Pixel Piracy Strategy Guide, General Tips and Multiple Choice Paths.

This guide focuses on general tips and strategies to guide players through the early stages of Pixel Piracy. This will be used as a community based guide as I will be using alot of ideas from the devs, players and other members of the community of Pixel Piracy.

Introduction

I’ve been playing Pixel Piracy for A rather numerable sum of time on Steam and counting and I love it, love the concept, the style, the gameplay and the content. However as a new player I suffered greatly and this hindered my opinion on the game but I pushed through it, and here I am.

This is MY strategy and tips, however I will be glad to share other players ideas, fully credited to them off course. This is not a PRO guide though, rather a general guide to easy or mediocre and maybe hard strategies. It’s to get new and growing players more into the much deeper sections of the game. Pixel Piracy appears as a rogue-like pixel piracy simulation game, however there is much more to it than just ordering your crew to grapple, buying and selling and navigating.

FAQ

This section is dedicated to helping the very new players to understand the game mechanics until an appropriate tutorial is implemented.

How do I enslave someone?
To obtain a slave you require a shackle placed on your ship, they can be bought from a ship store. A crew is classed as a fighter when you teach them a fighter skillbook. E.G Basic parrying, you can tell when they are classed as a fighter and eligible to capture a slave when they have a little sword icon on their info box in the crew menu.

How do I operate the Cannons?
Crew will automatically load and fire the cannons provided you have cannonballs placed on the ship, they also require to be taught the cannoneer/cannonball skill from the cannon skillbook, which can be acquired from a book shop. You can also set them to fire cannons or not within the crew menu and by clicking on them, at the bottom there is the "Fire Cannon" button, clicking this will toggle whether they will fire the cannons or not.

How do I plunder and scuttle a empty ship?
Once you have completely killed the enemy crew, you can plunder and scuttle it by clicking the plunder button.

Bugs are spawning in my ship, help!?
Spiders will spawn from webs which grow on wood walls in dark areas of your ship, they can be stopped by lighting up every corner with lamps. Although they do not stop the webs they stop the spiders from spawning. Lamps can be bought from one of the shops at a dock. The shop looks like the food shop however you can see a lantern in it.

How do I open a chest?
There is an interact button in the bottom right along with all the other buttons and you must click it while your captain stands on a chest, doing so will result in the showering of glorious loot.

How do I clean up poop?
You must train a crew with a cleaning book purchased from the book store which is identifiable by its golden gong in the dead-centre.

What is TP and how do I use it/them?
Training Points are used to increase the skills of your crew, individually they gain experience when they level up in which you can spend points on their skills by going into the crew setup clicking on them and clicking the yellow arrows above the desired skill you wish to level up.

How do I interact with shop keepers?
By walking up to them and pressing space or esc.

How do I teach my crew how to do particular task?
Task such as cleaning, carpentry and cooking can be bought from the shop with the bookshelves and the big golden gong thing at the top middle, upon purchasing them they will appear as a book in your inventory. You can teach your crew by going into crew setup, selecting the crew you wish to teach and then clicking on the equip passive and choosing the desired book. That crew now knows how to do something! Yay! This will also cost you TP from that individual crew member.

The UI confuses me? What is this?
The UI is designed to be very player friendly and easy for you to use within small spaces of time, especially during quick fights or events. The boxes at the top record particular statistics such as crew count, certain crew members such as cannoneers and boarders, crew that are training with specific ship items and also captured animals.

The Orange buttons are as goes from left to right
Move- Moves your captain and any willing crew to target location
Attack- Orders your captain to attack that particular unit
Interact- Used to open chests and interact with certain landmarks that are within range of your captain
Plunder- Plunders current encounter [Provided the enemies have been defeated]
Capture-Captures current encounter ship [Provided the enemies have been defeated
Mount Animal- Mounts an animal into a cage.




I'm not gaining anything from encounters?
Islands are the best source of loot, although some encounters do give decent loot it is much more efficient to raid islands, however islands are very difficult to raid early on it is heavily advised to gather a considerably decent crew with mediocre stats and some healing items before engaging island inhabitants. If you are still having trouble you can buy a book from the book store which will increase your percentage of loot gain from chests. [Must be taught to captain]



If I left out something, be sure to ask about it in the comment section, I will gladly put it up here for more players to see.

General Tips

When you purchase crew always check their bios to see what kind of pirate they are, it can help.

Grindstones are still very valuable, either spend them early or save them for later.

Lanterns get rid of those nasty spiders that spawn in the enclosed sections of your ship, though buggy you may need to light up every corner to keep safe. But you get a bug-free ship.

Weapons worth a large sum of gold should be rather powerful, such as hammers and katana's.

Food can be difficult until you get a working fishermen and cook which can be remedied by buying a fishermens book and cook book to train two eligible crew members to be said Cook or fishermen. Fishermen require a fishing rod equiped to fish.

Pay attention to relations in a crew. Watch what crew members are talking about, as of another patch watch the faces above their heads, this will tell you significantly how they are thinking. (Vitali Kirpu)

A good early crew is 1-5, medium is 5-8 and large is 8-15 and huge is 15-20.

A crewmembers stats that determine his or her's strengths and weakenesses can be determined by the name or description of their class and/or backstory. E.G, If the backstory claims that he was a Samurai in his past he will have bonus Strength and/or Agility. Again, Let's say their backstory claims that they were a wizard, then you would expect him to have a large sum of bonus Wisdom. Keep in mind these bonuses's will in-fact scale with the level that you buy them at.

Chickens will drop feathers which give 100+ XP to the given crew member, but they can be tough feathery ♥♥♥♥♥ to handle late game.

Apart from crew getting off your ship and going to a tavern, your crew will also occasionally get a free upgrade from a blacksmith if there is one at the location. Such methods could allow camping at a town for many free upgrades provided you have enough food to do so. Crew must have their salary paid for them to do this.

Oysters will drop their shells, thus making them semi-more important to farm, although you should only farm them have you the provided food for your crew, farming them at the village with a tavern is a must! They sell for large sums of gold to the book shops.

Some small but useful information.

• DO NOT fight tribal men without healing items
  
• Food can be administered mid fight.
  
• Crab meat is pretty dam valuable, gives that nice instant 5hp. Hanfy in deadly fights.
  
• Grindstones are still a very valuable item, buffs weapons which is pretty dam good, if you are having trouble fighting don’t be afraid to use them otherwise save them for higher tier gear.
  
• Crew that costs a lot of money is always worth it, they will always have good stats or class and trait bonus’s. But alot of salary.

OTHER Strategies

Here are community strategies, some might be short, some might be small, some might be for specific conditions or area's of the game. Anyways. Enjoy!

By CannonsMcChop-
Split half your crew between Ship Crew and Boarders, give the Boarders nice stuff (Kaboom, Falcon Blade, etc.) for combat as they will do most of the fighting. Have your captain and the Crew with ranged weapons and things such as the Brutalizer. They will fend off attackers that come onto your ship. When on an island, send the entire she-bang out there.

Update Notices

Patch 0.4.2.1: Crossed MY Strategy out, waiting for fixes and tweaks before developing new strategy, also renamed General questions and answers to FAQ, changed a few Answers in there. Waiting on a patch with tweaks as food is a bit unfair at the moment :(


As of patch 0.4.4.1
Changed FAQ questions, added crew picture, removed and added some general tips, changed MY strategy. Morale system is a bit unbalanced sorry if you're having trouble with any advice regarding this mechanic in the game.

As of patch 0.4.5.0
Added in new general questions, created a notification on the MY strategy section, Tweaked small things, not much as last patch seemed to balance the game, although there is a ton of new stuff to explore. Ship building guide removed as there is already another guide that has it, +My pictures are a bit messed up. Sorry if you were relying on it, although it may be better for players to build their own ships.

As of 0.5.0.4
Added in some contributed information, will be adding in FAQ content and updating old questions and answers aswell as tweaking general tips.
-Added in how to enslave someone.
-Added in how to operate cannons.

As of PATCH 0.8.5
Wiped Strategies area, if you have a strategy for new players that you wish to share feel free to contribute via adding me or by posting in the comments

Wiped MY Strategy and moved the latter to Tips.
Changed some outdated information in the Tips section.
New UI explanation in Tips.
FAQ Updated.

Contributors

People who contributed with informational purposes on the guide.

• Shyguy
  
• Dagg
  
• Skyzzor
  
• Elforia
  
• CannonsMcChop

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[Ravensoul]

@overlord6644, a bit of a late answer but it's been mentioned that one (it's random which if you have multiple) ultimate will fire off when you are under 20% health. I have not tested this though.

[P3nguinza]

to get pets, use the pet cage throwing item from the weapons shop, 15% chance to capture pet when hit

[overlord6644]

what do ultimate skills do, how do they work? do they automatically trigger mid combat?

[Kawwaiicat]

How do I get pets?

[Blackhaz :D]

What can i do with spider venom?

[Setso1]

@ThatHighGuy He probably has scurvy. Pressing space will give you information about you crews health. If a health bar has a shield symbol above that person has scurvy. Either give them a food that says it has vitamins. in their passive slot or put fruit/citrus or any other fruit that says it has vitamins on your ship.

[Kyfa]

I NEED help, My pirate captin just randomly starts taking damage and within about 30 minutes just drops dead is there something I need to do?

[[6-4] Kek~]

in FAQ

[[6-4] Kek~]

[this is a B]I'm not gaining anything from encounters?[/b]

It shows as a small b and the message with a /b at the end... glitch?

[Stealthkibbler]

Thank you for the compliment, I do apologise for not updating this guide that much but I am glad to see people still find it useful.