It was only a few days ago that the hardworking team at Rare were celebrating the 7th anniversary of Sea of Thieves, announcing a new Xbox exclusive version of their live service pirate adventure game – Sea of Thieves: X Edition. The Creative Director of the game, Mike Chapman, posted on social media how the team had the next five years planned for Sea of Thieves, and March’s Developer Update is the first small step along that plank.

While this developer update is lighter on features and content, it brings a number of changes to many elements of Sea of Thieves. Players can “a boatload of performance improvements, security updates and bug fixes”, as well as tweaks made to traps, and an updated enforcement policy.

Here are some highlights that we’ve plundered:

• A hotfix to address rebalancing for players who recieved less reputation for completing the new Hunter’s Call voyages, as well as those who used exploits to fast track their progression.

• The midseason update will bring the Hunting Spear to the game, a new throwable that can be lodged into the hull of enemy ships, requiring greater repairs.

• It introduces a new system to manage the acitvation of events, making sure the server has the resources to handle them. Megalodon encounters will be the first events to use this system, and it will be rolled out to others in the future.

• The team are holding off on removing the option for uncapped framerates, due to player feedback.

• Traps, which were introduced with Season 15, ‘Wild things’, can now be set up around Outposts and inside taverns.

A large overhaul is happening with the Sea of Thieves enforcement policy, seeing it change from a “three strikes, your out” approach to a 12 point system similar to what Xbox uses for its platform enforcement policy.

“We’ve matured a lot as a live service since our policy was first deesigned and, on reflection, we feel we can create a more fair and transparent approach to enforcement that give players some breathing room when mistakes are made, but most crucially gives them the chance to learn from those mistakes.”

You can read the full report on the official Sea of Thieves forums, or watch the 11 minute video below for the full details of the March Developer Update.

Rare continues to improve Sea of Thieves, taking player feedback seriously and trying to do right by their fans as best they can. While this developer update was more to do with patching holes than adding new content, it’s great to see the team keeping their vessel shipshape.

Have you been enjoying Season 15 in Sea of Thieves? Let us know in the comments.