One thing that has helped me once with buying crates was putting up emissary for merchants and getting how ever many commodities for as many crates as you are missing. Though i have only tried it 1 time seasons ago. Its not too often i dont get my crates.

@bleu-solo i am aware that it should be fixed permanently by rare and its not perfect but by propagating this info at least more people can prevent getting fleeced by the merchants

@callmebackdraft Thanks for that. It would still help the masses to have a real solution by Rare that works. Also this trick won't work for non-captained boats. This has been in the game for years it's a bit of a meme at this point.

@bleu-solo

Quick tip:

Always buy merchant crates first, if the merchant then refuses to give you your crates go to the shipwright and buy the shipwright’s supplies.

This will allow you to collect the crates

@procyon-mage yeah it just doesn't make sense to keep the exploit in when they could just sell the crates empty. It just seems like such a brain dead fix to the problem.

@captain-fob4141 I buy fruit supplies specifically for the pineapple. The others are just nice add-ons. I agree there shouldn't be as many pineapples. Maybe 2-4? One for each member of the crew, ship size dependant.

@captain-fob4141 I like this idea. Obviously this issue won't be fixed so they need to find a way to work around it. Wood crates and cannonballs crates could instead be found on islands, skeleton ships etc.

@bleu-solo I wonder if the actual solution is just increasing starting supplies and making the merchant crates empty on sale. I'm not too sure it makes sense for the merchants to supply your ship at all, and if they didn't sell full crates people would stop doing the exploit to buy 10+ of each crate.

200 cannons
15 chain
35 scattershot
15 blunder
25 fire
75 planks
15 of ea fruit except pineapples
Would be reasonable supplies

Yep massive pain, made worse by I think it's been listed as a fixed bug in patch notes 2 or 3 times....

The only thing is it must be difficult with this community's tendency to find and abuse multibuy exploits (there is one still active as far as I'm aware).