Through the night my ship fought and killed a 2* big fish (blue), 4* big fish (blue) and a 3* Royal Navy. Each battle yielded a battered chest. On opening the chests the only item I received for my silo was 1 voodoo mask. When clicking on each enemy on the map none of the ones I killed say they give out voodoo masks. This isn't an isolated incident. Battered chests frequently fail to give silo items, and when they do they don't give out what you'd expect to receive. Yet if I kill the Enemy Crab I'm 99% guaranteed to get iron. If I kill a Ghost Ship I have a high chance of getting silver or iron. If the randomly generated content of each battered chest isn't a bug then that suggests the Enemy Crab results are a bug. There is no logic behind the inconsistency here (but please don't take my iron source away!). My suggested fix is to reduce the likelihood of getting battered chests in favour of getting items for the Silo.
Battered chests are a fairly common drop (you can farm them up fairly fast!) Each slot in the battered chest has about a 20% (1/5) chance of having an item in it, which can be iron, copper, silver, gunpowder, vooodoo mask, or golden idol, and that item can come in a stack of either 1 or 2. This means that a little over half of the battered chests won't have any material items whatsoever in them (80% chance it won't be in slot one * 80% chance it won't be in slot 2 * 80% chance it won't be in slot 3). But that also means, a little under half of battered chests will have at least one item, so if you farm up a stack of ten chests in a day, you'll probably get about 5 items. The item inside the battered chest doesn't seem to be tied to what creature produced the chest in my experience. A battered chest from a 5* ghost ship has the same rewards possible as a battered chest from the shark that's only 5 minutes away from camp! I agree that battered chests should be further down the probability curve on higher rarity monsters, but if you farm the battles very close to the base, you can fight 5-10 battles in 2.5-5 hours generally, or about 2 fights an hour, and get a lot of battered chests quickly, which get a decent amount of material items. The trick with them isn't expecting quality from a single chest, but rather, relying on the law of large numbers, and amassing a large quantity of them and averaging things out.
Thanks for the info @Skye, that's helpful. I do have my ship out constantly so I do tend to get a lot of battered chests. It is just very annoying when you go after copper and gunpowder and all you seem to get is tiny amounts of grog and EP.
