As pirates aplenty work to unearth Ancient Treasures for Belle in our latest Adventure ‘The Sirens’ Prize’, and yet others discover the surprising truth behind a mysterious murder, September 17th stood on its own as a day for players to put the stresses and strains weighing down on the Sea of Thieves to one side and set sail with one simple thing in mind: community.
Well… community, gold, reputation and Ancient Skeletons if we’re being honest, so four things were on their minds. Okay, and talking like a pirate due to some very serendipitous timing with real-world calendar events, so five, five things were on our pirates’ minds and we’ll stop there before a specific group of inquisitors turn up unexpectedly.
But before we get into the day itself, let’s start our Voyage of Community Day highlights with a quick glance at recap rock for the uninitiated. Over there, it’s off the port side. As you can see, Sea of Thieves Community Days happen once during a Season, and during these days we offer our pirates the opportunity to boost their in-game rewards by sharing some of that passion we all have for sailing the Sea of Thieves. They do that by using the #SeaOfThievesCommunityDay hashtag on Twitter, spreading the love and pushing up through five ranks of our Community Emissary Grade as they collectively make more and more noise.
There was an extra-special treat on offer at Grade Five this time around, as reaching that top Grade would see a surge of Ancient Skeletons spawning across the seas for the rest of the day! With the prospect of Ancient Coins at your hook-tips, along with ample boosts to gold and reputation, the maximum Grade was hit in a record-breaking four hours and 44 minutes! Fine work indeed…
Not that this was the only thing worth setting sail for. Our official merch outpost offered exclusive goods and a 30% discount, as it’s done every Community Day thus far. The Gilded Phoenix Hull was given away via Twitch Drops. Setting sail during the day earned you a lovely chestnut-coloured flag with which to broadcast your amiable aims, no matter how many Gunpowder Barrels you had secretly stashed. We served up not one, but two appropriately elocution-based emotes over an extended period to mark Talk Like a Pirate Day, the Arrrgh! and Ranting Rogue Emotes. There were even special fireworks!
But that’s enough about what you got, our tour is entering the statistic surf so let’s talk about what you did. A day for the record books seemed to be on everyone’s minds, with scoundrels of all styles smashing the totals achieved on our last Community Day. Party pirates guzzled 880,868 grogs to the tune of 2,075,861 instruments, presumably while toasting the 1,318,615 fireworks launched (we’re sure your throats have recovered from all your appreciative articulations by now).
Elsewhere the sounds of combat rang out, often sounding a lot like cannons. 15,178,386 booms belonged to cannonballs, 557,802 could be claimed by chainshots flung with a varying degree of precision and 1,914,985 were caused by projectile pirates, who we shouldn’t automatically assume were seeking a scrap but it does help the number sit nicely in this paragraph.
All this carnage saw a grand total of 23,205,607 foes meet their end, of which 165,740 were those aforementioned Ancient Skeletons with their sought-after coins! A hearty congratulation to all the crews who profited from this never-before-seen surge – we hope you found some beguiling goods to purchase in the Pirate Emporium.
Finally, a nod to the foodies among you who devoured 11,722,511 food items over the course of the day, of which the number of bananas (3,570,943) stacked one by one in a big gravity-defying tower would be the equivalent of 76.9 Mount Everests! We suppose all those enemy encounters and the 2,349,029 emotes used would make for somewhat hungry work, let alone the staggering 203,175,357,480 gold made during the event!
You weren’t just busy on the waves though, which you can see if you inspect the community coral reef that we’ll be passing over shortly. The range of creativity brought to our attention on a Community Day is always one of our favourite things to see, and it also lets us deliver Hats of Unfeasibly Glorious Fame to a range of deserving pirates who we haven’t yet found time to honour in our Community Hub.
To that end, stunning cosplays and craft work from _JVL_, Fitzir_, grzywa_art, TheBreadGod9829 and ItSJustEnDerR, the artwork of Crimsaara, Burby_92, FortuneFinn, erroloxbow and MissCaptainOwl and accessibility advocate Shaysters all found a symbol of their persisting piratical pride awaiting them in their Equipment Chests to mark the day. For an even bigger list of celebrated corsairs, turn your attention to this Twitter Moment and we’ll wait here for you to get back.
Nice to see you back, just in time for us to say how much we also enjoyed seeing the activities our pirates were partaking in on the day. From EliEelEye’s crew tackling the entirety of the bingo card we created and TheEmeraldYosh1’s loot art of our chummy Community Day logo, through to Shrimpok’s flashy dance party with their extended crew, it’s the huge range of fun and stories you always share that truly make Community Day meaningful for us.
In fact, as we spot a shoal of social Splashtails streaming through the reef, we can see all the fun you got involved in to entertain us and the wider community. We asked if you liked pirates, to sum up Sea of Thieves in a GIF, to show us what your pirate was wearing – and in every instance you obliged and warmed our hearts.
We even asked you to direct a Voyage in SoT TV’s Interactive Expedition, with viewers in the Twitch chat using polls to direct our helmsman LazyBuzzard in his search for gold! And in the process you managed to get a Gunpowder Barrel on board and see him detonate it on deck. We’d say that’s a success. If you want to watch this back without the decision-making pressure, you can enjoy all the harmonica solos and questionable choices here.
And that concludes our look back, and brings us gliding comfortably into port once more. If you were one of the pirates who joined us at any point during our Season Seven Community Day, either in-game or via social media, we extend our most heartfelt thanks. We appreciate your showcases of skill, fun, creativity and silliness that make the Sea of Thieves community such a joy to behold, and we can only thank you for joining us to broadcast that to the world. As always, the #SeaOfThievesCommunityDay tag is there for all to scroll through as a monument to the passion we share as both creators and players of Sea of Thieves.
You’ll undoubtedly be riveted to know that we’ll be holding another Community Day in Season Eight, so keep your eyes on the horizon and, more helpfully, our social media channels (and Twitter in particular) to find out when that’ll be. But until then, happy sailing!