Rare is sticking to its schedule of weekly Sea of Thieves updates, and this time around the patch in question is 1.0.3. The update has already been deployed on Xbox One and Windows 10, bringing some weapon damage alterations, a handy message for dead players, and several more changes.
Whenever players die in Sea of Thieves, they have to spend some time in the Ferry of the Damned before returning to the land of the living. Now, the Ferry has a useful message nailed to a doorpost detailing how players can sink their own ship to spawn on a new location, in case they are being spawn camped, for instance.
On the weapon balancing front, Rare has reduced the Blunderbuss shotgun"s damage and buffed the Eye of Reach sniper"s damage. Regarding the change, the developer said that "We"ve been reviewing the data on players weapon choices and damage dealt across our weapons and made some balancing changes. We will continue to monitor this change and further tweak as needed."
Beyond that, the extremely low sensitivity that PC players witnessed when aiming down the sights of weapons has been increased somewhat. This is something pointed out in Neowin"s Sea of Thieves review as well, and the studio says that a separate aim down sight sensitivity slider is planned for a future update. Also, PC players now have the ability to bind mouse scroll up and scroll down actions to whatever they desire via the options menu.
Gamers from South America should have a much smoother experience while sailing the seas from now on as well, as a new data center has been deployed in the region.
Aside from the usual server and game crash fixes that have been deployed, here are the resolved issues in the Sea of Thieves update 1.0.3:
- Enabling "non-directional" chat no longer allows non-crew players to be heard anywhere in the world.
- Players should no longer get into a state where they can no longer equip a second weapon.
- We have corrected an issue with players receiving very little warning of a server shutdown. Players should now receive a minimum warning of 30 minutes for a server shut down.
We are still working to ensure that server shutdowns are something that a player would only experience during scheduled maintenance. In the meantime we aim to give players more opportunity to react to a shutdown should it occur.
And here are the known issues:
- Trading Companies now have limited voyage stock that refreshes at 6am every day (in-game time). This limited voyage stock is currently not explained during purchasing.
- 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.
- Players may experience details of their pirate (such as hair colour / scars) looking different from their initial selection.
We are still working on a fix for this. This was discussed in our Launch Update article written by Executive Producer, Joe Neate.
- Bounty quest skeleton waves sometimes spawn in the ground or cannot be found at all.
Improvements to spawning have been made in this update, and we are working to resolve the issue for all islands. For a potential work around, please read this Support article.
- Pirates can be migrated to another server after completing a Skeleton Fort, and sailing away with the Vault Key. After migration, they will find that the vault is empty upon their return.
We are working on a fix. A short term solution is to not sail away from the Skeleton Fort when you have the Vault Key.
- [PC] Push to talk option will reset to default (disabled) between sessions.
- Message from Beyond on the Ghost Ship isn"t translated to other languages.
The update is around 1.20GB is size on both Xbox One and Windows 10, and should begin downloading automatically when online. The game"s much-awaited roadmap should also be revealed sometime this week.
Sea of Thieves is available via the Microsoft Store for $59.99 as an Xbox Play Anywhere title, and is also part of the $9.99/mo Xbox Game Pass subscription program.