Since its alpha testing days, Rare has been honoring Sea of Thieves players with in-game Easter eggs that commemorate outstanding community contributions and milestones such as the first death by falling and the grossest overindulgence in bananas. There's a massive list of the player skeletons, plaques, engravings, and wanted posters scattered around the map over on the Sea of Thieves wiki (opens in new tab), and next week's content update will task you with hunting them down. It's not unlike the graffiti used in CS:GO to immortalize big moments.
In his latest dev update (embedded above), Sea of Thieves executive producer Joe Neate says that the January content update will add a new NPC named Umbra who will send us searching for these hidden landmarks in return for commendations and new tattoos.
There are also quality of life tweaks in the update, with more information coming next week in the trailer. Neate highlights a few. In Arena specifically, players will no longer begin in storms, and sunken ships will go down faster so that a new ship spawns more quickly. A feature that's already in Arena and is being added to the general adventure mode is the option for console players to avoid crossplay with PC players (and our fearsome attack mice). I'm doubtful we'll notice the population decline, given the relatively small number of players who simultaneously inhabit a server, and the way Sea of Thieves migrates crews into servers with nearby players to ensure occasional encounters.
Another minor general change is that storage crates won't always be empty—a fruit crate might contain a bit of fruit, as you'd expect.
"A lot more than that is coming" in the update, says Neate. We'll see what else is on the way in next week's trailer, and the update will go live on Wednesday, January 15.
Last month, we gave Sea of Thieves a commendation of our own, awarding it Best Ongoing Game (opens in new tab) in our 2019 GOTYs (opens in new tab).
