Meet the ‘Sea of Thieves’ Players Digging for Buried Lore

When Sea of Thieves was released, there was a clear divide in opinion. Some were sceptical about the amount of content and the longevity of Rare’s multiplayer pirate sandbox game, while others were on-board with sailing the seas in search of treasure and new online experiences.

Regardless, it has been amazing to see the sheer number of communities springing up around the game: from pirate unions to record-breaking gold hoarders. These players demonstrate a clear passion for the game and are obviously realizing the potential of Rare’s plans to build a “group shared narrative,” going beyond the three base factions in the game to create their own adventures and intrigue.

Perhaps the most interesting of these groups are the game’s lore hunters. These are the people exploring the seas to unearth the story of Sea of Thieves’ world and its many factions.

“With Sea of Thieves, I didn’t even know about it until like a month or so before it was released,” says Travis Zygmunt, known as FrostE online, a player obsessed with looking for deeper meaning in the game’s world and the co-host of the Twitch show Loot and Lore.

It was only when he started reading the comic and the book Tales from the Sea of Thieves, a collection of short stories set in the game’s universe, that he actually realized the game had its own lore. It was the parallels between these pieces of media and the core game experience that would inspire him to hunt for connections. But considering the size of the world, how did he know where to look?

“There’s a big part of the community that’s actually writing and cataloging and blogging where we see certain paintings and where we see certain styles and designs in the islands,” explains Zygmunt. “For instance, there’s certain parts of the map that will contain a lot of Boar skulls, but you only see those in certain parts of the map. You only see giant crab paintings on certain parts of the map. These things are being catalogued and tracked, so we know where they are.”

Lara is Zygmunt’s co-host on the Loot and Lore show. She also runs a blog where she collects her findings and speculates on the nature of the specific factions and other mysteries in the game. One of her recent blog posts, for instance, digs into the reasons why there are no boars in the world of Sea of Thieves, despite the vast amount of illustrations and skulls implying their existence in the area.

Here she posits that the Order of the Skulls used them for rituals and actually hunted them to extinction, before switching the skeleton skulls you collect in-game.

Not content with simply finding small connections, they also use the lore to speculate on future updates and craft their own theories about the game. Notably, they have found several paintings that have hinted towards two different types of Merfolk: those with a blue flame who help the player respawn, and those with a red flame. Alongside some other evidence from dev blogs, they believe that this discovery points towards the nature of future content.

“When they announced the roadmap and the first bit of content was called the Hungering Deep, that points to some sort of underwater threat,” Zygmunt tells me. “And the fact that the title directly refers to an underwater enemy and the fact that they said they were planning on having Merfolk enemies before June [with the delayed captaincy update] leads me to believe that this will be the content that will expand more on what’s going on with the Merfolk and the story behind the good and the bad Merfolk.”

Arguably the most engrossing mystery in the game for lore hunters, at the moment, is the tale of Captain Flameheart and the quest for another cursed chest in the world, named “The Screaming Chest.”

In the book Tales from the Sea of Thieves, Flameheart was a pirate captain whose ship, The Silver Blade, sunk somewhere off the eastern side of the map with a cursed chest aboard. Two other pirates, Nine Cat Nura and Diving Bel, are said to have then found the chest, They took it to Golden Sands Outpost on the western side of the map. These details have offered vital clues to lore hunters, with the community set on finding out what eventually became of it.

“When we went there to look for the cursed chest and see if there are any clues as to where that chest had gone after Nine Cat had stolen it, the book references Diving Bel swimming from Golden Sands to meet the sun and discuss the chest with the Merfolk,” says Zygmunt. “When they originally said ‘meet the sun,’ we were like, ‘Okay, well the sun sets in the west,’ so when it is on the horizon over the water, that’s just west of Golden Sands. So, we looked west of Golden Sands and Mermaid’s Hideaway was right there.”

So far, Zygmunt has still not been able to locate the chest. In fact, there’s a possibility that the chest doesn’t even exist in the game’s code yet. But this hasn’t stopped them from looking, and others from claiming that they have actually found the chest.

“Some people have said that they found it but sadly these claims are likely to be lies,” says Lara. “The screaming chest was within a very specific wreck, The Silver Blade, which is A) not in the game and B) the chest was salvaged from this wreck by two pirates, Nine Cat Nura and Diving Bel. The chest’s location is unknown but we have been tracking Nura and Bel’s route across Sea of Thieves and found many things.”

One such discovery was a statue underneath Mermaid’s Hideaway that suggests there was actually a meeting between Diving Bel and the Merfolk. There have been more indications that link the games to the expanded universe too, like the higher number of wrecks that spawn around the Devil’s Shroud area, where The Silver Blade reportedly sank in the first place.

On top of a fascination with the game, there is also another key reason why they are so interested in pursuing this task. That is due to the negative image and controversy surrounding the game and its release. They want to combat this idea that the world of Sea of Thieves is barren, with no real sense of discovery or purpose. They want to get players to engage with it beyond just the grind to Pirate Legend.

“[The problem is] there’s a million and one ways to play Sea of Thieves, so when somebody says, ‘What do you do in Sea of Thieves?’ it’s a little hard to give them a definitive answer,” suggests Zygmunt. “Because you could just say, ‘You sail around a map and you get treasure, and you kill skeletons, and you attack each other.’ But there is so much more to it than that if you just want to be creative and imaginative about it.”

Lara adds, “Sadly, I don’t think [players even realize that Sea of Thieves has lore].” She continues, “But when we do our streams and investigate the lore, or blog about it, there’s a lot of [interest] from both those already playing, and those who are yet to get the game.”

Though Sea of Thieves received a mixed response at launch from players, it’s safe to say communities like the lore hunters have been successful in demonstrating there’s a little more to Rare’s pirate sandbox than some thought. Hopefully, in the future, Rare can expand on this, while maintaining that sense of mystery and curiosity that is currently in the game.