Black Powder Merchant and Merchant Forager

I've even started to scour big islands for mysterious journals, and so far haven't found any.

I'm not even sure why there are any other quests in the bottles than delivering kegs and fruit/wood/cannonball crates. 95% of the time i get skeleton captains or cargo delivery, which nobody is looking for because you'd rather do them as voyages with emissary up. The only nice thing you can get otherwise are digs for kingly chests.

@hefty-henri This. Like 75% is skeleton crew voyages and the other small percentages are dig voyages for Kingly treasures.

Would be so awesome if they just added Black Powder Delivery voyages and Fruit Crate voyages to the merchant alliance in Season 14.

@hammerpunch i couldnt agree more its basicslly impossible rn unless you grind a rediculous amount probably 100 hours or more just hoping for rng spawns is a joke

@smuntface Exactly. I occasionally find a mysterious journal but they're not any better regarding the fruit crates nor the black powder quests.

I've seen alot of posts in the forum regarding Black Powder Merchant and Merchant Forager lately so hopefully this is now on the dev teams radar at least.

Grogs up for hoping!

It's 100% on their radar, and must have been for a while because it's been posted about often for seasons. But to quote my support reply, ''we cannot be certain changes will be made''. Why they can't be certain they're going to fix this issue is beyond me, because it's a problem they caused themselves by making these ultra rare, and it's one of the most requested changes on here. I understand they don't want to devote a lot of time catering to something the majority (casual/new) playerbase doesn't care about, but surely the easiest solutions to this just involve tweaking some values or adding/removing already existing quests. Easiest fix is probably just removing skeleton captains and cargo deliveries from bottles. You can do those with voyages so they serve no purpose. Or just tweak the chance to find keg/supply crate deliveries to be much much higher in bottles (and journals, even though coming across those is also super rare).

My solution would be like this;

The Merchant Alliance gets two new quests added in Season 14/15 that can be started from the captains table;

"A vital order from the insignificant MR.CHARLES" - A black gun powder delivery quest that randomizes between delivering 2-10 gunpowder kegs to the Merchant Alliance

"A pressing plea from the pitiful MR.EVANDER" - A fruit crate/wood crate/cannonball crate delivery quest that randomizes between 1-3 crates to deliver to the Merchant Alliance

@hammerpunch Another option is to give the crates and kegs you find in the wild a delivery quest as well, like the plants/rum etc. that you find. Every time you pick up a keg or fruit/wood/cannonball crate, it comes with a delivery note that you can optionally read and deliver on time at the right outpost.

@hefty-henri A great idea, I'd like that too!

@fry9889 I don't mind if they add these to emissary quests as long as it's guaranteed to give you at least one of each crate and a couple kegs, because getting to emi 5 only to find out you rolled low and got 3 wood deliveries would again mean the grind is stacked against some bad RNG

@fry9889 This. RNG is never fun. A grind is okay as long the task in question is fair. With the current system, it can be hundred of hours of even selling 10 kegs/crates which is insane.

I Couldn't agree with you more.
I don`t understand why they only changed to increase rate of The Horn of Fair Winds discovery.
They can add in merchant voyage.

@shinjammin7397 Of course I have the coral bottles for the breath of the seas left to do as well. And now I've found two horn of fair winds on islands instead of my desired bottles over two long separate sessions including many 12+ islands. So it seems that these horns competes with the coral bottles and merchant quests as well. In a bad way for me..