If you’ve just begun playing Sea Of Thieves then there’s a lot to get your head around, but this handy guide should help you get started.
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Sea Of Thieves is shaping up to be one of the best multiplayer games of the year, if not generation, but while it’s not a complicated game, once you get the hang of it, the lack of any tutorials or in-game help can be confusing at first.
Below are the answers to some of the most commonly posed questions, including how the trading companies work and whether the game will ever come to PlayStation 4. If there’s anything else you want to know though do send us an email or leave a note in the comments below.
Q. How do I customise my character?
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A. Sea Of Thieves has a rather odd approach to character customisation, in that it doesn’t let you create a pirate from scratch. Instead you have to pick who you want to play as from a carousel of random-generated characters. If you don’t like the look of any of them then you can get the game to randomly generate another batch as often as you like, but at the end of the day you’ve still got to pick one.
What you can do though is buy new clothes, equipment, and custom ship parts. None of these have any effect on gameplay – so even if a gun looks different it doesn’t do anything different – but they can change the way you look quite dramatically. All these items are expensive though and the main thing you have to spend your ill-gotten gains on.
You’ll see many items are also locked at the start of the game and can only be bought once you have a certain level of reputation with a particular trading company.
Q. How do you get reputation in Sea Of Thieves?
A. There are three trading companies in Sea Of Thieves, that have outposts on every island port: the Gold Hoarders, the Merchant Alliance, and the Order of Souls. Each of these trade in different items but all will offer you free missions as soon as you start the game.
Each of these missions will tell you to go to an island and retrieve an item. The Gold Hoarders will want you to dig up and bring back a treasure chest, the Merchant Alliance will ask you to transport an animal or other object to another location, and the Order of Souls will task you with defeating a skeleton captain and bring back his skull.
When you successfully compete a mission you’ll not only be paid but also earn reputation with that particular company. You’ll see a little meter fill up and when you level up enough you’ll be able to take on harder and more complex missions, although you’ll also have to pay a fee to start them. Eventually you’ll also begin to unlock unique items that you can buy only from that company.
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Although you can take a mission with whoever you like it’s usually best to focus on one company at the time, so you can quickly get to the high risk/high reward missions for at least one of them. But you can also trade items with any of the companies whenever you find something at random, or steal it from other pirates, even if you aren’t doing a mission for them at the time.
Q. Where can you get chickens and pigs in Sea Of Thieves?
A. Finding chickens and pigs (and snakes) is pretty easy in Sea Of Thieves. Each island is randomly populated with them, so if you don’t find what you’re after on one then just sail along to the next and it’s bound to be there. The difficulty is in actually capturing them, for which you’ll need a specific crate.
You can’t use a pig crate on a chicken, and vice versa, and officially the only way to get one is if the Merchant Alliance give you a mission to go out and capture them. However, you can randomly find empty crates on beaches, although using it to catch an animal (hold the ‘R’ shoulder button as you chase after it) won’t get you much money or reputation unless the Merchant Alliance has specifically asked for it.
There are four types of chicken and they’re worth more money in ascending order from white to red to black to gold. Pigs and snakes follow a similar pattern.
The other thing to bear in mind with animals is that if you keep them in the hold and you start taking on water… they’re going to drown. Chickens will always get upset and break out of their cage if they’re not above deck, while pigs will get hungry and refuse to move if you don’t feed them bananas. Also, a good trick with snakes, both when catching them and afterwards, is to calm them down with music.
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Q. What are bounty skulls in Sea Of Thieves and how do you use them?
A. Bounty skulls are the remains of undead pirate captains and are the main resource that the Order of Souls trade in. There are different rarities of skull but with each one all you have to do is pick them up and take them back to an Order of Souls outpost – which are on every island port – just like you would with a chest.
The most common way to get skulls is by defeating a pirate captain at the end of a bounty quest, which the Order of Souls will give you. They’ll only provide the name of an island though and you’ll have to actually search out for the captain. You can also come across captains at random though, without doing a quest, and sometimes you can just find skulls laying around on the beach.
Q. Can you get Sea Of Thieves on PS4?
A. No. Sea Of Thieves is published by Microsoft, so it’s only available on Xbox One and PC. It’s one of their biggest exclusives and a major selling point for the Xbox One in its rivalry against the PlayStation 4.
On top of that Sea Of Thieves is made by Rare, who used to be part-owned by Nintendo but are now owned entirely by Microsoft – so it’s completely impossible that the game could come to any other console formats.
Q. Can you play Sea Of Thieves with local multiplayer?
A. Not in terms of split-screen, no. The game is online-only but if you happen to have two Xbox consoles in the house you could play together with your crewmates in the same room if you have enough TVs to go around.
A more practical solution though involves the PC, as Sea Of Thieves needs only a modest PC to run. Because the game allows cross-play, between the Xbox and PC, one person can play on the TV with the Xbox and another can join in on their laptop.
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Here’s the minimum specs you need to run the game on a PC:
OS: Windows 10
CPU: Intel Iris Pro Graphics 6200 or Intel Iris 540
RAM: 4GB
DirectX: 11
VRAM: 1GB
GPU: Integrated
Modern GPU: Integrated
HDD: 60GB 5.4K RPM
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