As a peaceful fisherman, sailing the Sosarian seas, you may be attacked by sea serpents. Defend yourself as best you can and kill these beasts. You might consider skinning them for their horned leather. They have little useable loot, but as you open the corpse you may see what appears to be a bottle of ale.
Do not disregard this seemingly worthless prize. Click your mouse on it, for it may not be ale at all, it may be a message in a bottle (often referred to as a MiB). Double click the bottle to remove the message, an SOS from a ship in distress. Such bottles may also be recovered from kraken drawn up from the sea bed by throwing a fishing net.
There’s treasure from that ship, you could sail out and fish it up, but it may be a more worthwhile endeavour to collect messages until you have several.
A Fishing Expedition
First, open all your messages and note the locations. Mark the locations with pins on a world map as best you can in classic client, or create ‘waypoints’ on your map if you have the enhanced client. Then decide on where to launch your boat and the best course for you to follow.
Before you set sail ensure you have with you:
*The bag with the sos messages
* a sextant to find the location
* your fishing pole
These may seem obvious, but it’s surprising how often a fisherman has had to recall back home because one of these items were forgotten.
When you arrive near to the first location you can begin fishing. It is not necessary to be exactly on the spot, if the ‘degrees’ are right the ‘minutes’ are less important. Unlike treasure chests on land there are no guardians, though it is possible to fish up the odd sea serpent just as with normal fishing. Nor is there any trap on the chest when you have it.
If you pull up a fish, you’re not in the right spot,check your sextant. If you are in the right spot either the chest will come up or you will begin getting ‘pre chest loot’. Pre chest loot comprises of a selection of footwear, clothing, body parts, bones, paintings or furniture all bearing the tag ‘Recovered from a Shipwreck’. Each of these items, and the empty chest, has a value of 100 points in the ‘clean up britannia’ system if you have no other use for them.
When the treasure chest is fished up the hunt is complete. The sos message will disappear and no further items will be recovered.
Chests from normal sos messages are random level 1 – 3. They contain the following items:
- Level 1 Chests
– 10000 gold, 2-6 magic items, 2-5 scrolls, 10 gems, 15-20 reagents - Level 2 Chests
– 20000 gold, 10-15 magic items, 10-15 scrolls, 20 gems, 25-40 reagents - Level 3 Chests
– 30000 gold, 15-20 magic items, 20 scrolls, 30 gems, 20-40 reagents
Chests may also contain:
- A treasure map of the same level as the chest
- A fishing net, green or, rarely, colored
- Armor Refinement Components
- rare treasure items
When opening a message bottle, on rare occasions, a scroll so ancient that it has been bleached white is revealed. There is roughly a 4% chance that a mib will contain this special item. The chest is also white and contains:
- level 4
– 40000 gold, 38 magic items, 16 scrolls, 12 gems, 12 stacks of reagents
Inside these chests, in addition to the normal items, are:
- Ancient Aquarium Fishing Nets, which allow a fisherman to catch rare creatures for an aquarium.
- Live Rock, used by a carpenter to craft 3 special aquariums
- Salted Serpent Steaks, an ingredient needed by a cook to craft Charybdis Bait
- and, if you’re lucky, Ocean Sapphires, a resources that a tinker can use to craft an Oracle of the Sea, used to find Charybdis.
The chest will also contain a fabled fishing net. This net can lead to adventures that could make your hair as white as the chest, for in addition to the sea monsters pulled up from a normal net you will most certainly net a Leviathan and sometimes (approx 1:8 chance), instead, you will be blessed (or cursed?) with a visit from Osiredon the Scalis Enforcer. For this encounter you will need a fleet of ships with cannons and an army of helpers.
On very rare occasions you will be surprised by fishing up, instead of the expected chest, a ship’s strongbox. This small grey box, like the treasure chests, has 3 different levels and contains
- 10K gold per difficulty level
- Regular Gems 20 per level
- Big Gems (Difficulty *5 + random 0-4)
- Gold or Copper Ingots
White strongboxes from ancient sos messages containing 40,000 gold plus gems etc are possible, but extremely rare.