Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Jackdaw Upgrade Path: Stop Wasting Resources and Upgrade in the Right Order

With Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced officially revealed and releasing on July 9, 2026, many of us are returning to the original game to get ready for the remake. I’m about fourteen hours into my fifth playthrough of the game.

If there is one thing Assassin’s Creed Black Flag doesn’t tell you clearly enough, it is this: the Jackdaw is the game. Edward Kenway is great, the Caribbean is gorgeous, the story is definitely one of the best in the franchise, but if your ship is underpowered, none of that matters. You will get wrecked early, you will get frustrated, and you might miss the experience that makes Black Flag worth talking about over a decade later.

The good news is that upgrading the Jackdaw is not complicated once you understand the priority order. The bad news is that the game is perfectly happy to let you spend your metal and wood on the wrong things first. This guide exists so you do not do that.

The Resource Grind: Where to Actually Farm Metal and Wood

Metal and wood are the two resources that bottleneck every meaningful Jackdaw upgrade. Sugar, rum, and cloth matter for your cargo income, but metal is what you need to build anything worth having, and it is the scarcest commodity in the early game.

The fastest legal method early on is warehouses. Every major town has them, and they are mini-missions you can replay. Each warehouse run yields a solid chunk of metal, the infiltration is forgiving for a low-level Jackdaw, and if you do it clean without triggering the alarm you get a bonus on top. Sync the viewpoints in every town you visit so the warehouse locations appear on your map immediately. Make this a habit and you will always have a metal drip going.

For ships, you want to use your spyglass before every engagement. The spyglass tells you a ship’s level and cargo before you fire a single shot. Early in the game, hunt Brigs in the North Caribbean. They run around levels 15 to 25 and carry decent metal without requiring you to already have a beefy hull. The trick is to aim for the ones traveling alone rather than in convoy. A lone Brig is a manageable fight. A Brig with two Schooners as escorts is an annoyance when you are under-upgraded.

Once you have a few hull and cannon upgrades in place, start pushing into the Southern Caribbean. The ships down there are tougher but the payoff per engagement is considerably higher. Frigates in the 23 to 38 level range, found around areas like Punta Guarico and Navassa, carry much heavier resource loads. You do not need to be fully upgraded to take them; you just need to be smart about your approach angle.

A note on Man O’ Wars: do not engage them until you have meaningful upgrades. They will eat you. They carry 50 to 100 cannons against your Jackdaw’s base 8. They can throw mortar at four target zones simultaneously while you are sitting there with no mortar at all. The resource reward is worth it eventually, but early, they are a death sentence. Come back to them.

The wood situation is less painful than metal but still worth managing. Boarding ships to repair the Jackdaw is your primary wood sink, so every fight where you take hull damage is eating into your wood supply. If you want to bank it for upgrades rather than repairs, fight cleaner. Stay at range, use the mortar when you have it, and do not trade broadsides with anything higher level than you unless you absolutely have to.

Upgrade Priority: Hull Armor and Side Cannons First, Everything Else Second

The upgrade menu will tempt you with everything at once. Crimson sails look incredible. The figurehead options are fun. Resist all of it.

Hull Armor is your first purchase every single time. This is not a preference, it is math. Everything you do in Black Flag involves taking cannon fire. Every story mission with a naval component, every fort assault, every Legendary Ship encounter, it all puts your hull under pressure. The stronger the hull, the more punishment the Jackdaw absorbs before it sinks, and the longer you stay in fights, the more resources you collect. Hull Armor directly compounds your farming efficiency.

Side Cannons go second, and there is a reason for that sequencing beyond raw damage output. Upgraded side cannons mean faster kills. Faster kills mean less time taking return fire. Less time taking return fire means less hull damage, which means you are not burning your wood supply repairing constantly. The two upgrades feed each other.

The Heavy Shot upgrade for the broadside cannons is worth picking up whenever it is available. It is not free, but it genuinely changes how quickly you can put down a Brig or Frigate, and the price is reasonable relative to the damage increase.

Mortar is where you start spending after the hull and cannons are in decent shape. Not because mortar is unimportant, it absolutely is, but because early mortar upgrades give you less return than an equivalent metal investment in armor. Once you have three or four hull upgrades locked in, mortar becomes a priority because it is your only ranged weapon that can damage enemies at extreme distance and it is the most effective tool for fort assaults.

Chase Cannons, Fire Barrels, Chain Shot, and swivel upgrades are situational. They have uses, but they should not be coming out of your metal budget until the hull and broadside cannons are solid. Decorative upgrades and figureheads are absolutely last. There is no shame in sailing with plain sails and a default ram while you build the ship that lets you actually conquer the Caribbean.

Mortar Mastery: How to Actually Hit What You Are Shooting At

The mortar is the most mechanically demanding weapon on the Jackdaw, and a lot of players either ignore it or get frustrated with it early because the targeting feels unintuitive. Once you understand it, it becomes your best tool for medium and long distance fights.

The targeting reticle for mortar is a circle projected onto the water in front of you. You adjust the range of the strike by holding the aim button and nudging the stick. The physics model accounts for ship momentum, which means if you fire while the Jackdaw is moving at full sail, the actual strike point is slightly forward of where the reticle sits at rest. At medium range you can compensate for this intuitively pretty quickly. At maximum range the gap between aim point and impact becomes meaningful, so slow to half sail before you fire a long shot.

The bigger skill is targeting moving ships. An enemy Brig or Frigate that is running from you will not stop moving while your mortar round is in the air. You need to lead the target. Watch the heading, estimate the travel distance during the round’s flight time, and aim ahead of the ship rather than at it. This takes practice and the game does not teach you directly, but once it clicks it feels exactly right in a way that feels genuinely satisfying.

Where mortar is most useful is fort assaults. Forts project both cannon fire and their own mortar strikes marked by circles on the water. The routine is simple: stay out of the mortar strike zones, circle at range, and use your own mortar to chip down the fort’s health before you move in for the final broadside pass. Rushing a fort before you have mortar upgrades is painful. With two or three mortar upgrades it becomes manageable even against higher-rated forts.

Mortar storage upgrades are also worth grabbing. More shots per engagement means you spend less time sailing in and out of range to reload. When you are fighting a Man O’ War, you need every round available.

One last thing worth mentioning because the game is quiet about it: the mortar is unlocked in Sequence 3 along with the ship upgrade menu itself. If you are in Sequence 1 or 2 wondering where the full upgrade screen is, that is why. Once Sequence 3 opens up, go straight to the upgrade screen and start funneling your stockpiled metal into Hull Armor. You have been warned.

One quick note before you set sail: this guide is written for the original Assassin’s Creed Black Flag. Ubisoft has the Resynced remake on the way, and if they make meaningful changes to the resource economy, upgrade costs, or ship combat mechanics, some of this advice may need revisiting. The core philosophy of hull armor before everything else will probably hold no matter what they change, but the specific farming routes and upgrade tiers? Those could shift. I will update accordingly once Resynced is in hand and I have had time with it.

Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced is set to release on July 9th for PC, PS5, and Xbox Series. You can pre-order the game now from Amazon, digital or your preferred store for $59.99 at launch.

Once you finish upgrading the Jackdaw and taking down those legendary ships, check out Dragonkin: The Banished and our Guide to the Ancestral Grid.

Agree, disagree, or have a better farming route than anything I listed here? Drop it in the comments or bring it over to the Vortex Effect forums. Always happy to be wrong if someone’s got the receipts.

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