Years after its initial release, Sea of Thieves recently embarked upon a new voyage - a Season system. The game will now be getting fairly regular updates with all-new content for fans to enjoy.
With new Seasons comes the necessity of new features. Fortunately for Sea of Thieves fans and unfortunately for real pirates, historical accounts of life at sea provide some grizzly possibilities for new mechanics.
Scurvy Dogs
Being a pirate during the Golden Age of Piracy was an unsurprisingly nasty business. As well as being stabbed, shot, drowning, or being tried and executed for piracy back on land, the average pirate crew faced a myriad of grim diseases and pest problems that could be an interesting basis for new features in Sea of Thieves.
Most famously, pirates had to keep eating lemons, limes, sauerkraut, or they'd risk getting scurvy. This disease is caused by a vitamin C deficiency, and those suffering from the disease would find their teeth falling out and their bones atrophying. Sea of Thieves' food is currently only used to restore health; it works as a genre-friendly version of the health potions found in many other games. Players can also get sick from eating uncooked meat. However, there aren't any actual net negative effects, as raw meat just restores less health.
Food effects could be an interesting addition to Sea of Thieves. Cooked food can already grant additional health. Other foods in the future might grant things like faster running speeds, longer underwater breathing, and so on. It may not be historically accurate, but pirates certainly did have to keep an eye on their diets or suffer the consequences. Sea of Thieves players who go too long without eating certain foods might also begin to suffer side effects like a reduced maximum health.
Rats And Rudimentary Medicine
Rats were a huge problem onboard pirate ships. They would spread diseases like scabies, and could devastate a ship's food supply. Keeping a ship as rat-free as possible was an important responsibility on the sea. Rats could be an interesting new animal in Sea of Thieves in a few ways. First, they could pose a problem to players who leave cooking food unguarded or overstock their food barrels. A rat infestation might causes some supplies to disappear when they're most needed, or players to start suffering debuffs similar to the ones that could come with scurvy or other diseases.
If a rat problem got out of control, it could even swarm - or worse, form a Rat King - and attack players on their own ships. As with everything dangerous in Sea of Thieves from explosive barrels to the Megalodon, it likely wouldn't take long for players to figure out how to weaponize such a feature. Players might intentionally sacrifice some supplies to summon a rat swarm, and then lead it onto an enemy ship Pied Piper-style by playing a new tune on their instruments. Once on board, the swarm might attack other players and devastate their supplies.
With all these dangers, surgeons were extremely valuable to real pirate ships, and surgeons aboard captured ships were often press-ganged into their captor's crews. Giving players the ability to heal one another might be an interesting addition to Sea of Thieves, but as with so many things at sea, it would have to come with a cost. Amputations were famously common among pirates, though it's hard to see how exactly that could be integrated into the game, especially with wooden legs and hooks already existing as cosmetic options in Sea of Thieves.
Nonetheless, the many real-life perils of pirate life could provide great inspiration for Sea of Thieves' future. With the Season system set to see the game get a steady stream of updates, pests and plagues could be right around the corner.
Sea of Thieves is available now on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.