Today saw the broadcast of our very first Community Direct, a long-form sit down with key crew members to discuss all things Sea of Thieves over the next six months or so. Covering game health, upcoming changes to the Insider Programme, our evolving approach to Seasons and more, it was also an opportunity to reveal an incredibly exciting premium feature coming to Sea of Thieves’ shores in early 2026: custom servers.
Your host, Head of Video Production John McMurtrie, was joined by Head of Community and Communications Christina McFairholme, Associate Design Director Shelley Preston, Creative Director Mike Chapman and Production Director Drew Stevens to talk through all of the above and more. If you’ve got 51 minutes to spare, you can watch the Direct in full below. But if you can’t watch right now, we’ve compiled the key takeaways right here in this handy article!
Looking Back
Before the gang got into what to expect from Sea of Thieves moving forward, there was some reflection on the last few Seasons. Our last major content releases brought a significant focus on enriching the sandbox; player feedback we’d received last year pointed to the sandbox being perhaps in need of reinvigoration with new tools and opportunities, and the last few Seasons of content worked towards this with a plethora of new ways to play.
We’ve also been making a concerted effort to provide more detail and context to our players via the reintroduction of the Developer Update, a video series now fronted by Production Director Drew Stevens. This has proved a great vehicle for us to talk about things in a more transparent and reactive manner, and we’ve been heartened by the response. We’re also planning to deliver a Community Direct every six months as part of this openness with our community – so expect another sit-down with the crew early next year.
That’s not to say there hasn’t been room for improvement; we know we haven’t hit the mark our players were hoping for in terms of game health and performance, especially when it comes to being reactive to cheating and the game experience on PC. We’re also cognisant that we could be more attuned to the desires and experiences of our player base, and we’ll be working hard to remedy this in future. We’ve learned a lot from the past year, and we’re ready to put those insights into action.
Looking Forward
The partnership we have with our players is incredibly important to us, as is taking on board feedback that doesn’t just help us shape a feature but define it in the first instance. This is why we’re taking the bold step to lift the NDA from the Sea of Thieves Insider Programme. We want to inspire more conversation at scale about what we’re up to and how we can improve the experience. This means that while players will still have to register to be an Insider, they will be able to talk openly about the Insider build – as well as stream and capture it.
This is only the first step in opening us up to more community input, as starting from next Season we’re also planning a Seasonal Big Listen with our Insider Programme members. We’ll be asking how you found the content we’ve recently released, and more broadly how you’re finding the whole package: performance, cheaters, bugs, enjoyability and more. This will allow us to better track sentiment over time and identify gaps for content that addresses a desire or opportunity within our current feature set. And, of course, in line with this focus on transparency, we’ll share the results of these surveys with you, our players.
We’re also working on relaunching the Insider Programme in 2026 to make it more engaging and rewarding for participants. This reboot will fold in a number of different community programmes and make the Insider Programme a home and a hub for our most engaged players to get the most out of their playtime.
Another thing that we’ve heard our players are missing is consistency in our worldbuilding endeavours, and we’ll be striving to renew our focus on the story of the Sea of Thieves to satisfy different player motivations. We appreciate that we’ve allowed the momentum of the story to slow down as we focused on the sandbox, but looking ahead, we plan on having a much better balance of narrative and features – as well as including story beats within a Season, rather than just at the start. 
New Team Setup and Seasonal Approach
We’re crafting a new structure for the team to allow us to deliver across all these areas. While dedicated teams already exist for Seasons, Pirate Emporium and Game Health, we've committed to expanding our Game Health team to ensure we continue improving the core playability and stability of the main game, alongside introducing new experiences. These teams are now set up and ready to go, with some improvements already in the bag and being enjoyed by our players.
We’re also changing the way think about our Seasonal content, as well as how we deliver it through a three-month period. We want players to always have something new to look forward to throughout a Season – and when we've released the majority of the content at the beginning of the Season, that hasn’t always been the case. So we’re committing to a clearer structure that means there will be a predictable rhythm of play to each Season, that looks a little like this:
Month 1: more sandbox features and worldbuilding setup
Month 2: headline live Event, upscaled and expanded with lore elements
Month 3: ‘call to action’ moment for players, revisiting and revitalising sandbox content
This comes on top of our existing live Events: we will now always run a Community Weekend in the first month of a Season, and a Gold & Glory in the last month to ensure players have an opportunity to catch up if they’ve struggled to find game time.
This shift does require a transitionary period to put into practice though, and as a result we will not be running a Community Weekend for Season 16. However, Season 17’s Community Weekend will land early in August to ensure you don’t go too long without that Community Emissary Grade multiplier goodness!
Season 17
Those of you who caught the Xbox Games Showcase trailer will have learned that the upcoming Season is all about The Smugglers’ League, a band of pirates new to the Sea of Thieves’ shores. The first month of the Season will introduce this ragtag bunch and key features like smugglers’ hideouts, new loot types and Smugglers’ Runs.
Month 2 will bring a headline live Event in the form of a heist, while Month 3 refreshes the Skeleton Fort experience – a feature that’s remained unchanged for some time. A Community Weekend celebrating Rare’s 40th anniversary will land at the very beginning of the Season, and Gold & Glory near the end will offer that all-important catch-up moment before Season 18 kicks off. You can also expect all the usual Seasonal rewards, Twitch Drops, Xbox Game Pass Ultimate Perks and more as we roll out a suite of cool stuff to get involved in.
We can’t wait to show you more of what to expect of Season 17, so stay tuned for more details on what players will be facing from August onwards!
Season 18
It wouldn’t be a Sea of Thieves broadcast without a little bit of Sea of Tease – and so our Community Direct took a quick dip into what players can expect from Season 18. With a focus on The Devil’s Roar, this Season promises to boost Emissary play along with general activity in the region. New Ancient Shrines and expanded Smugglers’ League gameplay will form part of this, as well as a thrilling headline Event…
But more on that later – for now, it’s time to talk about the much-requested community feature we’ve been working on behind the scenes.
Custom Servers
We recognise that Sea of Thieves, at its heart, is about player storytelling – and so over the past year we have been developing a brand new toolset designed to unleash community creativity. These Custom Server features will be available to players in early 2026 as part of a new subscription model, and will come with a whole host of other benefits as part of the premium package.
Custom Servers will offer a range of different features, including a private customisable sandbox. With switches, toggles and commands to curate the server experience, subscribers will be able to do things such as spawn enemies and loot on command, turn off AI enemies and ensure that the environment is fit for whatever shenanigans they want to set up.
They’ll also be able to run Safer Seas Fleets, filling a server full of friends and larking about to their heart’s content, all while earning rewards at the same levels available in the solo version of Safer Seas. And finally, a cinematic camera will offer players a toolset similar to that used by our very own Video team when they’re putting together those beautiful gameplay trailers.
Although this subscription service is landing next year, we’ve taken the decision to announce it nice and early so that our Partners and creative communities can start making plans sooner rather than later. We want to build this toolset in partnership with the community, and running it as a subscription model means that we can ensure ongoing investment into and development of Custom Servers as a platform.
We can’t wait to get this feature into players’ hands and build a toolset that empowers all facets of Sea of Thieves’ player base – creative, competitive or otherwise – to craft even more amazing experiences that they can share with their communities.
Beyond Seasons
Custom Servers will of course fall outside the Seasonal team’s delivery of regular in-game content, and that’s an area of focus for us moving forward too. There’s a dedicated team looking at bigger projects and opportunities beyond Seasons, and how we can deliver these features alongside our Seasonal releases. This resource will look at things like our core progression system, the Pirate Legend experience, community storytelling, ship overhauls, world updates and other areas of this scale and ambition.
We’ll share more about our focuses in this space when we’re ready, but we’ve set up our team structure in a way that now allows us to more elegantly deliver different types of content alongside one another, rather than having to sacrifice something in one area for the sake of another. We think this is the best way to keep Sea of Thieves feeling fresh and giving players lots of different things to look forward to.
Thanks for Reading
If you got this far through the article, congratulations! It’s been quite the whirlwind of information, so thanks for staying with us. We’d love to hear what you think of our plans for the months ahead, so please head over to our social channels or our Discord server to share your thoughts – we try our best to read all your comments, and we want to make sure that we keep an open dialogue on how our designs are landing with players.
We hope you’re as excited as we are about what’s to come for Sea of Thieves, and we’re looking forward to sharing more detail on what we’ve discussed as these features get closer to release. And, of course, we’ll see you in around six months’ time for another Community Direct to dive deep into the next wave of exciting plans!