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Black Flag Resynced Community Watch: The Lucy Softlock Bug, DLSS 5 Dilemmas, and Fleet Optimization

A silhouette of an assassin overlooking a bustling colonial Caribbean harbor with docked galleons and the Jackdaw at sunset.

Welcome back to the Black Flag Wiki Community Watch. We are well over two months into the life cycle of Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced, and while the vast majority of players are comfortably sailing the open Caribbean or testing the limits of their highly upgraded Jackdaw, the community forums remain incredibly active. From hardcore trophy hunters optimizing their final runs to PC enthusiasts debating the bleeding edge of NVIDIA’s upscaling tech, there is plenty of valuable information to sift through this week.

Today, we are taking a close look at a severe progression blocker that is ruining Platinum runs, breaking down a fascinating debate on DLSS 5 and Frame Generation settings, sharing a highly specialized naval fleet composition to speed up the end-game grind, and touching on recent rumblings regarding Ubisoft’s next potential remake.

The “One With the Gun” Softlock: A Platinum Nightmare

Recruiting specialized Officers for the Jackdaw is one of the most rewarding new systems in the remake. These unique crew members provide passive buffs to naval combat, economy, and boarding actions. However, a particularly nasty bug has surfaced in one of these recruitment storylines, and it is currently trapping players with no obvious way out.

According to multiple reports on Reddit over the past few days, the mission “The One With the Gun”—which tasks Edward with recruiting a skilled gunner and quartermaster candidate named Lucy—is triggering a hard softlock. During a specific objective on an isolated island, the game requires you to interact with a bundle of plantains. For affected players, the interaction prompt either fails to appear entirely or completely breaks upon execution, leaving the item sitting on the ground untouched.

Normally, a broken objective would just require a simple checkpoint restart. The primary issue here is the specific phase of the mission: fast travel is completely disabled by the quest state, and the Jackdaw is rendered inaccessible until the objective is marked complete. You are physically trapped on the island.

Players who rely heavily on auto-saves are finding themselves 90+ hours deep into a 100% completion run, only to be completely roadblocked just three trophies away from the Platinum. Support tickets have reportedly been filed by the community, but as of this writing, there is no official hotfix available on consoles.

How to protect yourself from the bug:

  • Create a manual save slot before initiating any Officer recruitment quest. Do not rely solely on the Anvil engine’s autosave feature.
  • If you encounter the plantain glitch, do not attempt to wander the island to force a respawn or trigger a combat state, as this might inadvertently overwrite your auto-save. Immediately force-quit the game and reload your manual save.
  • For more details on the recruitment mechanics and why these NPCs are ultimately worth the risk, check out our earlier breakdown on how to recruit crucial officers.

PC Performance: DLSS 5, DLAA, and the “Pure Cinema” Experience

Black Flag Resynced on a high-end PC is an undeniable visual marvel, pushing the latest iteration of the Anvil engine to its absolute limits with dense volumetric clouds, terrifying storm physics, and ray-traced global illumination. Over the past week, a significant portion of the PC community—particularly those upgrading to the newly minted RTX 5080 series or utilizing GeForce NOW Ultimate tiers—has been debating the optimal way to configure NVIDIA’s DLSS 5 technology.

The core of the debate centers on a specific dilemma when playing at 4K Max settings: should you use standard DLSS Quality to maintain a rock-solid, natively capped 60 FPS, or should you push for DLAA (Deep Learning Anti-Aliasing) combined with multiple tiers of Frame Generation?

For those unfamiliar, DLAA uses the AI prowess of DLSS but applies it directly to a native resolution image, entirely skipping the internal upscaling process. The result is the cleanest, sharpest image quality possible, eliminating jagged ropes and pixelated rigging on enemy ships. However, it comes at a hefty performance cost. To compensate, players are stacking DLAA with 2x or even 3x Frame Generation (FG) multipliers.

One community member went viral this week demonstrating a “Pure Cinema” setup: DLAA, 3x Frame Generation, and the in-game HUD completely disabled. By generating multiple interstitial frames, the game hovered around a simulated 70 FPS. Players attempting to replicate this setup have reported that the visual fidelity is staggering, feeling more like a pre-rendered cutscene than live gameplay, making it perfect for taking in the sights of Havana.

However, there are downsides to excessive Frame Generation. When asked about the negatives, PC veterans pointed out that 3x FG inherently introduces input latency. While NVIDIA Reflex works overtime to mitigate this, the parry-heavy combat of Resynced can feel slightly detached and floaty if your base, pre-generated framerate dips below 40 FPS. Additionally, UI elements—if you choose to leave them on—can suffer from minor ghosting or flickering during rapid camera pans.

If you are tweaking your rig this weekend and want a more balanced approach, you can find our baseline recommendations in our PC performance guide.

Optimizing Kenway’s Fleet for the “Dilettante” Trophy

Trophy hunters know that not all achievements are created equal. While taking down Legendary Ships requires pure combat skill, the “Dilettante” trophy requires immense, unyielding patience. This achievement tasks you with collecting specific, rare art pieces scattered across the globe, entirely facilitated through the Kenway’s Fleet management mini-game.

A recurring complaint this week is the sheer grind involved if you leave this trophy for the post-game mop-up phase. A user who recently secured their 156th PlayStation Platinum trophy shared their frustration with the random number generation (RNG) mechanics of the fleet missions, but they offered a highly optimized ship composition to minimize the pain for the rest of us.

If you are chasing the art pieces, the community strongly recommends maintaining this exact active roster in your fleet menu:

  • 5 Brigs: These are your primary workhorses for art collection. They strike the perfect balance of travel speed and cargo space needed to run the specific mid-tier routes that yield art pieces, without taking literal days of real-world time to return to port.
  • 3 Schooners: Fast and highly expendable, these should be used strictly for rapid, low-level trade missions to keep your Reales and basic fleet resources topped up.
  • 2 Man O’ War: These massive floating fortresses are kept on standby purely for risk management. Use them to aggressively clear out treacherous shipping lanes and secure the routes before sending your vulnerable Brigs out on their art hunts.

The most important takeaway from the community is to avoid the “post-game trap.” Do not wait until you have finished the main storyline to start managing your fleet. You should be sending ships out concurrently while you explore the open world and tackle main missions. For a more comprehensive look at routing strategies and maximizing profits, review our mastering Kenway’s Fleet guide.

Ubisoft Teases the Next “Resynced” Title

Finally, while we have previously covered the clever Easter eggs hidden inside the game’s Animus anomalies that hint at future projects (which you can read about in our remake teaser guide), the hype is now bleeding into real-world press coverage. According to a recent report from GAMINGbible, Ubisoft is beginning to officially tease the next title in the “Resynced” lineup following the massive commercial and critical success of Edward Kenway’s rebuilt adventure.

Whether this means we are heading back to the Third Crusade with Altaïr or taking a second, modernized tour of Renaissance Italy with Ezio Auditore remains entirely unconfirmed. What is abundantly clear, however, is that the “zero original code” remake strategy executed by Ubisoft Singapore has proven to be a winning formula, and fans are eagerly awaiting whatever comes next.

Sources

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