Sea of Thieves now lets you create friends-only crews

If someone leaves, the game won’t try to backfill your group

After a short delay, Rare has added the ability for Sea of Thieves players to create open and closed crews. Under the old system, the game would try and fill out your crew as needed, so if you had a friend duck out, a random player would more than likely be matched into your group as a replacement.

With closed crews, you can start on “either a Galleon or a Sloop, allowing friends to join in when they’re available. You can now play with any configuration of players up to the limit on each ship, which is four players on the Galleon and two players on the Sloop, as well as preventing non-friends from being able to join you. This option replaces the three-player Galleon and Solo Sloop options in the Main Menu.”

Rare says it also hopes to add an open/closed toggle for changing your crew’s permissions while you’re playing, along with the option to “make a session fully private by preventing friends joining.”

As mentioned in this developer video, one of the update’s other new features is currently missing in action. Rare introduced the ability to hand players items like bananas, planks, and cannon balls, but this led to unforeseen performance issues and had to be temporarily removed pending a fix.

Here’s everything else in today’s update:

Updates

• Who Goes There? – When swimming underwater, gamertag and Player Titles are no longer visible. Now you can #BeMoresneakyPirate!
• Now in Stock! – Imperial Sovereign Blunderbuss, Pistol, Sails, Hull and Liveries are now available to purchase in the Ancient Isles. They were incorrectly listed as available in Patch 1.0.6.
• Flintlock Pistol – New sound effects for close fire and reloading the Flintlock Pistol.
• Icons – Within the clothing chest, the icons to unequip all or select a random outfit have been updated.
• Health Bar UI – Deciding whether to eat that banana or keep swiping your sword? You’ll notice some changes to the health bar UI, fancy!

Progression & Economy Updates

• Price Changes – Greedy pirates had overpriced the Castaway Bilge Rat weapons and ship liveries. These have now been reduced. Anyone who purchased items within this set pre-price adjustment will have the difference reimbursed very soon.
• Strike Gold – As Pirates rank up with all the trading companies, the chances of finding more valuable rewards has been increased. Say good-bye to those Castaway Chests at higher ranks!

Fixed Issues

• Players should no longer experience details of their pirate (such as hair colour / scars) looking different from their initial selection.
• Players should no longer experience delayed achievements and commendations from in-game actions.
  During last week’s maintenance window we made improvements to our servers and services which should have resolved both of the above issues. If you are still encountering the above two issues, please log a Support Ticket so we can investigate this further.
• Resolved issue that sometimes showed riddle landmarks as glowing rocks.
• Resolved an issue on Old Faithful Isle which could have prevented players from completing riddle voyages.
• Bounty Captains and Crew will no longer have their names mixed up.
• Gunpowder Barrels will no longer cause two explosions if detonated when being held by a player.
• Loaded cannons will no longer intermittently appear unloaded when returning to the ship.
• Starting Merchant voyages back to back will no longer prevent the reminder to collect crates from appearing.
• When playing on wide monitors the settings menu UI will no longer have clipping issues.
• Being on an Order of Souls voyage no longer causes fewer ambient skeletons to spawn.
• Cannonball, wooden plank and banana crates no longer always spawn empty.
• Restarting the game will no longer reset the frame rate lock option.
• Fixed a collision issue on Thieves’ Haven.
• Equipping the Seadog Hull on a sloop will now match the preview image.
• Muting all other crews will no longer mute your own crew.
• The floor texture of the crows nest on the galleon now appears correctly.
• Resolved a shader issue caused the balcony outside the Captain’s Cabin on the galleon to appear incorrectly.
• There is no longer a gap between a characters head and the Imperial Sovereign Hat when it is equipped.
• Restored missing 90 fps frame rate lock option.

Performance Improvements

• Frame rates will now be more consistent during ship battles, sword fights and Kraken encounters due to visual effect optimisations.
• Latency has been improved in multiple-ship and skeleton heavy scenarios due to server optimisations.
• Frame rates can now be locked to 100 FPS.
• [PC Only] Fixed GPU driver hangs/crashes on certain graphics devices.
• [PC Only] Resolved bug which triggered Copperbeard error when alt-tabbing.
• Multiple server crash fixes.
  Further improvements and optimisations for all platforms are ongoing.

Known Issues

• Some players cannot see their downloadable content in game.
  Once you redeem your code, here is a Support Article that shows you where to find your items in game. If you still cannot find your items in game, please raise a support ticket to log this issue.

Check back later this week for a first look at the Hungering Deep update for Sea of Thieves.

Patch Notes Discussion – 1.0.7 [Sea of Thieves]