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Black Flag is the Assassin's Creed game where the ship is the character. The Jackdaw is the tool you use to reach almost everything, and it is also the thing almost everything is for, which produces the loop the whole game runs on: a stronger ship takes a fort, the fort unseals the water around it and lets that region's treasure maps surface, the maps lead to plans, and the plans make the ship stronger. Work out where you currently sit in that loop and the Caribbean stops being a wall of icons.
What is locked, and when it opens
A surprising amount of this game is unavailable at the start, and knowing the schedule prevents a lot of wasted sailing. Harpooning arrives after the third sequence. Kenway's Fleet arrives in the fourth, and needs you to be online. The Blowpipe, which half the side content quietly assumes you are carrying, unlocks after Sequence 4 as well. No dive site in the game opens until you have played Diving for Medicines, which sits well into the sixth sequence, so anyone hunting ship parts before that is looking at a locked diving bell.
The Templar Hunts wait on something different again: they only begin once Great Inagua is yours. And the Assassin Contracts open around Havana but are not really playable until you have darts to put in the Blowpipe, because every target in all thirty of them stands inside a Restricted Area where a casual hidden blade kill is off the table. Our mechanics guide walks the seven side systems in the order their gates open.
Forts are the hinge of the whole game
There are ten naval forts and they are the single most consequential thing on the map, because taking one permanently opens the restricted water around it and only then do that region's treasure maps appear. Each fort is fought twice over: first from the deck, shelling the outer defences until they collapse, then on foot, killing one to three Captains to reach the Fort Commander.
They come in three tiers, and the tier tells you what the Jackdaw needs to be wearing. Three are easy enough for a nearly stock ship. Four in the middle want reinforced armour and better guns. The last three assume elite parts, and two of them sit in permanent storms that throw off your aim while a third turns stormy partway through the fight. Go ashore with smoke bombs, loaded pistols and blowpipe ammunition. Coordinates and routes for all ten are in our locations guide, which also covers the dive sites, the eight taverns and the warehouse rotation.
Twelve plans, and where they hide
Ship upgrades come from design plans, and the twelve elite ones are what separate a serviceable Jackdaw from a ship that can take a Level 3 fort and a legendary vessel. They split perfectly in half. Six are in chests inside underwater wrecks, which is why Sequence 6 matters so much. The other six are buried treasure, and those cannot be dug up on knowledge alone: you need the map in hand first, which is the game's way of making the fort campaign a prerequisite for the ship that fights forts.
Maps come from three places. Most are on corpses, several inside Smuggler's Dens, and three arrive only through Kenway's Fleet trading missions. There is also a cheap shortcut people miss: every one of the eight tavern barkeeps will sell you a map's location for 200R once you have won the bar fight, which turns a scenic activity into a shopping trip. Twenty three buried treasures and all twelve plans, with coordinates for both the map and the dig, are in the items guide.
Edward gets his own upgrades
Away from the ship there is a second, much simpler economy. Most cutlasses, pistols and coats are on sale at a general store, and the mannequin in Edward's own cabin aboard the Jackdaw is where you change what he is carrying. A few outfits are crafted out of pelts, which is what the hunting system exists to feed, and three of them unlock just for having older Assassin's Creed save data sitting on your machine.
The pieces worth planning for are the ones no shop stocks. Finishing half the Assassin Contracts gives the Stealth outfit and finishing all of them gives the Pistol Sword. All fifteen Naval Contracts give the Golden Flintlock Pistol. Sixteen Mayan Stones open a door in Tulum for the Mayan outfit. And the four Templar Hunts, plus one key the story hands you, open a cage at Great Inagua containing armour that takes a flat 25 percent off everything that hits him, which is the best defensive item in the game by a wide margin.
Paying for it
Reales are the constraint on all of the above, and the reliable earners are not glamorous. Synchronise viewpoints and the area's treasure chests appear on your map, each worth 100 to 300R for a few seconds of walking. Plunder ships, because the sea restocks endlessly, though check a target's level through the spyglass before committing. Sell the hides and bones you are not crafting with. Contracts pay well and pay a bonus for stealth.
Then there is the hideout, which is the biggest single sink in the game at roughly 90,700R for the full set of eight upgrades. Two of those are worth buying early rather than last, because the Brothel makes hired dancers free and the Campfire lets you take drunk pirates along, and those two are exactly the distraction tools the Assassin Contracts keep asking you to pay for. If you would rather chase the big numbers, the four legendary ships pay 20,000 to 30,000R each, assuming your Jackdaw is ready for them.
Cheats, and getting the PC version running
Black Flag is old enough to still have real cheats, and they are earned rather than typed in. Completing Abstergo Challenges unlocks ten of them in tens, from controlling the day and night cycle at ten challenges up to giving the Jackdaw a skeleton crew at a hundred, taking in invincibility, infinite ammunition and turning every enemy into a Rabbid on the way. The catch is that saving is disabled while any of them is switched on. There is also a well known boarding trick, since the game lets you leave the ship freely: swim across, clear the enemy crew by hand, swim back, and a single shot is then enough to board. All of them are on our cheats, exploits and secrets page.
If the PC version is misbehaving before you get that far, the usual suspects are Uplay rather than the game itself. Blurry interface text, launch failures, screen tearing, frame rate drops on Nvidia hardware, multiplayer crashes and downloads that refuse to start all have known workarounds, collected in our errors, crashes and fixes guide.