Tried it today for 3 hours:

• all big islands seem to have up to 9 (maybe 10?) spawn locations.
• we have had max 5 journals on the same island (all spawned at once)
• OoS bounty is most common, Gold hoarders 2nd place and merchant is rarest of them.
• if you want to grind for merchant stuff ignore "bounty" and "map" - look for "contract"
• island reset did not work for us - so we kept switching servers instead

result after 3 hours:

• 1 keg delivery quest
• all other quests were OoS or Gold Hoarder ;-(

Still very much based on pure chance encounters and luck.
We could have ended up with more merchant quests, but had bad luck today.
Will try it again tomorrow, but this style of playing gets boring quickly, if you don't do other stuff on the way.

@abjectarity sagte in Supply Crate Commendations:

this steam guide should help.

Useful guide. Thanks for sharing. ;-)

We still have some guild members, that are trying to grind out those delivery quests.
We might try to grind it via those journals and see how that works out for us. :-)

@abjectarity thanks a ton. super helpful

@tootie1411 limited data right now so can't check youtube, but this steam guide should help. It talks about all the commendations you can use the journals. Basically get to one of the locations and check the spots, if none give the merchant then go to a different island.

@abjectarity i found this thread because i had the same issue trying to finish off merchant commendations. I searched it a couple different ways, but cant find much on the mysterious journals on youtube. No shot you have a link you could post in here is there?

@abjectarity Okay, thanks. I think I know what you’re talking about now

@renee-le-mom yes, the voyages from the table are different than you'd find in the mysterious journals or bottles

@abjectarity are these different from the merchant quests you can get off the captains table?

There’s these things called “mysterious journals” that give quests like how a bottle does. They are located on specific islands around the seas and they have been the best method of grinding these voyages for a couple years or so. There should be a tutorial on YouTube about it. With diving added to the game it should actually be slightly easier because you can dive directly to the islands to look for these journals.

The YouTube video should explain the rest but you basically look for them until you find one that gives these merchant voyages and you reset the island over and over to pick up a few. Sometimes the journal will stay a few resets so you can get more than one delivery, but sometimes they disappear after the first reset.