Thomas Richards
Thomas Richards is a Coastal Jungle boss in Windrose, encountered as part of the "Revenge Is Best Served Cold" questline given by Doctor Galen after I Need a Bigger Boat.
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Thomas Richards is a named boss encountered in the Coastal Jungle biome of Windrose. He is the primary boss of the "Revenge Is Best Served Cold" questline, which is given by Doctor Galen Skelton after the player completes I Need a Bigger Boat. He is tuned for gear tier 1 to 5 and is the first named major boss players encounter during the early hours of Early Access.
Thomas Richards lives in a Coastal Jungle encounter tied to the Black Marks quest chain. The fight pairs heavy two-handed axe swings with thrown grenades, and he carries a poise guard that must be broken before you can open a reliable damage window. Because the arena is generous and he does not regenerate health between your retreats, attrition strategies remain viable. In co-op play, one player should hold aggro and absorb the axe windups while the rest of the group focuses poise and flank damage.
The quest structure requires the player to collect 4 Black Marks scattered across the Blackbeard Waters region before the encounter opens; each Black Mark ties to a small Coastal Jungle objective and progresses Doctor Galen's intel on Richards's location.
Community-built discovery trackers (such as /discovery) list a "Local Threat" discovery slot for each biome. There is community discussion about whether the Coastal Jungle Local Threat is Thomas Richards or a separate, currently-locked entry tied to 1.0 release. A Steam forum thread titled "Anyone found the Local Threat?" reports that the Local Threat discovery item is gated behind release-version content in some players' experience. Treat Thomas Richards as confirmed via his boss guide, but do not assume he is the Local Threat entry without in-game verification.
Recommendation | Details |
|---|---|
Gear tier | 1 to 5 (Common to low Rare) |
Recommended level | Late Coastal Jungle; typically Level 5 to 8 |
Armor minimum | Around 180 defense for consistent survival |
A balanced damage-type loadout; carry a pistol or musket for opening shots | |
Food buffs | Stack two long-duration buffs (e.g. +Agility or +Strength food plus a Health buff) |
Carry Minor Healing Potions; apply oils appropriate to the damage type |
Thomas Richards wields a two-handed axe as his main weapon and supplements it with thrown grenades, forcing the player to manage both melee spacing and area denial. A poise guard covers his early health bar and must be broken before melee strikes connect for full damage. General Soulslite combat principles apply:
Lock onto the boss with T so your dodges and guard track the enemy
Watch for telegraphed windups; each axe swing has a visible animation before impact, and grenade throws have a distinct overhand tell
Use Perfect Blocks (parries) to stagger him when possible; parries do not consume most weapons' poise
Do not fully deplete stamina; recovery from zero stamina takes significantly longer than from partial depletion
Retreat to recover stamina between aggressive windows rather than trading blows
Red-glow unblockable attacks must be dodged, not blocked
Enemies do not regenerate health between your retreats, so attrition strategies are viable
Defeating Thomas Richards advances the "Revenge Is Best Served Cold" questline and unlocks progression toward the next biome (Foothills). Specific drop data for his loot tables continues to be refined by the community during Early Access.
Thomas Richards is not a historical figure; he appears to be an original character created for Windrose's alternate Age of Piracy setting. The "Revenge Is Best Served Cold" quest name suggests a personal grievance motivation, likely tied to the player's shipwreck prologue or to one of the secondary characters encountered in the early game.
Procedural Biomes - biome progression and boss placement
Enemies - full enemy roster
Israel Hands - Foothills boss, next in the gear-tier progression
High Priestess - Cursed Swamps boss at the final tier
Combat - core combat mechanics
Doctor Galen - quest-giver for Revenge Is Best Served Cold
On top of the armor and gear-tier guidance above, the actual in-fight resources decide most Thomas Richards attempts. The player who walks in with too few heals burns attempts on the last third of his bar, where the combat window tightens and mistakes become expensive. A working checklist for the fight:
Bandages, at least ten. Bandages are the fastest mid-combat heal and the cheapest to craft in bulk. Solo runs tend to use all of them by the time poise breaks consistently, so going below ten is self-sabotage.
Health potions. A small alchemy bench investment yields Minor Healing Potion stacks that restore a large chunk of the bar. Brew three before the fight as emergency cover when bandages run out.
Damage buff drink. Elixir of Cruelty layers a flat damage multiplier on top of your weapon's base output. Every extra point of damage accelerates the poise break, which means fewer windows spent dancing in range.
Stamina / endurance food. Stacking an Endurance-boosting dish (cooked at the Cooking Fire) before entry keeps heavy attacks available deeper into each exchange. Food buffs can stack up to three simultaneous bonuses.
The Rested buff. Decorating the base to apply the Rested buff increases stamina regeneration. It is free damage and free dodges; leaving without it is the most common avoidable mistake.
The Greatsword is the recommended weapon for this fight, not because it is the strongest weapon in Windrose overall, but because strength-based heavy attacks are the most reliable way to deplete Thomas Richards's poise guard without needing to land perfectly timed parries. The reach of the weapon keeps you outside his axe swing arc, and its block stability trims chip damage during the double-swing pattern.
The Saber and Rapier are faster and more forgiving in general combat, but their lighter hits chip poise more slowly, which extends every safe window and compounds the total hit count needed per phase. If you are confident with parries, they remain viable. If you are relying on rhythm rather than reflexes, the Greatsword is the shortcut.
Guns are the fastest option if you have the ammunition budget. Gunpowder is scarce in the early game and is usually better saved for dungeon bosses, but Thomas Richards is a dungeon-class encounter, and ranged shots deal both poise and health damage against a target that cannot effectively retaliate at distance.
The core of the fight is a simple loop around his primary melee rhythm: two axe swings, brief pause, repeat. Watch the two swings, step back through the second, move in for one heavy attack, then disengage before his next combo begins.
Lock on first. Press T to lock on as soon as the encounter begins. Dodges and blocks automatically face him, which matters when his second swing tracks your movement.
Walk backwards, do not run. Thomas cannot move faster than your backwards walk. Baiting both swings by retreating is safer than attempting to parry them cold, and leaves stamina available for the counter.
One heavy, then out. Two or three heavy attacks in the counter window is greedy. His recovery out of the pause is faster than a full combo, and the first hit that catches you during your animation lock tends to cascade into a death.
Phase compression, not phase change. As his health drops, the pattern speeds up and hits harder but does not change shape. The two-swing read carries you from full bar to empty if you do not deviate.
Because the arena is instanced, a tent placed inside it will not serve as a respawn point. Dropping a Tent at the cave entrance and setting it as the active revival point cuts the corpse-run to seconds and makes attempt-cycling viable while learning the two-swing read.
For the armor loadout, a hybrid of two pieces Conquistador's Armor and two pieces Flibustier's Attire gives up both four-piece capstones in exchange for a flat 15% mitigation plus a 20% cut to attack stamina cost. The mitigation compresses his heavy frontal slam into a recoverable hit, and the stamina reduction buys one extra dodge inside each combo window.
Players with surplus Gunpowder can trivialize the encounter with a Blunderbuss. Close-range shots strip his posture far faster than melee, and he has no effective counter to ranged pressure. The tradeoff is ammunition cost: expect to empty most of an early-game gunpowder stockpile on a single attempt, so this route is only worthwhile once gunpowder production is established.
The Conquistador plus Flibustier hybrid described earlier is the mitigation-focused variant. Captains who have not yet unlocked the heavy Conquistador plans can instead run a lighter two-by-two split built around health and critical chance. Slot two pieces of the Pikeman Set for the 2-piece health bonus of +160 maximum health, then two pieces of the Privateer Set for the 2-piece crit bonus of +10% critical chance. The health cushion buys one extra mistake inside every exchange, while the crit chance compresses the poise bar faster across a long fight.
Both sets have plans available at faction Provisioners earlier than the Conquistador line, so this combo is the standard fallback for players who pushed reputation through the non-Smuggler factions first. The tradeoff is that it gives up the flat 15% mitigation of the Conquistador 2-piece in exchange for output and survival padding, which favors careful dodging over absorbing the axe swings outright. If you are already comfortable with the two-swing read, crit plus health usually closes the fight faster than mitigation plus stamina.
Thomas Richards has six posture (armor) bars, which is significantly more than most earlier enemies. Breaking his posture for a critical stun typically requires landing five or six consecutive Perfect Blocks without missing. Missing any single Perfect Block resets significant portions of the drain, so the practical path for most players is not chasing a stun but instead doing damage in his cooldown windows between combos.
Rapier of a Thousand Cuts bleed loop: the Rapier of a Thousand Cuts applies stacking Bleed on hit. A three-hit-and-retreat rhythm puts enough stacks on Richards that the Bleed ticks continue to deal damage while the character is safely out of range, effectively converting dodges into damage windows. This build path shortens the fight substantially without ever needing to commit to a stun break.
Bomb AOEs have a small radius and are static: the bombs Thomas throws explode in a tight radius, and he freezes in place until they detonate. That idle window is the safest healing opportunity in the entire fight. When a bomb lands, immediately step two body-widths outside the marker, heal with a bandage or potion, and return to aggression the moment the explosion resolves. Trying to close and hit Richards during the bomb state wastes the healing window for a few chip hits he can easily absorb.
Grab attacks: in addition to melee combos and bombs, Richards occasionally uses a forward grab with a red telegraph. Unlike his other reds, the grab has a longer wind-up and can be reliably dodged sideways rather than backward. Dodging backward sometimes catches the grab's forward lunge; dodging laterally steps outside of it cleanly.
Hotfix 0.10.0.2.54 on April 17, 2026 retuned two aspects of this encounter. The first is a fix for a target-switching bug in multiplayer that had Richards occasionally disengage from his active target and pivot mid-combo. The second is a fix for a specific edge case where Richards would sometimes use his Grab attack immediately after throwing bombs, stacking two red-telegraph attacks in a window that gave no practical counterplay. Post-patch, the Grab still appears but no longer chains directly off a bomb throw, so the bomb-drop healing window described earlier in this guide is reliable again. The same patch retuned boss difficulty scaling for 3+ player encounters, bringing multi-player kill times back in line with the intended curve; any pre-April-17 timing or TTK data for 3-, 4-, 6-, or 8-player squads should be considered stale.
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