How Megalodons and Shrouded ghost works...

Good info. This tracks with most of what I have thought for years. I estimated 10k hours per shrouded, which obviously is not a guarantee regardless.

Killing 5 is a ridiculous commendation that was either poorly thought out with little understanding of how probability works or intentionally meant to never be completed.

This post proves how wildly unfair this commendation is to neurodivergent completionists, because what’s being presented here isn’t a “rare challenge,” it’s a mathematically unfinishable task for a huge chunk of the playerbase. For a lot of autistic, ADHD, or OCD players, completionism isn’t optional flavor content — it’s how we engage with the game — and dangling a commendation that statistically demands 10,000–50,000 hours with zero skill expression, zero agency, and no upper bound isn’t prestige, it’s exclusion by RNG. Effort doesn’t matter, knowledge doesn’t matter, dedication doesn’t matter — you can do everything “right” and still be locked out forever, which is exactly the kind of infinite unresolved goal that causes fixation, burnout, and frustration. Comparing this to shiny Pokémon only makes it worse: those rolls take seconds, not two hours per attempt. “Having a chance” after thousands of kills is not good design, and requiring five Shrouded Ghosts crosses the line from rare into absurd. If a commendation can realistically never be completed by dedicated players who love your game, then it’s not a challenge — it’s a design failure hiding behind statistics.

So basically when u started a session u got a small chance to get a meg on day 1 and the average megalodon timer is day 5 and 6

False. I’ve had a Meg spawn on me two islands away from outpost. First 5min of game

@burnbacon said in How Megalodons and Shrouded ghost works...:

So basically when u started a session u got a small chance to get a meg on day 1 and the average megalodon timer is day 5 and 6

False. I’ve had a Meg spawn on me two islands away from outpost. First 5min of game

Did you read what he typed before responding? He said you have a SMALL CHANCE on day 1. Just because it happened to you within 5 minutes of loading in ONCE does not disprove what he said. What are you even talking about? Why have the mods allowed you to say this kind of stuff for years unchecked? WHY?

@burnbacon

U can have a meg on day 1 just after leaving on outpost , but the odds are pretty low... Didn't get a single meg on day 1 this year.

But i can compare it with my 2025 data xD

DAY Count MEG DAY % % CHANCE TO HAVE A MEG

Day 1 25 2,81% 2,81%
Day 2 51 5,72% 8,53%
Day 3 94 10,55% 19,08%
Day 4 232 26,04% 45,12%
Day 5 288 32,32% 77,44%
Day 6 115 12,91% 90,35%
Day 7 48 5,39% 95,74%
Day 8 30 3,37% 99,10%
Day 9 8 0,90% 100,00%

Statiscally i get lower chance in 2026 than in 2025 to get an early megalodon (day 1, 2) but it's still possible.
Btw the meg timer where 'better' in 2025 than 2026

Just A Goat commendation.

But more seriously out of all this what really is the hardest part is the not knowing truth for certain.

If it is a pure lottery full RNG, at least having this acknowledgment from Rare would be a win.

Having a few mechanics allowing to increase your lottery odds would be a second win.

Having an honest and transparent communication workshop with Rare on this overall 5 total feasibility would be the final cherry 🍒 win.

But in the end out of all this the Shrouded “myth is still running after over 7years and has drove multiple pirates on the seas (which are human beings behind) go completely crazy and wasting a whole lot of their time just because of an unrealistic gameplay loop which is at a border line limit of players’ time investment respect and ethics.

@burnbacon said in How Megalodons and Shrouded ghost works...:

So basically when u started a session u got a small chance to get a meg on day 1 and the average megalodon timer is day 5 and 6

False. I’ve had a Meg spawn on me two islands away from outpost. First 5min of game

@BurnBacon its literally what was said. Did you even read or you are just trolling out of boredom?

@serdudekiller said in How Megalodons and Shrouded ghost works...:

On the meg/day percentage and your conclusion that day 5/6 is most likely to get a spawn:

This doesn't take into account your sampling method. For instance, you conclude that day passage is a factor into a spawn becoming more likely (with a fall-off after day 5), but what if the reason the distribution is this way is because you mostly have 2 hour sessions? We can see that you killed 10 megs out of your 154 on day 9, but how many day 9s have you reached vs day 5s?

The distribution would make it more certain that day passage is a factor for the spawns if you consistently ran 9-day sessions and recorded the data, otherwise the distribution feels a little random.

Also:

u could get it on your 1st roll or maybe after 5000.

You missed an opportunity to plug in the fact that you got 4 Shrouded Ghosts somewhere in between your 5000 rolls 😌

He’s playing specifically for megs most of the time and not leaving a server until seeing a meg.

The spawns are clearly weighted towards day 5 or more likely just an amount of time passed since logging in or the previous spawn. Lukitch is one of if not the most notorious meg hunter(s) on the seas. His data is good.

You don’t need to play 9 day sessions over and over to see when your first meg spawns.

@serdudekiller

It seems that the maximum timer is day 9.
So basically when u lauch a session the server determine a timer it can be day 1 , day 3, day 4 or day 9 ...

most of time you'll get the average timer (between day 5/6) which is like 2h of session .

But sometimes your timer can be reset (Server merge , Scuttle change sea , and sometimes if u dive too much)
I can't affirm that the timer can be reset if u sunk (cause my game play avoid any conflits) , cause i'm just afk on edge of map waiting for megs.

And most of time after getting and killing my meg , i'm doing a new server
Most of time if i stay on the same server , i'll get a longer meg timer (1st meg killed day 5 / 2nd meg can be day 7 ) so it's better to do a new session cause u gain some precious minutes.

@shadowfox327533

You should get a guarantee meg on day 9 but they are some factors which can increase (Server merge : I can't affirm it , but when i'm doing afk during nights i get 2 or 3 server merge and my meg is delayed) most of my Day 9 megs are due to it)
And a soon you kill your megs , a new timer will be set.

Exemple :

1st meg killed on day 5, if you stay on the server you can have a new meg on day 6 (Odds are pretty low) , or it can be day 13 (5+9 new timer) ...
But most of time after killing a meg on day 5 your next meg should be day 10/11

Basically , it's Original meg timer + New meg timer = Day1to9 + Day 1 +9 etc...

After killing my meg , I'm switching server (new ship + new server) cause my 1st timer is lower than the 2nd one ...
So i can gain some precious minutes....

If it use more stats , it's better to launch a new ship after day 6 if u don't have your meg ... (but only if you aim is getting more megs)

Waiting until Day 6:
+15.2% probability gain
Acceptable time cost

Waiting beyond Day 6:
5% gain per day

Strong diminishing returns
Waiting until Day 7–9 is not efficient

@burnbacon I would try comprehending what was written. The important part of language is to actually read it, and understand. You should try it before trying to engage. A bit of practice goes a long way

@look-behind-you said in How Megalodons and Shrouded ghost works...:

Th problem with personal or anecdotal 'stats' is that they ignore every other person's anecdotal 'stats'.

Anyone could easily start a new Sea of Thieves journey and manage to meet/defeat a Shrouded Ghost within 15 mins, which would destroy all 'stats' mentioned.

On the inverse, someone could play for 8 years and 1000's of hours and never even see, let alone defeat a Shrouded Ghost.

Almost as if it is actually a (at best) "guess" rather than actual "Stats".

The numbers may be correct for you but...ignores...EVERY other player's experience ever.

While it is luck and RNG, the 1/5000 spawn rate is a real thing.

I have over 25k hours and have killed thousands of megs and still have never seen the Shrouded Ghost even once. So these stats do reflect what most people feel when it comes to megs, and lukitch has a ton of data to support all this.

Needing to kill 5 is not only insane, it is safe to say it is literally impossible for even the most hardcore of players

@look-behind-you

I ve done some 'Community statistics 2 years ago' , the Data are quite the same for a Megalodon spawn (the average timer is way higher in 2026 than 2024 or 2026) , you need to play at least 30 min more to get a single megalodon.

The odds to get the Shrouded ghost is the same for everyone...

You could get a Shrouded ghost as your 1st meg on your 1st minute played on SOT (but ODDS are too low for that) Or you couldn't meet on even with 20k hours played , due to statistics and how your gameplay is. (I can proove you that i can play 8-10h straight withtout getting any megalodons)

The main trouble is How the game mechanic on megalodons works ... only a timer
And you haven't got anything to decrease this timer or A way to farm megalodon (HC quest won't give you a shrouded).

Only Natural spawn can do it , So if you are lucky you could get one pretty quickly less than 50 megs killed but you need to kill 4 more of them.
Try a Random generator (ex : random.org) from 1 to 5000 and try to pick a random number as 3613... Tell me How many tries you need to get 3613
Then do the same 4 time more...

Getting 5 shrouded ghost becomes impossible for most of players... So why we got this kind of commendations ?

Let's speculate , Only to keep players on seas ?
Is it normal that after 7 years (soon 8) no one get 5 of them ?

Do u know why Shrouded ghost were nerfed from 50 to 5 ? Cause i know the reason , and it's funny how they pick this random number... Thanks Spammals ...

Having loot don't change anything ( I can see it when i'm doing open crew) i'm not doing everytime a full afk for meg.

And Shores of gold theory is a pure lie , cause people didn't understood how megs works...

Next time you got a meg , check the day you got it (using the loogbook)

@look-behind-you said in How Megalodons and Shrouded ghost works...:

Th problem with personal or anecdotal 'stats' is that they ignore every other person's anecdotal 'stats'.

Anyone could easily start a new Sea of Thieves journey and manage to meet/defeat a Shrouded Ghost within 15 mins, which would destroy all 'stats' mentioned.

On the inverse, someone could play for 8 years and 1000's of hours and never even see, let alone defeat a Shrouded Ghost.

Almost as if it is actually a (at best) "guess" rather than actual "Stats".

The numbers may be correct for you but...ignores...EVERY other player's experience ever.

His data is good.

One player seeing a shrouded ghost within the first 15 minutes of their account being made does absolutely nothing at all to alter how his data is interpreted nor does it change the accuracy of the data. It's so incredibly consistent over such a large amount of spawns at this point that you are either intentionally misleading the other people in the thread for weird reasons or you are commenting out of your depth on the subject and just plainly ignoring the data.

As someone who used to be obsessed with megs it's pretty obvious to see that the spawn times are weighted towards a specific time, Day 5 as he puts it, and that each meg type also has a certain spawn percentage.

Not to mention, and I won't go into detail for obvious reasons, people have straight up leaked extremely specific info on publicly available social media accounts re: meg spawns further confirming years of suspicion and data collection.

I'll go ahead and assume your post is genuine and you're not trying to gaslight. Why are you arguing with someone who has literal thousands of hours chasing megs? Why are you arguing with one of your customers over ANYTHING in the first place when he was nothing but respectful and spitting straight stats, WHICH ARE ACCURATE BY THE WAY.

Further, and here are some more stats for you.

I have data from 26 players that completed all commendations the game had to offer through the end of season 6. They collectively shared 117,093 hours played. They had 10 shroudeds among them. That comes out to 11,709 hours per shrouded which is pretty close to what he said. 117,093 hours played is a pretty healthy sample size, lol. I don't know how anyone could argue against that.

Hourglass has made such tracking pretty much impossible at this point but that's all the confirmation I ever needed.

Shrouded grade 5 was never meant to be completed or the people who put it in didn't have a full appreciation for the numbers, and still might not. It would take the average person 50,000 hours of their life to see 5 shroudeds. Of course some people will get lucky, and some extremely unlucky, but that's beyond absolutely ridiculous. Most people play most games for less than 100 hours and you guys want people to sink 50k hours into your game specifically while also ignoring hourglass. Haha.

@look-behind-you said in How Megalodons and Shrouded ghost works...:

@swabbie-john said in How Megalodons and Shrouded ghost works...:

@look-behind-you said in How Megalodons and Shrouded ghost works...:

Th problem with personal or anecdotal 'stats' is that they ignore every other person's anecdotal 'stats'.

Anyone could easily start a new Sea of Thieves journey and manage to meet/defeat a Shrouded Ghost within 15 mins, which would destroy all 'stats' mentioned.

On the inverse, someone could play for 8 years and 1000's of hours and never even see, let alone defeat a Shrouded Ghost.

Almost as if it is actually a (at best) "guess" rather than actual "Stats".

The numbers may be correct for you but...ignores...EVERY other player's experience ever.

His data is good.

From their personal experience, I'm sure it is!

Not to mention, and I won't go into detail for obvious reasons, people have straight up leaked extremely specific info on publicly available social media accounts re: meg spawns further confirming years of suspicion and data collection.

If there was a way to predict, guarantee or otherwise influence the spawning of a Shrouded Ghost, it would have been for sale on eBay for silly money....and more than one someone would have defeated 5 by now!

I'll go ahead and assume your post is genuine and you're not trying to gaslight. Why are you arguing with someone who has literal thousands of hours chasing megs? Why are you arguing with one of your customers over ANYTHING in the first place when he was nothing but respectful and spitting straight stats, WHICH ARE ACCURATE BY THE WAY.

As I don't work for Rare, no one is my 'customer'.

Once again, I am sure from their personal lens, their data is accurate...for them, but it also ignores every other person that plays/played/will play Sea of Thieves' own personal stats.

You could roll a normal dice a million times and never once throw a 6....or you could throw a million 6's in a row.....improbable? absolutely! Impossible? No!

The only official stats I have ever seen come from Forum competitions:

How many Megalodons defeated? (in a specified 24hr period)

and How many Shrouded Ghost Megs Killed? (again within a specified 24hr period)

I imagine the actual numbers have shifted over the years due to player count/players and ships per server/interest and many other factors but they are ACTUAL game stats.

You are a moderator. You are a deckhand. Ok, so you don't get paid. You still represent Rare. I gave you data from 117,000 hours worth of play time. I edited it in after you might have started responding, I don't know. But I assure you I'm not making it up and it almost perfectly aligns with what he said.

What you are saying is just based on feelings and nothing more. The data doesn't lie.

and I won't go into detail for obvious reasons, people have straight up leaked extremely specific info on publicly available social media accounts re: meg spawns further confirming years of suspicion and data collection.

Hence, not true.

Why are you arguing with someone who has literal thousands of hours chasing megs?

This means, what actually? You chase megs, spend more time chasing a random encounter.

spitting straight stats, WHICH ARE ACCURATE BY THE WAY.

"accurate" Nothing is accurate in shuffling a deck of cards. If they can't share where this 'secret' stat is given, its not true and just trying to start something with Rare. Prove some point that isnt true.

A true statistic specialist would take into account all information on the matter. You dont just claim "yours" is true, and ignore someone else's. Proper research, you learn this in school.

Day 1 0%

As many I've spoken with, read player posts. This isnt true.
Ive encountered Megs right off the Outpost, Krakens too. Even a a skeleton ship spawn up right after dropping sails.

Game is pure Luck, Unluck and random.

and How many Shrouded Ghost Megs Killed? (again within a specified 24hr period)

Maybe not all were killed... maybe swabbies just ignore it or sunk on it ... so it could even be more

You could roll a normal dice a million times and never once throw a 6....or you could throw a million 6's in a row.....improbable? absolutely! Impossible? No!
yes you could roll a million's 6 in a row ... but you know with statistics everything is possible , but more you increase the same number , lower are the odds and sometimes close to impossible.

Imagine most of people are blind or don't get my knowledge on meg ... Yes, maybe i'm one of the hunter in this game , but i know other pirate like me...

It's great to see that even if i explain how is the game mechanic and how the odds are low for shrouded ghost ... Only people who has experience this game as a complestionist can understand it ...

Casual like always won't see more than his edge of his nose

My aim with my data, it's to proove how it's impossible for a casual to get 5 Shrouded ghost... Even a completionist who got 20k hours ,and a dedicated meg hunter can't achieve it ...

And what's the reaction from CM or DeV... No answer , no comment nothing (as expected)

@Look-Behind-You
If there was a way to predict, guarantee or otherwise influence the spawning of a Shrouded Ghost, it would have been for sale on eBay for silly money....and more than one someone would have defeated 5 by now!

I've worked on a theory which is pretty hard to say if it's correct or not , due to my data lack , i had 253 screenshots of people who killed ... Do u want to know the odds of the SG killed during the eclipse ?
I wish i could collect more of this data , but due to my health issue , i ve abondon this kind of research , cause it take me ages to collect them.... And i wish i could get 1000 of records for that ... 250 is not enought to make good statistics....

But, Is it normal that i get my 3 shrouded ghost during eclipse ? and i'm not playing waiting for the eclipse cycle...

Do u know that eclipse exist in SOT ? do u know that u can predict them ? You can have a look on https://eclipse.lukitch59.workers.dev/ but take care the eclipse started at arround 7:30 pm or arround 4:30 am (In game)
And i can't optimise the timer due to server performance (hoster) and your local windows time...
So, the best, when you are at arround 1 min before the eclipse , is looking sun

Official data , why since 7 years we didn't get any refresh on it ?
Hidden the truth from dev and be speechless about megalodon , shrouded , it's only a gatekeep from them.

Why i'm the only one who is interested by the SOT game mechanic ? maybe cause i'm a merfolkslullaby researcher... (you know the Storm interractive map) .

And if u are interessted , u can give me your data , i just need this kind of proof ... https://ibb.co/xqGfy8Sf

@BurnBacon A true statistic specialist would take into account all information on the matter. You dont just claim "yours" is true, and ignore someone else's. Proper research, you learn this in school.

Day 1 0%

As many I've spoken with, read player posts. This isnt true.

Do u want my gradue in Math ? I guess, i went more at school that u (but i'm not here to dismiss u and your math knowledge)

And I get more lucky rolls on meg this months...

u can follow my stats throw this link : https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1g60_woKuX5aZwBaNNgBgR9vzKR2IJFwf8D1xGXj7YcM/edit?usp=sharing

I got 2 day 1 in February and 2 of them where the same day 11/02/25 ... i was pretty lucky on this one...

And i get a good afk for meg , i get my 1st meg on day 6 , then day 8 (day2) , then day 10(again a day 2) then day 11 (day 1)
i'm always counting the day between each kills...

The Shrouded Ghost was added to the game November 28, 2018 and the spawn rate was increased February 6, 2019. Imagine the spawn rate being worse than it already is…

Megalodon data cumulated over the years is a difficult statistic to work with given the parameters have been inconsistent. So even though I played thousands of hours, if a bulk of them was during a time megs didn’t exist or were broken then it doesn’t matter how many hours I played.
They completely turned off megalodons during The Shrouded Deep adventure and then from reading personal accounts here on the forums, the discord and other SoT community discords the meg spawns were really inconsistent for most of the rest of that year after being turned back on. In season 15 they stated they added a new event management system that would include controlling meg spawns.

I would personally say the spawn timing has been broken even since that adventure. They then added diving which broke it even more for me. I remember them saying they would make it so diving didn’t reset your meg timer, and I’ve seen people say they get megs when diving. But I often play long sessions and if I’m diving the majority of the time I just don't get megged.

@abjectarity

During this Winter holidays , i've saw so many people who killed the shrouded ghost . And there are some period that there is any reports (Discord , YT , Reddit etc)

There are some period that i think dev tweak the odds , but hard to proove , when u don't get data from them.

Btw, i didn't told u how to improve your Megalodon Kills per hours... yes, u can optimise it , but I don't want to reveal how , cause it's not a normal way of playing...

But, if u know how the megalodon works ( 1 per ship) it's easy to know, how to get more for the same amount of time play ....

@lukitch59 oh I know! I got mine the same week Arib got his, which was also a week of spiked self reporting on social media, similar to during the spell this Christmas time.

@abjectarity

Imagine during months meg where broken , cause seagulls , so u have less megs during at least 6 months before dev fix it...

@Swabbie-John we should do a video , maybe people will understand how megs works...

Cause there is many players who still thinks that Shores of Gold theory is true...

@burnbacon I'm fairly sure you misunderstand to troll since you take a contrary position to almost every post on this forum, but giving you the benefit of the doubt maybe it's just that you don't read or understand anything that anyone else writes. Your point about encountering a meg straight off the outpost has already been shown as irrelevant in previous replies, and the rest of your last reply is not coherent.

But for the benefit of others who might think you're talking sense, and for @Look-Behind-You who doesn't seem to understand how statistics work either:

Statistics, in one sense, is the study of collecting, analysing and interpreting data, and in another sense, statistics are a collection of data or measurements. Saying the OP's data is not "stats" is a complete misunderstanding of the word. The data posted by the OP is his data, yes, but it's a collection of measurements nonetheless, and it's a large enough sample size collected in a methodical way to get a picture of how the system works and deduce conclusions. Not an anecdotal "this happened to me once", or a one-off report of a single stat (I'll get back to this in a minute). Personal observations when recorded methodically are a scientifically acceptable approach to collecting statistical data. There can be flaws in the approach taken to collect the data, such as selection bias, data quality problems, or insufficient sample size, and there can be flaws in the analysis and interpretation, but neither of you are dismissing the OP's study on any such valid basis. Yes, a bigger sample size would be better. Yes, some control experiments to see if ship size makes any difference would be interesting. But the sample data provided by OP (which has been bucketed into discrete intervals) shows a probability curve with enough clarity to draw conclusions from. You may dispute that, fine, you're entitled to an opinion. But you provide no argument to challenge the data quality or collection method, or propose an alternative model to explain the data, so it remains just that, an opinion.

When others in this thread say that the OP's data is accurate, what they mean is that it fits their personal observations or data from another source. By design, the OP's statistical study is based on the data they have collected according to their collection method. It would not be scientifically sensible to combine data from other sources collected in a different way, even though there absolutely is more meg data out there collected by other groups of players. Of course, comparing the conclusions drawn in other studies is valid. In fact that is a good thing to do, because it's how we identify inconsistencies and design experiments to deduce the causes, plan further data collection to eliminate bias, and to further refine our understanding of something.

Before moving on, I'll say this very clearly: seeing a meg as soon as you leave the outpost, or a new player killing the shrouded ghost in their first 15 minutes does not invalidate the conclusions of OP's study. I can't think of a tactful way to say how flawed this reasoning is.

Now to address the issues of what is being sampled here. The OP's study is clearly based on their experience setting sail specifically to encounter emergent megs. We can assume that they roughly follow the same strategy each time so their data is, on average, consistent. They probably sail in a way they think maximises their chances of having a meg spawn; not diving, staying in open water, etc. They have recorded how long it took before encountering a meg. A player who plays in a different way might get a different encounter rate. However, we can make a reasonable assumption given the hours multiple people have put into meg hunting and their shared experience, that the way the OP plays is based on reasonable conclusions about meg spawns and that their encounter rate is close to the best it can be. Therefore we can hypothesise that the rate for the average player is lower. We can ignore this for the purposes of the OP's original conclusion, since they are effectively saying that even when you just hunt megs in an optimised way, killing even one shouded ghost is going to take most players an excessive amount of hours. Again, I'm trying to be tactful here, but arguing that OP's conclusion is wrong because their data was collected by one person is a staggeringly "strange" thing to say.

Finally, to address @Look-Behind-You and the subject of "true stats" or "hard stats". Your "stats" from the forum competitions are almost entirely irrelevant to the discussion for a few reasons. They measure a completely different thing; the number of megs killed during a 24hr real world time period. We don't know how many players were sailing, so the numbers are useless for predicting anything. They're not even useful for calculating the chance of a meg being a shrouded ghost since it's more likely players won't bother to kill a meg if it's not rare, and they aren't even covering the same time period so differing player numbers would skew the answer. OP is measuring time taken to encounter a meg from setting sail, which allows the use of maths to calculate the average, expected play time taken to encounter a shrouded ghost. OP's data is a large enough sample size over a large enough time period to be considered representative. The amusing part is that your comments refute the OP's conclusion based on the fact that they are personal observations, and yet that actually makes them more likely to be valid. Even if Rare came out and published the probability function they use for spawning megs, and the real % chance of it being shrouded ghost, the other factors involved when playing the game such as bugs, diving, other ships, sailing route mean that observed data with a large enough sample size gives a better estimate for the real world hours needed than simply knowing the game mechanics themselves. The only thing better than the OP's data set would be a larger data set recorded by more people (if using the same method), or Rare releasing exactly the same data themselves. Which is NOT at all what you've quoted from the forum competitions.