You don’t want to have the Death Mark in Skull and Bones, and if you’ve spent enough time in the game, you’ve likely witnessed a message constantly popping up claiming your Death Mark has expired. We understand this can be annoying since the online title never stops telling you about it. Adding to the confusion, many players are even getting this without being knowingly marked in the first place.
If you’re sailing the choppy seas and keep getting spammed by the message, there are ways for you to remove it.
Skull and Bones: What is the Helm Death Mark?
The Helm is an organization you’ll join as you progress through Skull and Bones. You can get a Death Mark by performing actions against them. Getting hunted means that you’re vulnerable to getting attacks on sight. The Death Mark can be treated as a wanted level, similar to Grand Theft Auto games, where you can be caught or attacked by the police. In Skull and Bones’ case, other ships near you become hostile and try to take you down.
How to Remove the Helm Death Mark
The Death Mark notification is a bug in Skull and Bones that appears until you take the necessary steps to fix the problem. Here are a few options you can try to get rid of it:
- Visit any camp or settlement and speak with an NPC. If you’re not in the open sea, find a vendor or another NPC and chat with them. This will block the Death Mark message. For example, you can go to the vanity atelier to stop the notification; it’s where you can change your appearance in the game.
- Quite out of the game entirely and relaunch it. By restarting the game, you can effectively remove the Death Mark pop-up. Skull and Bones is an online live-service title that saves constantly, so you don’t have to worry about losing your progress when closing or quitting the game. You can also quit to the game’s main menu and log back into your world.
- Use your spacebar to clear all notifications.
Finding the vendor to interact with or sit it out is the most straightforward method, but we don't blame you if you’re not the patient type. Go ahead and quit the game and relaunch it. It shouldn’t take long for you to get back behind the wheel of your ship.
High-Level Players Are Abusing the Helm Death Mark
Beyond the persistent notifications above the Helm Death Mark, it’s designed to weave a layer of danger into the gameplay. Anyone who’s been marked by The Helm becomes a target for enemy ships, making the process of navigating and sailing all the more challenging. Now that the Death Mark is glitched, other players are exploiting it. The bug allows them to attack new players in (supposedly) safe zones, further exacerbating the situation.
Besides players who aren’t marked in the first place having problems, the same goes for those who haven’t even encountered The Helm yet. The organization only opens up when you’re in the endgame stages of Skull and Bones. However, newer players who have yet to unlock it already get marked.
Fix Your Game, Ubisoft
The Skull and Bones community’s response has—so far—been a mix of frustration and complaints. Players devised temporary fixes, such as speaking to NPCs or pressing the spacebar to clear the notifications. Sadly, these workarounds are only band-aids over a gaping wound that Ubisoft has yet to fix. The persistent ‘“Death Mark Expired” bug, coupled with exploitations in the safe zones, highlights the need for urgent action from the developers.
Game development is filled with turbulence. Bugs and glitches aren’t uncommon, but the measure of a game’s success lies in how swiftly the developers address these issues. Unfortunately, we’ve yet to see this from Ubisoft’s perspective. Despite Skull and Bones being touted as a quadruple A” game, there’s nothing much to see apart from a husk of Sea of Thieves.
