Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag – How to Find Metal
If you’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag, you’ve probably come to realize that upgrading the Jackdaw is very important. With that realization came another interesting fact, you need a lot of metal to get the upgrades you want. You probably looked around and spotted a few ships here and there with some metal, but when you checked the upgrade list to see just how much metal you needed, it was probably a bit disheartening to see you had nowhere near enough.
Metal is the most commonly used commodity to upgrade your ship in Assassin’s Creed 4. Unfortunately, it’s also the hardest to find. Even when you find ships with a lot of metal, you can’t take them down early on because they’re usually high level. Don’t worry, Prima Games has your back. We’ve come up with a few ways to earn metal in Assassin’s Creed 4.
Warehouses
With every major town you visit, find the viewpoints and synchronize so you have a view of the entire map. Once that’s done, you can find all of the warehouse locations. Make sure you stop by every warehouse because many of them have a hefty supply of metal. These are also mini-missions that you can repeat over and over as long as you wait a little for the mission to respawn. You can even find a few treasure chests or take on assassin contracts while you wait.
The key with warehouses is that they’re relatively easy to infiltrate, and you can do so early in the game. You’ll need to upgrade the Jackdaw early and often if you want things to be easier as you progress through the naval battles in the main story missions. The easier it is to acquire metal, the better off you’ll be.
Raise Your Wanted Level
You can always go after the super strong ships to find a large amount of metal, but that means you need a heavily upgraded Jackdaw, which is the whole purpose for the metal in the first place. However, early on you can ambush smaller ships for a little bit of metal. Use the spyglass to determine the contents of each ship before you engage. Don’t waste time attacking ships that don’t have metal, unless you simply can’t find any ships housing metal at the time.
The more ships you take down, the higher your wanted levels gets. Once it reaches a high enough level, you’ll alert local authorities and hunting ships will come after you. These hunting ships almost always have a good amount of metal in their hull, and they never stop coming for you as long as you don’t clear your wanted level. If you’re in the lower level waters, the hunting ships won’t be too difficult to overcome, even when you’re surrounded by several at once.
Hunt Stronger Ships
Of course, the most lucrative way to obtain metal is to take down the higher level ships located in the hard difficulty areas. These should be your targets once you’ve upgraded the most important areas of the Jackdaw two or three times. At this point, not only will you have a stronger ship, but you’ll also be in need of much larger quantities of metal.
The smaller ships and even the hunter ships won’t offer enough to meet your need unless you take down a ton of them. This is when you head to the hard areas and take on the higher level ships. Make sure you continue to use the spyglass to examine each ship; even the higher level ships vary in level and supplies. Start with the lowest of the high level ships and work your way up as you continue to upgrade the Jackdaw.
