The Most Common Sea of Thieves Problems and How to Fix Them

Publish date: 2024-03-28

Microsoft and Rare launched online pirate adventure game Sea of Thieves on March 20, and players around the world have started exploring its vast waters and blowing each other up with their ships’ cannons.

When everything is working as intended, Sea of Thieves can be an exhilarating adventure, but players have reported a number of technical issues and bugs, which can sometimes keep us from finding as much fun as we’d like. We compiled a list of the most common problems players have reported, as well as how to fix them.

Connection issues

While Sea of Thieves depends on online group-ups, sometimes the digital waves get a little choppy.  Upon loading into the Sea of Thieves main menu, you might see a message such as “KiwiBeard, “Greybeard,” or “DaffodilBeard,” among other facial hair-themed errors. The majority of these are error messages related to the game’s servers rather than a problem with your system or your own internet connection.

Possible solutions:

Missing reputation, ship, or currency

Occasionally, you may load into Sea of Thieves and find you don’t have any items, that your currency will be completely depleted, or that your ship hasn’t appeared. You may also find you aren’t receiving new money or earning reputation for completing voyages.

Possible solutions:

Server mergers are causing chaos

One of Rare’s solutions to managing servers and player density is to create server mergers that join players together so the seas stay active and interesting. When a migration like this happens, it can cause several problems, such as teleporting your ship to other players’ ships or glitches when trying to navigate after a migration.

Possible solutions:

A new quest parchment is completely blank

Skeleton Captains and similar enemies can drop quest parchments to start a new voyage in search of buried treasure. The thrill of getting a parchment drop is occasionally thwarted when players take a look and find nothing but a blank parchment with no clues or an island map to be found.

Possible solutions: 

Using a mermaid causes freezing and black screens

The mermaids found in open water act as beacons that can teleport a lost sailer back to their ship if they got stranded in the chaos (or, you know, jumped off for the fun of it). However, players encounter an annoying bug that causes the game to freeze on a black screen when they try to use a mermaid. This indicates a bug when the game tries to find the new location of the ship and teleport the player there.

Fortunately, this problem should be largely in the past, as long as you make sure that your version of Sea of Thieves is updated. Rare recently patched this issue and is reporting that it should no longer occur.

Glitches and gameplay issues

Sea of thieves flying ship

There are a few other problems in Sea of Thieves that don’t appear to be tied directly to server issues. These range from the amusing to the frustrating, and most of them don’t have any player-side solutions.

Possible solutions: 

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