Sea of Thieves Season 20 gives you the keys to the ocean with Custom Seas

Sea of Thieves Season 20 has officially launched, and while there are plenty of bits and pieces for you pirates to dig into, in my eyes, Custom Seas is absolutely the headline act here.

Arriving as part of update 3.8.0, Custom Seas gives you the ability to create private sessions, build your own game modes, mess with how the world behaves, and generally turn Rare’s pirate sandbox into a far more flexible affair.

Custom Seas is Sea of Thieves’ biggest creative tool yet

With Custom Seas, you’re able to create and host private lobbies with up to 24 players and six crews. If you’re a Session Owner, you can invite others through platform invites or Join Codes, assign Session Leaders, choose ship types, and set up crew configurations before launching into the session.

From there, the real tinkering begins. Custom Seas includes switches that let you adjust different parts of the world, covering players, ships, emergent creatures, World Events, and treasure hand-in locations. Rare has also included several presets to make setup easier, including Adventure, Competitive Pirates, Competitive Sandbox, Social, and Creative.

These can be tweaked further and saved, so if you somehow come to invent the greatest pirate party mode known to the world, you thankfully won’t have to rebuild it from scratch every time.

Once in-game, the Command Menu gives Session Owners and Leaders control over rosters, ships, crews, World Events, settings, and item spawning. World Events can be started on demand, weather can be repositioned, and the time of day can be changed, which should be a huge win for content creators and event organizers.

There’s also a Quick Commands Menu with tools like Fly, Quick Sail, Quick Spawn, and Free Camera. The latter is especially useful for cinematics, with adjustable movement speed, field of view, depth of field, and the option to lock onto players, ships, or creatures.

While Custom Seas sounds like an absolute dream, there are a couple of big caveats you need to be aware of before jumping in. These are that normal progression and gold rewards are disabled. In their place is silver as a temporary scoring currency, with custom scoreboards, time limits, score limits, and positive or negative values for different actions.

Regardless of the fact that any real progression is disabled, Season 20 is probably going to be one of the wildest to date. If you’re a seasoned player, I’d recommend going out and messing with all the new tools to make ‘brand new’ experiences that will hopefully feel fresh 6 years into the launch of the game.