This is an ongoing collection of strategies for saving small amounts of time in your runs. Once you're getting close to record times, learning these techniques may be enough to get you that world record!

If there are any tips that I missed, let me know and I'll add them!

General

Faster Loading Times: I find that the loading times for cutscenes are significantly longer when they are loading for the first time in a play session. Before starting your runs, do a practice run where you try to trigger as many cutscenes as you can. They will load faster on subsequent runs.

Skipping Cutscenes/Animations: Nearly every cutscene and most NPC interaction animations can be skipped by left-clicking anywhere on the screen. The only cutscenes that should NOT be skipped are the marriage and Montalban victory cutscenes when running the Beautiful Wife and any% categories. Here's some of the animations/cutscenes that can be skipped this way: - Intro bartender/captain animations - Sailing to the new world cutscene - All governor/daughter interaction animations - All tavern interaction animations - Pre- and post-swordfight cutscenes - Finding lost relative/lost city/buried treasure cutscene - Jailed/marooned cutscene - Marriage cutscene (Categories other than Beautiful Wife)

Faster Timeskipping: After dividing the plunder or being marooned or jailed, multiple dates will be shown to indicate the passage of time. These can appear faster by left-clicking instead for waiting for them to appear.

Special Items

The items listed below are the only ones worth picking up to save time.

Balanced Swords: Increases your attacking speed. Speeds up every swordfight by a bit, and on higher difficulties, this will allow you to attack without blocking first on most fights.

Pistols: Gives you a free attack at the start of every swordfight. Speeds up every swordfight by 1-2 seconds.

Armor: Gives you a chance you automatically block a thrust attack. Can save time if you miss the parry, and allows you to attack more aggressively.

Fencing Shirts: Increases your defending speed. Not as important as the swords and pistols, but it can save you some significant time if you would have missed the block otherwise.

Jewelry: Given to the governor's daughter for a reward and to progress the marriage storyline. Essential for 126 Fame and Beautiful Wife categories, but useless otherwise.

Medicine: Reduces the speed at which your age hurts your swordfighting/dancing skills. Very helpful for 126 Fame and other long runs, but useless otherwise.

Musical Instruments: Reduces the speed at which your crew's morale decreases. These give you a few more months to earn enough gold to keep your crew permanently happy, but are useless on the shorter run categories.

Rutters: These will show the location of small settlements in areas that you haven't been to. Helpful in the 126 Fame category when trying to find buried treasure, lost cities, or relatives, but useless otherwise.

Swordfighting

Adventurer Aggression: On higher difficulties, it is basically required to block before attacking, due to how fast the enemies can block and attack. On adventurer difficulty, however, you can usually get away with attacking right after you see the enemy start their attack.

Final Thrust: There are instances where both a thrust or a chop/slash will be enough to win the swordfight. In normal circumstances, using the thrust attack will be slightly faster than using a chop/slash. However, it may not be the case depending on what attack the enemy is doing and what the enemy's lightning-quick move is.

Lightning-Quick Moves: Every notorious pirate, evil Spaniard, or wanted criminal you fight will have one attacking or defending move that they can do much faster than normal. Strangely, your character will copy that ability, allowing you to also perform that move incredibly fast. You can occasionally discover this by talking to the tavern's barmaid, but more often than not you will discover it while fighting them. If they have a lightning-quick block, avoid using the corresponding attack. If they have a lightning quick chop or slash, use only that attack for the fight. Even on harder difficulties, you may not need to block and can go straight for the quick attack, unless they do the same.

Counterattacks: Occasionally when performing the correct block, your character will instead do a fancy dodge, followed by a counterattack. Unfortunately, this counterattack only does 1 damage (the same as a thrust), so it often ends up prolonging the swordfight. I'm not sure what causes these counterattacks to occur, but they are seemingly random. The only way I know of to avoid these is to attack first instead of blocking. On higher difficulties with no items, you are basically required to block, so it will be impossible to completely avoid triggering these counterattacks.

Sailing

Points of Sailing: Every ship class has an optimal sailing orientation relative to the wind direction. This information can be found in the Pirate-O-Pedia. Try to orient your ship in this optimal direction as much as you can (without sailing in the wrong direction).

Reeled/Full Sails: You can choose to sail with either full sails or reeled sails. You should always be sailing with full sails, unless you are using a large galleon or frigate and are trying to sail or turn into the wind. In most playthroughs, you will want a pinnace-class ship, which should always be at full sails.

Stormchasing: Sailing near the edge of storm clouds can give you a big speed boost for a short time. However, sailing too close will damage your ship.

Social Distancing: Sailing near ships will slow you down as they shout out their name and destination. If you notice a ship in the distance, try to avoid getting close to maintain your speed.

Sailing Eastward: The wind will almost always be blowing westward, making eastward sailing difficult. On longer runs, try to minimize the amount of east-west sailing, and make the most out of each westward trip.