Sea of Thieves – How to Shoot Yourself from a Cannon

Sea of Thieves’ closed beta is finally here and there are a lot of places and ships for players to explore and set sail upon. As you sail your way across the seas, encountering other pirates, there will come a time that you’ll need to board the enemy’s ship and take the battle directly to them. Now, you can get up alongside them, and risk taking damage from their cannons. But, if you really want to board their ship without putting your own at risk, you can also climb into the cannon and shoot yourself out. Today we’ll show you how to climb into the cannon in Sea of Thieves, and how to shoot yourself at the enemy ship to board it.

How to Climb into a Cannon

Before you just start climbing into cannons, you’re going to want to make sure you have a good lineup. This means you’ll need a dedicated captain, and while you can use the self-cannon shooting to board enemy ships in solo mode, it will leave your ship abandoned and sailing forward without any kind of navigation. This means you could end up slamming into rocks or other debris, which could lead to your death, or even your ship’s death.

To use this maneuver, you’ll want to get up alongside the enemy’s ship, just within range of their cannons. Make sure that you’re already inside the cannon—you can do so by simply look at the end of a cannon and choosing the option to “climb into cannon”. Once you’re inside, aim yourself (or have a crewmate aim you for better trajectory) and then you can be fired away.

How to Board Enemy Ships

If you want to board enemy ships without using the cannon technique, then you can also move in close to the enemy ship after you shoot at it enough to slow it down, and then hop over to it. Once on the enemy ship, make use of your guns or cutlass to take down your enemies and commandeer their goods. If you’re using one of the larger ships, you can also make use of the plank to hop over to enemy ships, just be wary of falling in the water as sharks may have been drawn to the noise of battle and the possibility of blood.

The cannon technique is a great technique to make use of, and if you do it right, you can definitely make use of it to board enemy ships and surprise their crew. Just remember that you won’t want to make use of this technique if you’re sailing on a solo adventure, as you will leave your ship constantly sailing off into the distance, or worse, into a nearby island where it will sink to its watery grave. 

You can check out our other Sea of Thieves guides for more helpful tips, like how to change clothes as well as how to get Voyages—which are basically quests in the game that will reward you with treasure and gold.