Sea of Thieves PVP centric Season Eight update has forced some major changes to how the game prioritises supplies.
Praise be to Joe Neate: the blunderbomb meta is over.
Following the Sea of Thieves Season Eight content update, which introduced a new skill-based matchmaking system for PVP, players have been complaining of a vicious new meta emerging from the shroud: the blunderbombs were raining from the sky.
A quick explainter for the non-pirates in the house: Blunderbombs are a throwable item that cause knockback and a small amount of damage. They’re best used when boarding an enemy ship, clearing people away from guarded ladders, or knocking interloping players out of your crow’s nest. They can also be loaded into cannons and fired at other ships, which created an outsized knockback effect, pushing enemy ships off-line and steering their guns away from your ship.
Well, no more. With its Christmas update, Sea of Thieves is finally giving blunderbombs a long-needed nerf.
In Sea of Thieves new PVP mode, players have been stockpiling blunderbombs and spamming enemy ships with them in the hope of knocking players overboard and letting their ships drift outside the designated battle zone for an easy sink. Unfortunately, its not exactly fair, and the Rare has put its foot down, lowering the number of blunderbombs found in the wild, and removing an exploit in one of the game’s Tall Tale quests that players were using to farm them.
Further, Rare has reduced the blunderbomb area of effect, when fired from a cannon, to 5 metres down from 10. This now matches the weapon’s area of effect when thrown by hand. This should mean that, not only should the number of incoming blunderbombs be lessened, they shouldn’t knock everyone off the ship quite so easily anymore either.
Good news all round.
Also coming in the patch: a fundamental change to how ships a stocked at spawn-in.
For a long time, a big part of the Sea of Thieves experience has been scrounging for supplies before your adventure can begin. In years gone by, this was a long, and sometimes painstaking process of picking through every barrel at the starting outpost for a ten-fifty-five (10 cannons, 5 fruit, and 5 wood) and carrying everything back to the ship, bit by bit. Concessions have been made over the years to help speed this up — the ability to buy crates of supplies from the merchant, storage crates that can hoover everything up without ever opening the barrels. Season Seven added Captain’s supplies at the shipwrights as well, allowing for even more stocks on startup.
That bar has now been raised again. Now, every ship will start with increased stocks onboard to facilitate a faster time-to-voyage (or time-to-fight if you’re after PVP). Food barrels now also contain coconuts, in addition to the OG bananas. Starting stocks only containing bananas was a holdover from an earlier era of the game when bananas were the only food in the game. Now, Sea of Thieves contains a wide range of fruit and meat that heal the player to different degrees. Adding coconuts to the starter supplies is a long-awaited and necessary change.
A final change around stocks: previously, when a player vessel was defeated, it would take its supplies with it as it sank. Now, sinking another player vessel causes their barrels (and all the supplies within) to float to the surface for easy collection. It also provides the defeated crew a chance to snatch some of the more valuable items before the victors can claim their prize.
Like the changes to spawn-in stocks, this change is designed to help PVP mode players keep moving. Now, they can snatch up their fallen foe’s supplies, add them to their own, and continue on to the next fight without having to head back to an outpost to resupply.
For long-time Sea of Thieves fans like me, this a night-and-day change from where the game started. It’s entirely likely that every fight will now be a war of attrition. There’ll be no running out of stocks and desperately firing off to passing islands for a ten-fifty-five in this new era of Sea of Thieves PVP, that’s for sure.
You can watch the full Sea of Thieves News update announcing the changes right here.
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