bomb firing mode for the mortar.
📜 Recruitment timing
Lucy and the Padre become available once you finish Sequence 4's "This Old Cove"; Deadman Smith is tied to the new 'A World Without Gold' chapter and only opens up after Sequence 11.
Collectible types
🎵 Sea Shanties
Floating music sheets your crew learns to sing while sailing.
💰 Buried Treasure
Dig sites found from treasure maps looted around the world.
🗡️ Assassin Contracts
Targeted-kill side missions in the major cities.
⚓ Naval Contracts
Sink or escort objectives out on the open sea.
🏛️ Animus Fragments
Glowing collectibles scattered across islands and rooftops.
How it all connects
Plunder at sea buys Jackdaw upgrades; a stronger Jackdaw lets you storm forts and beat Legendary Ships; those unlock region collectibles and the best gear sets. Rather than grinding one system, sail with purpose — take contracts and shanties on the way to your next fort or hunt, and the map fills itself in.
Reducing your Wanted level
- A Wanted level spawns hunter ships (and forts fire on you) until you clear it.
- Sink the hunter ships flying the red flag, or outrun them and break line of sight.
- On land, bribe a herald or tear down a wanted poster to drop your notoriety.
- Boarding a hunter and choosing 'reduce Wanted level' is the quickest fix at sea.
What else changed for Resynced
- Harbourmasters at each port now handle ship upgrades and repairs — the job the Captain's Cabin menu did in the original 2013 release.
- You can free-dive almost anywhere in open water, and the Diving Bell still covers deeper wrecks — two ways into the same underwater loot.
- Fort assaults run on a dynamic morale system rather than a fixed defender count, so a fort can crumble faster once its garrison starts routing.
- Kenway's Fleet is fully built into the base game this time; the original shipped it as a companion app you needed a second device to run.
- All 35 original Sea Shanties return alongside 10 new ones — 45 in total by ConsolePulse's, bfresynced.com's and VULKK's count, though Vandal's Resynced guide lists 42 shanty sheets — picked from a new in-game shanty wheel instead of playing in a fixed order.
Cross-checked
Cross-checked on 6 September 2026 and re-checked on 26 September 2026 against Ubisoft's own naval-gameplay deep dive for Black Flag Resynced and the guides of KeenGamer and Vandal. What is still unverified is the only thing reading cannot settle — nobody here has played it.