Sea of Thieves Update:
Due to severe sever instability caused by patch 1.0.7, Rare has temporarily disabled all of the patch’s new gameplay features, including private crews and hidden underwater name plates. As of this writing, Sea of Thieves is still suffering from unstable online servers and Rare hasn’t provided a timetable for when patch 1.0.7’s new features will return.
Original Story:
Rare’s swashbuckling open-world adventure game Sea of Thieves has received a new update which adds in a welcome feature: the ability to form private crews with your friends.
Before the update, trying to play Sea of Thieves with your friends was a bit of a pain. There was no ‘friends only’ crew option so if you wanted to form a crew but you had less than three friends with you, your only recourse was to either limit your crew to three players (thus making it harder to effectively sail larger ship types) or have random players fill the empty crew slots and pray that they weren’t some troll or griefer looking to sabotage you.
Now, thanks to Sea of Thieves’ 1.0.7 patch, players can toggle between ‘Open Crew’ and ‘Closed Crew’ options. Open Crew is the standard matchmaking a solo player can use to be matched up with other random crewmates while Closed Crew allows players to manually assemble a crew by inviting their friends. When using Closed Crew, players will be able to specify whether they want to spawn onto a four-person galleon or a two-person sloop, and then they’ll be able to invite as many friends as they like up to their given ship’s maximum capacity. This means that two players can attempt to sail a galleon if they want (though it won’t be ideal), and if a friend has to disconnect for whatever reason they won’t be automatically replaced by a random player.
In the near future, Rare wants to expand the Open/Closed Crew feature even more by allowing players to dynamically switch between Open and Closed Crews while in-game (currently players have to return to the main menu if they want to switch). Rare also wants to eventually add a full private option for players who want to play solo without their friends being able to join their games.
Along with the Open/Closed Crew feature, patch 1.0.7 makes it so that a player’s name plate is hidden while they’re underwater, allowing for more clandestine boarding. The patch was also supposed to enable the ability for players to directly trade items like bananas and planks with each other, but a last-minute bug forced Rare to disable the feature for the time being. Be sure to read the full patch notes to get a sense of everything patch 1.0.7 offers.