Sea of Thieves News

[h2]Sun, Sand and Sea of Thieves
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For those of you who were planning to get away for the summer, but had your plans scuppered by our collective situation – don’t worry, there’s a whole other world for you to explore from the safety of your sofa! If you’re stuck on land with nowhere to go, the ‘Summer of Sea of Thieves’ event kicks off today, inviting you to dive in and take a challenge-driven tour of our beautiful ocean regions.

From meeting the local pirate populace to attempting explosive aerobatics, this event serves up 10 challenge sets, each containing four goals, plus one more for Pirate Legends with some special tasks to tackle! You’ll have until the event ends on September 30 to pick and choose which of the wildly varied goals you want to complete, based on your play style and the rewards on offer.

There are glittering piles of gold and Doubloons up for grabs, plus rare cosmetics and player Titles – including a highly prized ‘Legend of the Sun’ Title to be bagged by those heroes who fully commit to this event’s adventurous antics and risky requests.

To find out more about the ‘Summer of Sea of Thieves’ in-game event, watch our handy video then head to the Events Hub to check out the challenges!

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[h2]Turn Your Garden into a Galleon[/h2]

It’s not just your in-game summer experience that we’re aiming to improve: thanks to a new summer-themed set of merchandise soon to land in the official Sea of Thieves store, you’ll be able to enjoy the sunshine in true pirate fashion. Deckchairs and towels will be on offer for those of you who want to sunbathe in style, and you’ll even be able to keep hydrated with your very own Sea of Thieves water bottle.

Head to the Sea of Thieves store later to this month to pick up the first of your pirate poolside accessories, and make sure you’re quick about it! Wouldn’t want things to get salty if you miss out…



[h2]Find Out More[/h2]

For more information on the ‘Summer of Sea of Thieves’ event, including the full roster of challenges, please visit the Events Hub on the Sea of Thieves website. The event is available for free to all Sea of Thieves players who have bought the game on Xbox One, on Windows 10 PC or via Steam, or players who have access to it with Xbox Game Pass. Simply download and install the latest Sea of Thieves update to take part.

New to Sea of Thieves? Join the fun with our Maiden Voyage, a narrative-driven tutorial experience. New players will begin their travels within this scenario, which provides guidance and information to fledgling sailors. Learn more about Sea of Thieves at www.xbox.com/seaofthieves, or join the ongoing adventure at www.seaofthieves.com where you can embark on an epic journey with one of gaming’s most welcoming communities!

Hi everyone, I hope everyone is doing well and staying safe. I wanted to share an update on Sea of Thieves plans as we head towards our next update, coming August 19th.

As we came off the back of our July release, we had an opportunity to assess our planned set of features for August – and it quickly became apparent that everything was coming in a little hot.

Since we started working from home, we’ve definitely had to be a bit more flexible with our plans for each month, and as such we’ve decided to move our key planned features back to our September release.

Because of this, tomorrow’s update focuses on a range of bug fixes and quality of life improvements while rolling out a series of live events to mark the Summer of Sea of Thieves. There will not be a Pirate Emporium refresh as part of this update.

Keep your eyes on our Sea of Thieves channels to learn more about the live events on their way, and remember you can always check the Sea of Thieves Events Hub for the latest live events and Daily Bounties to tackle.

Thanks to everyone for their understanding and ongoing support as we continue to work through this unique situation. We have seen so many players, both new and old, head to the Sea of Thieves over the summer, and we continue to love hearing about all your stories and adventures.

As always, see you on the seas!

- Joe “Three Sheets” Neate

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This month’s Sea of Thieves content is being served up hot – literally! Captain Flameheart’s manipulation of Stitcher Jim, Duke and countless other pirates on the seas has finally granted him the knowledge and resources he needs to transform some of his most trusted underlings into Ashen Lords. This July, pirates are tasked with taking down a fearsome foursome in Sea of Thieves’ latest monthly update Ashen Winds, available today for all Sea of Thieves players across Xbox One, Windows 10 PC, Steam and with Xbox Game Pass.

[h2]Lording It Up[/h2]



July’s update centers on the rise of the Ashen Lords: four of Flameheart’s followers boosted by the blistering energy of the Ashen Curse, leaving them capable of causing huge destruction. These powerful skeletal foes have emerged across the Sea of Thieves and will strike back with fire, ash and flaming rocks at any pirates who dare to challenge them. The Ashen Lords have distinct personalities and different abilities to anything else seen on the seas, so seafarers must stay sharp at all times to ensure their defeat.

These emergent enemies will appear on islands indicated on the horizon by a raging tornado cloud, and will remain on the Sea of Thieves as a permanent threat to pirates. The Ashen Lords’ fires are far from burning out, and their hot-headed ways are set to rain fiery terror down on players for months to come!

[h2]All the Hot Gossip[/h2]



In combat, an Ashen Lord can spit flame at its opponents – but even after defeat, it’s rumoured that the Ashen Winds Skull left behind is potent enough to use as a deadly weapon. Take the cursed cranium and aim it at your enemies to use its fire for your own purposes, but be warned: constant use will drain its power, and reduce its substantial value to the Order of Souls. So if it’s the gold and reputation you’re after, a little restraint will go a long way. If not… fire at will!

[h2]Accessibility Additions[/h2]

In a continued push to open the seas to everyone, more accessibility options are being added to Sea of Thieves this month. The most notable is support for play with a single analog stick, where players can opt to, well, play with just a single analog stick. All ship, pirate and menu controls are moved to your stick of choice, allowing anyone not comfortable with a traditional controller to reduce the number of held inputs required to set sail.

In addition there’s a new auto-centering camera option that ensures it always tends towards the horizon, and an auto-float mode to keep pirates with a dislike of the watery depths bobbing on the surface in a virtual lifejacket. With the number of options in the menu, there’s also a handy button to reset all accessibility options to their default state.

[h2]Pirate Emporium Scorchers[/h2]

Ashen Curse pets are sizzling onto the scene with July’s update, and these charmingly charred critters are joined in the Emporium by new roleplay emotes for your pirates, based on the mannerisms of some of your favorite Sea of Thieves characters. If you’ve ever wanted to prop up the bar just like Duke or delve deeper into roleplaying as a Trading Company Emissary, you’re in luck.



Meanwhile, if you’ve been hankering to dress your four-legged friend in something that reminds you of your many-tentacled enemies, look no further: Kraken cat outfits have reached the Emporium, so your cute kitty can trot about in a dapper new outfit inspired by a terrible behemoth!

There’s also a sale coming to the ship livery aisle of the Pirate Emporium, with a range of Rare-inspired ship bundles (paying tribute to games as diverse as Banjo-Kazooie, Viva Piñata and Perfect Dark) getting a sweet 35% discount to mark Rare’s 35th anniversary. Check out the Pirate Emporium page for all your window shopping needs.

[h2]Find Out More[/h2]

For more information on the Ashen Winds update, including full release notes, visit the Sea of Thieves website. The update is available for free to all Sea of Thieves players who have bought the game on Xbox One, on Windows 10 PC or via Steam, or players who have access to it with Xbox Game Pass. Simply download and install the latest Sea of Thieves update to get access.

New to Sea of Thieves? Join the fun with our Maiden Voyage, a narrative-driven tutorial experience separate from Adventure and Arena modes. New Sea of Thieves players will begin their travels within this scenario, which provides guidance and information to fledgling sailors. Learn more about Sea of Thieves at www.xbox.com/seaofthieves, or join the ongoing adventure at www.seaofthieves.com where you can embark on an epic journey with one of gaming’s most welcoming communities!

It’s both thrilling and humbling to share with you that Sea of Thieves has been played by more than fifteen million players since our launch in March 2018.

The way that the game and its community has continued to grow has been amazing to see. It was only in January of this year when we shared that 10 million people had played the game! We’re also humbled that more people have played Sea of Thieves in the first six months of 2020 than who played in the whole of 2019, which was more than 2018.

Last month – June 2020 – was also the biggest month so far for Sea of Thieves in terms of active players, with more than 3.3M players setting sail. A contributing factor to this growth has been our recent launch on Steam. We’ve been blown away by the support we’ve seen from the Steam community, with over 1M copies of the game having been sold so far and the game regularly appearing in the top selling and most played games charts.

On behalf of all of us at Rare, I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone who’s ever played Sea of Thieves for helping to get us this far. It’s a game that we love making, and there’s plenty more to come. See you on the seas.

- Joe Neate, Executive Producer at Rare

One of the many things we have always loved about Sea of Thieves is being able to witness the creativity of our players within the sandbox we provide. We’ve seen so many things from legendary races, fashion shows and fishing competitions through to entirely new games like SkullBall, The Pirate Games and countless others. We love the energy and variety this brings to our community, not only if you find yourself lucky enough to take part, but because these are just great to watch.

As Sea of Thieves has grown we’ve been supporting some of these initiatives in the background, helping people get together on the same server to save on that initial setup time for our community events, but we’ve always harboured a desire to do more. We have been working for a while on formalising this support, and in the near future we’re going to bring an early Alpha version of Custom Servers to Sea of Thieves as a tool for selected creators and community groups to utilise for community events.

We will be working with these creators and community groups to test Custom Servers in a live environment, to gather feedback and prioritise future development priorities in this area. At the same time as giving us valuable feedback and data, it’ll make it easier for these groups to run community events like the ones we’ve seen already.

With this in mind, the initial feature set for our Alpha release is absolutely reflective of the goals above: giving these creators and community groups swift access to Custom Servers, an ability to run custom events and invite players from their communities to take part.

· Key features:

• Ability to set up a Custom Adventure Server
  
• Customisation of ship numbers and types prior to starting
  
• Generation of a code to distribute to community members to allow them to join
  
• No gold or reputation progression from Custom Server sessions
  

We will be testing in Insiders, prior to rolling out with our initial creators and groups in the wild. We see a bright future for Custom Servers in Sea of Thieves, but we want to start purposefully with the dual purpose of learning from this initially small audience and expanding the Custom Server toolset before we think about rolling out more widely and what that will entail. The first step is to roll these out in an Alpha state and start learning. We expect this to be a lengthy Alpha phase where we listen, learn and evolve what Custom Servers deliver in terms of tools available to those using them.

To acknowledge some of the questions we expect to see:

· The key purpose of Custom Servers is to allow creative players the opportunity to use our sandbox to create unique experiences for their communities. They are not intended to be used as a PvE server, hence the removal of ability to earn gold and rep.

· We are launching early and to a limited audience for multiple reasons:

• It’s a very bare-bones feature set, and we want to learn with a limited audience (who have already demonstrated drive and creativity in our community) and build it out before considering how we bring it to a wider audience.
  
• Custom Servers cost money to run. Starting small and learning makes sense from a business perspective.
  
• With the above point in mind, it is likely that Custom Servers will eventually be an optional feature that players can access from the Pirate Emporium. We want to learn more about the desired feature set, usage and cost before deciding exactly how to make this something the wider community can access.
  

In the near term, we’ll be continuing to expand our Partner Programme and Affiliate Alliance, and will be keen to hear from people with proposals for new community events that could utilise this formative and growing toolset. Please reach out via our Affiliate Alliance programme if you have a proposal or want to find out more. You can find more details here.

We are excited to start this new part of the adventure with our community and see the future creativity that this unlocks. Your ideas, energy and creativity inspire us every day.

See you on the seas!

– Joe “Three Sheets” Neate