sea doggies... to each his own

[herknewz]

something worth mentioning is that if you plan to dive head-first into the world of Sea Doggos/Caribbean Legend, it’s important to note that the community has been around for over 20 years in various forms: the Russian one has been around for a while, but the English one is fragmented and weirdly cliquey in certain respects.

the two major English-speaking ones are PiratesAhoy!, which is where most end up going and a lot of good stuff is documented there, and Buccaneer’s Reef (not really active, presumably having switched to Discord) which is where a few other major projects are hosted and archived, such as Historical Eras, which is basically this massive mod that has been worked on for ages, but the guy who hosts that site has issues and shut down the site and put into archive mode for whatever reason; that massive diatribe that iguferon showed in a video sits there because the project lead for Historical Eras got upset over whatever: Full Correspondence between PA! and MK -

There’s also numerous mod projects doing variations of the same thing, such as overhauling Sea Dogs 2 - which was the first major exposure for many western players to the world of Sea Dogs (and was also licensed by Disney because they approached Akella’s in-house dev studio and said ‘hey can you name this Pirates of the Caribbean for the western release and put in something vaguely related to the movie’), and Akella didn’t say no because they wanted the money. Most of the documentation or resources for these mods are horribly organized and you have to go on a goose chase to find most of the information or assets related to these projects. If you’ve been in something like the STALKER modding community for a while, which tends to archive and document things in exhaustive detail, this is can give a bit of cultural shock since no one has really bothered to make an comprehensive mod archive for Sea Dogs-related content that puts everything in one comprehensive resource.

The Russian community is mostly relegated to numerous forums, and there’s a lot of legitimately great resources on them for mods or information related to more obscure quests or mechanics related to the retail games, but one of the major forums - Corsair’s Harbor - has this staring at you as soon as you go onto it:

“Dear forum members! Please refrain from any negative statements regarding the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation. Public actions aimed at discrediting the use of the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation to protect the interests of the Russian Federation and its citizens, and to maintain international peace and security, fall under the provisions of the Code of Administrative Offenses of the Russian Federation. The forum adheres to the laws of the Russian Federation. Any public negative statements regarding the Special Military Operation are considered extremism, and violators will be banned. Any actions that could harm the image Armed Forces of the Russian Federation are unacceptable.”

this stands out because none of the major non-English STALKER forums (read: Russian, Ukrainian, etc) have something like this because most of them try to be as neutral as possible for anyone from the ex-USSR to hang out, chill, and talk about mod projects or whatever. There’s some sincerely great resources on this forum, but seeing this warning presumably put on by some overly patriotic moderator certainly is an experience.

[iguferon]

[iguferon]

new horizons is crazy

these random encounters are intense…a spanish patrol got sucked into it and the wind was bad so we all ended up trying our hardest to not run aground while struggling to move anywhere

what a great looking game

[Tulpa]

@herknewz

this stands out because none of the major non-English STALKER forums (read: Russian, Ukrainian, etc) have something like this because most of them try to be as neutral as possible for anyone from the ex-USSR to hang out

lmao the one thing I do when I go to any russian forum is search the most common anti-ukrainian slurs and if I see more than three examples in the results I never visit the site again.

So far, there have been zero russian-language stalker fansites that survive this test

One of the big ones even had a regular poster who had a slur as his username

[herknewz]

i’ll have to try this next time go to one of them

[iguferon]

Yesterday I played some new horizons briefly because they switched from the maelstrom engine to … another independent effort to add dx9 to the city of abandoned ships engine … and I wanted to see what makes this project so compelling there need to be three separate forks of it. well as far as I can tell so far it is just a worse version of what existed before. I’m sure it’ll get fixed but as of right now there are memory leaks and FPS issues that were not there before in the old maelstrom version.. the guy responsible for this version said “anyone can code these days” but uh, I don’t think that’s true.

Anyway new horizons. Its a lot like sea dogs 2025, except the UI was made by a demon so you can only tell which way the wind is blowing based on the flags on your ship. I guess you need to buy a compass and sextant and chronometer so you can actually see where you are without having to go to the world map. For something with an insanely condescending manual written by old men you think this mod would give you that shit to start, but despite calling you a pussy idiot for wanting to do something other than direct sail everywhere it is extremely hard to manually navigate when you start the game.

I did really like how punishing the wind physics are though. That battle with the three pirates and the two Spanish ships on my side was awesome, because it’s the biggest battle I’ve seen so far in a sea dogs game. The desperation as everyone came frighteningly close to getting smashed up on the rocks…that’s gaming

[iguferon]

Last time on sea doggies our ship exploded and we were forced to persevere. In Santiago we intercede on the local parish’s behalf with some scoundrels. Church robbery is an epidemic in the Caribbean.

We take a passenger from Havana to Belize, where the tavern is full of all sorts..

and then finally arrive in Port Royal to stop for a few days and fix the ship. It’s worth noting Jamaica is in the wrong spot in this game, the Caymans (which is a single island for some reason) and it are spaced out so there isn’t a big empty spot in the middle of the map. Port Royal also features one of the few shipyards in the game that can upgrade ships, specializing in sails, which means they can make your ship go faster or improve your angle of sail. This takes special materials that you can only find in higher end trade fleets. The regular ‘trade caravan’ fleets only have common goods.

More about the smell of freshly planed planks. We repair the ship which takes about three days.

From here it is directly south to Portobelo to rendezvous with the frigate “Warlike.” The captain has no respect for personal space whatsoever.

We offload the cannons and he offers us another job. Sneak into Portobelo and figure out what happened to his agent, along with the whereabouts of the galleon he needed the cannons to sink in the first place.

In the original version of this game this quest basically required you to sneak into the city at night using the jungle and waiting until midnight for the guards near the gate to disappear. Now you can just put on a Dutch flag and moor directly in the port. This quest involves talking to a lot of people. You have to ask a tavern drunk about what’s going on in town to learn that the agent was arrested for asking too many questions about the ship. From there you need to approach a beggar in town and Charles cooks up this whole story about how he’s acting under secret orders from the Spanish governor to find out who wants to sabotage the ship’s launch and why, and pays the beggar to gather information at the shipyard. He finds out it’s because the ship is waiting for a load of gunpowder, Charles pays him and lets him go. I think you can kill him for dishonorable reasons but really there is no reason to.

We report back to the captain.

Obviously now the task is to intercept the gunpowder shipment, arriving on a barquentine named ‘Puebla’, so we go do that. This ship is absolutely worth boarding because the captain’s cabin contains the first musket in the entire game! Here’s me first person view shooting it in the ass with grapeshot to kill the crew to make it easier to board. Even though we have several officers capable of captaining it I sink it cuz it’s not particularly valuable and honestly, fuck the Spanish, they blew up my fucking ship!!

Mission completed. Now the Spanish galleon must depart without its gunpowder and Warlike is free to intercept it. Now that our job is done here and we are 75 doubloons richer, it’s time to return to Fadey.

[iguferon]

[iguferon]

@iguferon

Nobody told me Master & Commander is just miserable Star Trek

naturally New Horizons has playable Jack Aubrey and a meticulously modeled HMS Surprise

[iguferon]

New Horizons:

The premise of the “Gambler” start is that you won a ship in a card game but the guy you won it from is not very happy, and neither are the authorities if you kill his ass. The game does just give you the option to hit the bricks and sail outta there which in retrospect, I probably should have done. So here we are busting out of Spanish prison because it’s just one Sea Dogs duel, how hard could it be…

Seeking aid at the church…

The local padre hates the governor so he’s more than happy to shelter us. We’re going to steal a galleon with his help.

naturally the “disguise” just changes you and your crew into identical clergymen models. lol

free temporary sex change at the catholic church to ring in the year of our lord 1700. I love sea dogs

[herknewz]

it rules that there’s over twenty years of modder’s syndrome in New Horizons to catch up on so there’s a ton of stuff waiting to be discovered

[iguferon]

@herknewz

modder’s syndrome

[iguferon]

I feel like Scumbag Pew

[iguferon]

ok so last time I played I finished up “caribbean in a nutshell” which despite the urgency mostly ended up being a typical fetch quest with a lot of talking. charles was over it, I was over it, not much to say there.

Willemstad, on Curacao, is mostly uneventful, but it would be wrong of me to not mention its excellently named tavern.

I didn’t learn this until yesterday :))) but there is a Dutch East India Company office here that sells maps of the islands, which would be really helpful. We only have a map of Martinique at the moment.

A while ago on our first visit to Port-au-Prince I stopped at the lighthouse to pick some pot leafs and this gave me a quest to investigate the magical healing properties of that good brazilian shit. I’ve been asking alchemists in every town and finally here one pointed me to a lady who knows a thing or two about smoking weed. half the NPCs tell you that smoking pot turns you into a zombie or that spliffs rule, which is helpful in a certain way but we have to talk to a fortune teller to learn the real wisdoms.

Her directions are purposely vague but the lady lives in a hut somewhere near Portobelo. I kinda have an idea of where it is, but I won’t be back that way for a while.

Shout out this great camera angle when I was fuckin around in the jungle somewhere

OK, so now we get to Barbados. I stop at the lighthouse because I’ve learned it’s not just the Guadeloupe guy, all these motherfuckers are sick for rum and I’ve got like 7 bottles to sell. Charles steps onto the wrong beach and this guy instant transmissions up into his shit, indignantly.

The pigs arrive about 10 seconds later, as I’ve come to expect from anything to do with smuggling, and immediately one of them gets a musket ball through the dome.

As usual, nobody knows what’s happening and we right quickly circle around the soldiers so the smugglers try to get us through them, because this fight is bullshit and none of your fighters come ashore with you. Sometimes they get claustrophobic or nervous and simply do not appear when you could actually use their help.

We cannot go anywhere without leaving a pile of bodies stacked up yet this has not affected my reputation or saintly honor. The sniper’s up in the lighthouse, and you just sorta have to run in a serpentine fashion until you get into the tower, and then shoot the guy in the head without going so far up the stairs he shoots you. Normal Sea Dogs BS. This guy is from the “Black Mark” DLC, and he is a complete fucking goof like every other permanent party member we’ve gotten so far:

Tommy’s head hurty and he fought during the English Civil War before ending up here like everyone else with a mysterious past. I’m pretty sure his harquebusier pot helmet is supposed to help evoke Cromwell’s Ironsides troops. He’s kind of an asshole, but I don’t think we’ve met anyone in the Caribbean who isn’t.

Charles and this possible anti-Irish war criminal hit it off famously because they’ve both ended up in their current predicament after cuckolding another man, so after a 150 doubloon charge he joins the crew. I’m happy to give up a chest of the fucking things, because many people don’t know this, but the Spanish Crown insisted on making every coin emit an irresistible miasma that summons gentlemen of fortune to try and fuck you to death every time you go on the world map. It’s great entering a random encounter and seeing a conga line of four pirate ships that are all patiently waiting in queue to have a go at you.

Before we move on from this island, I’ve mentioned taverns a few times now, but Barbados has the greatest one. Hands fucking down.

Gaston Bald-pate runs a great establishment, even if he don’t exactly remember the name.

Return to Basse-Terre. Fadey the Muscovite. Everyone’s favorite! A great dialogue here.

This is blatant Sidorovich behavior. So there’s nothing left to do but get blasted on delicious basement vodka!!

Hilariously, this buries all of Charles’ negative feelings towards Fadey in a matter of hours. Such is the power of the Monolith, when we keep it in our heads and hearts. Airlifting the wish granter out of the NPP and into a cellar in the Caribbean Priboi Story style. Our drinking tolerance actually went up, which absolutely is going to matter at some fucking point.

Now the first leg of the main quest is over and my understanding is that there’s this whole quest line called “The Last Lesson” involving the guy who gave us a tour of Saint-Pierre all the way at the start of the game. It was DLC for To Each His Own but it is mandatory here. I won’t be starting it right away cuz there is some other stuff I want to do first without getting railroaded onto a timer, like Tommy’s personal quest (which takes 3 weeks after recruitment to even start!) and maybe even look for the first legendary ship because I’m almost rank 8.

Also I saved a lady from rapists and she fucked Charles afterwards which made some kind of pipe laying stat go up and increased his vitality so lol. The healing power of pussy. You lose honor for this but not as much as you gain from saving a woman from being assaulted. The cultural mores of the European are truly strange and fascinating.

[herknewz]

the priboi story reference is incredible. airlifted from the chernobyl npp to some garbage heap

don’t tell anyone this but the monolith’s wish granter has been around for centuries, and it spent a few good years in some russian dude’s basement in the caribbean before ending up in ukraine for whatever reason

[iguferon]

the cutscene cuckold

[iguferon]

hell yeah the developers changed it in 1.7 so officers assigned as vanguard (aka they board with you) can be selected as captains when you take a prize cuz me and another person posted about it in the discord. Right now it is the only officer role that prevents them from doing so despite them being physically present on the captured ship

[iguferon]

I’m having so much fun with this quest to hunt down the Lady Beth I cannot help but post about it before I am finished because I stayed up til 3am yet again yesterday studying this goddamn thing like I’m planning a bank robbery. The ship moves along a fixed route, only remaining in each port for a brief period of time, and trying to intercept the ship at sea is suicide. Attacking the ship in port is both deranged and misguided, because even if you managed to survive taking fire from the fort the captain of the Lady Beth will detonate the ships gunpowder stock and kill both of you when you try to board. It’s been almost a week. The hunt goes on. At some point the ship will deviate from her route…

I will have her! I must have her!!

[iguferon]

Really loving how often I’ll get into some kind of boarding action in this game lately that’s like a hair away from being straight out of the chapter of Master & Commander I’m about to read. Did I use surprise to board a lagging snow and use it to ambush the rest of a trade convoy with my sloop? Yes absolutely, and I can’t even feel smart about it because Jack Aubrey already beat me to the fucking strategy without me knowing it

[iguferon]

one of the funniest things in this game by a country mile is when you successfully board a ship, sink it, and then when you return to the sea both ships spawn inside each other and immediately explode with dozens of hl2 physics sounds, killing you fucking instantly in a huge explosion