Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced: How To Capture Forts

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Published Jul 8, 2026, 12:00 PM EDT

Lee D’Amato is a writer born, raised, and based in Queens, New York. With collective thousands of hours in games like Final Fantasy, Metal Gear, Elden Ring, and The Legend of Zelda, he's now writes game features, guides, and reviews for Screen Rant, but has covered a wide range of topics, including ancient history, affordable travel, and overall health.

Once you get a few hours into Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, you'll start to see forts popping up on the map. These encampments are marked with red, tower-shaped icons on your map, and they pose a major threat in the early to mid-game: they'll start firing mortars at you if you sail into their midst.

You may have tried taking on one of these forts, only to have your ship sunken almost immediately. Thankfully, there's a way to capture them for yourself, but you'll want to progress through the game a bit more before you try them again.

How To Capture Your First Fort

The location of The Forts main quest on AC Black Flag Resynced's map.

Instead of repeatedly bashing your ship against random forts in the open world, hold off on capturing these enemy strongholds at least until you've completed the main quest mission "The Forts." This will pit you against a weakened version of one of the open-world forts, with only a handful of defenses, and give you an introduction to the process.

There are effectively three steps in capturing a fort:

Weaken defenses
Storm the fort
Reduce resolve

To weaken a fort's defenses, attack its walls and towers from your ship. Each fort has a different number of defenses, each of which is represented by an individual HP bar. Once you've depleted them all, the fort is weak enough that you can pull your ship right up to its docks and fight on foot.

From there, it's just like boarding a ship: you'll fight a group of enemy soldiers in melee combat. You may also be directed to defeat the fort's leaders before you can capture it.

Capturing a fort may earn you money, crafting/upgrade materials, and/or cosmetics. Completing the first fort will also allow you to unlock Kenway's Fleet, a strategic mini-game that allows you to send ships you capture out on missions. Taking additional forts may unlock new regions on the Kenway's Fleet map, or make it easier for weaker ships to complete missions in certain areas.

How Strong Do You Need To Be To Capture A Fort?

Even if you continue taking on forts in the open world, though, you may find that they seem way too powerful for your ship. For most forts, you'll want to upgrade your hull and main weapons to at least the fourth tier before you can comfortably beat them.

That said, the Chinchorro fort is one that you can take on relatively early without too much difficulty. Just make sure there are no Spanish ships nearby when you engage it; Man-of-Wars patrol the waters around it, and, if there's one aligned with the fort, it'll come to its aid and likely sink you immediately.

So, even though you unlock the ability to capture forts relatively early, you'll likely want to wait a while before trying to capture most of them in earnest. In the meantime, enjoy exploring the world of Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced, and expanding your fleet by boarding and seizing ships.