Personalise Your Pirate Playground in Sea of Thieves Season 20

Do you want to play a game? Don’t worry, no creepy phone calls or tricycle puppets here, just the long-awaited introduction of Custom Seas – Sea of Thieves’ headline feature for Season 20, an expansive creative toolset designed to help all players build their own game modes.

With the phasing out of monthly Acts, the whole Custom Seas toolset arrives when the new Season launches on June 18th, though we’ll be continuing to work on its features and functionality as we see how players respond to it. Accompanying this in Season 20 are an overhauled Season Pass offering more choice in the rewards you unlock, new Seasonal Deeds to complete, refreshed stock across shops, stores and markets, and a catalogue of new and returning Live Events!

What Is Custom Seas?

In short: the tools for any Sea of Thieves player to invent and build game modes, challenges and private worlds of their own devising. Using a combination of straightforward Session Switches and an in-game Command Menu, you can shape each Custom Seas session to your own rules, then save them as Presets to revisit whenever you like!

Once inside the Custom Seas lobby and ready to take control, you’ll find that you can toggle everything from weapon loadouts and enemy types to World Events and stormfronts, and set up scoreboards and rules so that anyone you invite can get involved in the games you invent.

Then the in-game Command Menu lets you carry on creating with tools such as Fast Travel, the ability to spawn a wide range of treasure items and wildlife in quantities that hopefully don’t break the game, and the fantastic Free Camera, letting you capture the sights of the Sea of Thieves in ways you never could before.

With all the options that open up once you’re in Custom Seas, you can look forward to spending many productive hours putting your inner game designer through their paces and discovering whether that out-there idea you once had would actually work…

New Deeds and Rewards

While standard game progression towards targets such as Commendations and Season Pass levels is suspended within Custom Seas, you need a way to determine where your players sit on the scoreboard, and that’s where silver comes in. Earning silver through games set up in Custom Seas also contributes to one of the new Seasonal Deeds – all of which offer a nice Renown boost once you return to High Seas. Other rewards tied to ticking off these Deeds include a commemorative painting, and Custom Crafter Sails to serve as visual proof of your inarguable genius.

To find out more about the possibilities put into your hands this Season, and see a selection of recipe cards we’ve put together with examples of game modes you now have the tools to create, see our dedicated Custom Seas page.

A Calendar of Events

There will of course be plenty more to do as Season 20 progresses, and frequent Live Events are key to that. Following the Season 19 debut of Last Ship Standing, you can expect to see the regular return of this slyly shrinking Sloop smash-fest, with Allegiance gains, Doubloons and, later in the Season, cosmetic rewards all up for grabs. Bilge Rats Weekenders will also be back every month, giving you opportunities to spend all those Doubloons you’ve racked up. There are new Events and experiments on the way too, such as Renown Rally – a chance to speed up your progress through the final few Season Pass levels before the Season ends.

Before that, there’ll be plenty on your plates before the month is even out: fresh Twitch Drops follow on the heels of Season 20’s release, a new reward for completing any Sea of Thieves: A Pirate’s Life Tall Tale marks that classic crossover’s fifth anniversary, and Community Weekend is all set to deliver good vibes on June’s final weekend with Community Emissary Grade boosts, Pop-Up Plunder, Picture Walls, freebies and more. A new This Month in Sea of Thieves article early each month will help keep you apprised of what’s coming up!

An Evolving Season Pass

Season 20 rolls out a few changes here too. Previous Seasonal Renown tracks spanned 100 levels of rewards, unlocked by spending time playing the game and organically raising your Renown. From Season 20, this is now formally named the Season Pass and has been streamlined to 50 levels, split into tiers and filled with revamped rewards, including specially curated items from the aisles of the Pirate Emporium packed in alongside Doubloon drops and Voyages.

One other key change is that many of its reward tiers provide a choice, letting you build your cosmetic collection to your own preference and bypass any offerings you may already own! Make it to level 50 and you’ll unlock a specially made Star Prize: for Season 20 it’s the Greed’s Reach Cutlass, a quirky melee weapon well worth getting your bony digits on. Also new is the option to use Ancient Coins to purchase Season Pass levels, up to a maximum of 10 per Season, if you’re struggling to find the time to hit a level with a reward you really want.

This Season Pass remains free to all players. But of course as the Season Pass changes, so does what was previously known as the Plunder Pass. This optional paid extra is now the Season Pass: Premium Tier and functions much the same way as before, adding an extra pool of unlockable items to pick up as you progress through the Season Pass. Season 20’s Premium Tier offers the effortlessly elegant Sirens’ Splendour ship set, along with 1000 Ancient Coins and an automatically applied boost to Renown progression.

Still curious? Everything you need to know about June’s big update can be found on our dedicated Season 20 page and in the latest release notes, while our YouTube channel has a cache of content to help you get all set up for Custom Seas. Take your pick of Sea of Thieves social channels to stay informed on everything from Event kickoffs and contests to downtime planning – and as you build your own collection of hand-crafted Custom Seas experiences, don’t forget to share your stories, snippets and screenshots with us there!