Rare"s monthly updates to Sea of Thieves continue, but due to complications the studio is facing due to working from home, today"s August update is lacking a big hook as it normally does with content expansions, with the new features being pushed to next month"s update. Still, the developer has delivered an update loaded with a new series of live events marking the beginning of "the Summer of Sea of Thieves" alongside gameplay updates and bug fixes.
The new time-limited summer event tasks pirates with completing various challenges that contain four goals each. The challenges will take players all over the map, meeting NPCs, fighting in the Arena, and making new friends, with various rewards - from unique cosmetic items to loot - attached to how many goals are completed by crews.
Events don"t stop there, as a Megaladon hunting challenge is incoming on August 26, which offers the upcoming Shrouded Ghost ship cosmetic collection as a reward before it is introduced into the Pirate Emporium premium shop. Finer details regarding each of these, and more, can be found on the Sea of Thieves Events Hub portal.
As for gameplay updates, Rare has made Skeleton Ship Fleet rewards more significant, upped the frequency of Ashen Lord encounters, and disabled the intro cutscene if players are joining a session using an invite. Meanwhile, on the accessibility side, voice translations have been added as a feature, with the game now providing text translations of player voice chat.
There is a whole host of bug fixes included in the update too, which can be found on the full patch notes over here. The update comes in at around 5GB on the Xbox One family of consoles and Windows 10, while Steam players will find a 1.7GB download waiting for them.