Suggestions: Rare Solar Eclipse world event, with linked in-game events and rewards, and also saving ship customisations

  • Micro666
    Champion
    Insider
    Boatswain
    Founder

    Hi Sea of Thieves team,

    I had two great ideas for Sea of Thieves recently, that I wanted to let you know about. Feel free to ignore them. One is just a simple improvement, but the other I think would make a great addition to the Sea of Thieves world.

    1. My first idea is a really simple, and is to simply remember the customisations applied to my boat e.g. Sails, Hull, Figurehead, Flag etc.

    If I'm creating a new session, then my last settings could be automatically applied. If joining an existing session then of course do not apply any settings, and use the settings of the boat already in that session.

    It's mildly annoying to have to set my boat customisation each time I load the game. This seems like something that could be achievable?

    1. You have realistically re-created the movements of the sun and moon, and the effects they convey over the environment, both land and water, are amazing.

    You also sometimes show the moon in the sky during the day, but...what if...just occasionally...very occasionally the moon were to cross the sun's path ;-)

    Wouldn't it be amazing, in Sea of Thieves, in the middle of the day on really really rare occasions to have a total solar eclipse within the world of Sea of Thieves?

    I'm sure the visual team could create the correct effect for visualising a solar eclipse with the corona ring around the moon, and the so called diamond ring effect.

    When such a total eclipse occurs in maybe it could be linked to some kind of rare and very rewarding, in-world event, some opportunity within the world that only presents itself during the eclipse.

    What the event that would be linked to the eclipse is I don't know, I'll leave that to the amazing SoT team. I don't know what you think but I can imagine this being a pretty good and amazing addition to the game that player would really like.

    Maybe when there's a solar eclipse in SoT (maybe once a month), a new area of the map might become accessible? Maybe a new enemy type presents itself, with rewards for defeat. Many possibilities here..

    I hope you like both my ideas, and I'm so in love with the game you and your team have created. Keep up the great work all

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  • zZ Emerz Zz
    Captain
    Founder

    @micro666 hey there! You're right, our amazing Tech Art Team has done an great job with the realistic sun & moon cycle. Since it is semi-realistic, there are eclipses. I've managed to find a few examples here.

    And @Captain9of9 is one of our amazing technical artists who might be able to weigh in more.

  • Captain9of9
    Commander
    Insider
    Founder

    It's a bit of an easter egg at the moment :) I set up a somewhat weird day-night cycle when we first decided to add in moon phases because I wanted the moon phases consistent to the sun position, but we also couldn't do an actually realistic day-night cycle because - due to design requirements - we couldn't have any nights where you can't see the moon in the sky, since that's our night-time light source.

    A side-effect of that system (which calculates orbits, rather than simply setting the light position based on time of day as it worked initially) is that the sun and moon could cross over. We initially had an eight-day month with one day per each phase of the moon and it required some tweaking to make sure the sun and moon paths did not cross when they were above the horizon.

    Later we added the pocketwatch that gave us 28-day months, so I changed the celestial month to also be 28 days when that went in... I knew that would break the delicate eclipse-preventing balance and sure enough, people started taking screenshots of occasional eclipses :)

    I believe they happen once a month and probably at the same date on every month, but I'm not actually sure as I haven't been able to catch one so far!

    The main issue with getting a full eclipse would be the fact that we make the sun larger when it's closer to the horizon for aesthetic reasons, while the moon stays the same size... making eclipses look especially weird and creepy!

  • KnightX13
    Commander
    Insider
    Founder
    Deckhand

    I can verify that there are eclipses...and they are super cool for the few minutes they happen.

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