Maxing out the Jackdaw: the eleven forts and the legendary ships

Order matters more than skill

Six Jackdaw trophies and a single chain linking them. Done in the wrong order, each one costs three times as much.

The chain runs like this:

1. Not So Little Friend comes on its own, in a mandatory story tutorial. It is the starting point, at 78.1%. 2. Old Ironsides needs the officer Lucy Baldwin. The perfect brace does not exist until you recruit her, so if you try the three braces beforehand nothing happens, because the button does not do what you think. 3. King of the Castle is the 11 forts, and each capture unlocks Kenway Fleet missions. 4. The forts reveal the legendary ships. Until you destroy them, Devil of the Caribbean does not even appear on the map. 5. Ship This — the fully upgraded vessel — is what turns the legendaries from impossible into manageable.

So the real order is: Lucy → easy forts → money → maxed ship → hard forts → legendaries. And Hunter Hunted slots into the middle once you are past half the upgrades.

Where the money comes from

Ship This asks you to max out every component of the vessel, and each one's final upgrade also demands a specific blueprint you have to find. It is the game's most expensive trophy.

Five routes, ordered by actual return:

- The Great Inagua manor. Upgrading it fully makes its chest generate income by itself, periodically. It is the game's only passive source, so it is the first place to spend. - Boarding ships in the hard-difficulty zones and looting the captain's chest. Far more profitable than sinking them. - Capturing the forts. Each pays out and advances King of the Castle along the way. - The underwater wrecks, available from Sequence 6 with the diving bell. - Sending Kenway Fleet schooners out to sell materials.

And the ordering advice that saves the most: spend at Great Inagua first, not on the ship. The sooner the village is restored, the sooner the chest starts paying for everything else. That also closes Business And Pleasure, which asks you to spend 50,000 reales and pops without you noticing.

The eleven forts and the four legendaries

The forts show on the map in red with a tower icon and work in two phases: you destroy their defences from the sea, then storm them on foot, killing soldiers, forcing the gate and beating the captain.

They come in three difficulties, and the map tells you which. Leave the three hard ones — Chinchorro, Serranilla and Charlotte — until you have the mortars maxed: with a half-upgraded ship they sink you in seconds.

The legendary ships appear once the forts are destroyed, and sit at the four corners of the map. It is the trophy most people call the game's hard one, and at 8.4% it is among the lowest — but it has two legitimate shortcuts:

- Drop the difficulty to the minimum. It blocks nothing. - Approach from the stern and stay right behind them, firing. It is the tactic people who have done it keep repeating: from there they return far less fire.

And Hunter Hunted fits here. Wanted level rises by destroying ships, and only beating a hunter at maximum level counts — mid level gives nothing. Wait until the Jackdaw is past 50% upgraded before letting it climb, because at that level the hunters genuinely hit. As a bonus they are the ships that ram of their own accord most often, so they also settle Return The Favor.