Delayed by a week but still coming in hot is Rare’s latest content update for Sea of Thieves. Forsaken Shores adds a new area called The Devil’s Roar, which contains a variety of hazards, like volcanoes, geysers, and quakes. Volcanic rocks rain down from above and even the water around the isles can heat up during eruptions, damaging players in the process.

Obviously that would make traversal to the isles tough, but thankfully, new rowboats have been added to ease the process along. A new time-limited campaign is also available, along with 23 standard Commendations (with more coming soon).

New time-limited items, improvements to barrels, improvements to performance and servers, and much more have also been added with the recent update. Rare is also investigating a number of known issues, like oars appearing to disconnect from one’s rowboat.

Forsaken Shores requires 4.86GB of space on the Xbox One and Xbox One X, while Windows 10 PC users need 5.53GB of space. You can read the full release notes, as provided by Rare below. There’s also a new video to commemorate the DLC’s release, embedded at the bottom of this post.

Release Notes

As The Devil’s Roar opens up to a new wave of pirates, meet a survivor of the last expedition to this perilous region and learn the fate of their crew in the Forsaken Shores campaign.

This content update also introduces and showcases a raft of new features that will persist in Sea of Thieves beyond the time-limited campaign:

• Devil’s Roar Map – Explore the newly emerged lands to the east, where both sea and land provide new hazards for unwary pirates!
• Volcanoes – Exploding in a fiery inferno, volcanoes rain down hot rocks that damage players and ships. It has never been more important to think carefully about where you anchor!
• Earthquakes – Tremors forcefully shake the ground and players in the vicinity. Sometimes these earthquakes are isolated, but they may also foreshadow a volcanic eruption…
• Geysers – Geysers are active in The Devil’s Roar and can launch you into the air… so watch where you step!
• Lava Floor – Lava floor zones become active during a volcanic eruption and will cause damage over time if you stand on them. Keep moving!
• Superheated Water – During a volcanic eruption, the waters around the island become superheated. Damage is not applied to ships, but pirates who opt to stand or swim in the superheated water will find themselves in dire need of a banana. Water in your hull can also become superheated, so have your bucket at the ready!
• Rowboats – Find these new additions washed up on the islands. They can be pushed into the water and docked to your ship to be transported around the sea.
• Seaposts – These have appeared across the Sea of Thieves, offering discounts on a selection of items that change over time.
• Commendations – Earn 23 standard Commendations during the first two weeks of Forsaken Shores. Additional commendations are coming as part of weeks three and four. All these Commendations are here to stay!
• Bilge Rat Titles – Earn two unique Titles introduced during the first two weeks of Forsaken Shores. Equip them straight from the Vanity Chest! Will you be a Devil’s Cartographer or Master Devil’s Voyager? Additional Titles are coming later in the Forsaken Shores campaign.
• Bilge Rat Doubloons – There are 185 Bilge Rat Doubloons available for the Commendations during the first two weeks of Forsaken Shores.
• Additional Doubloons will be available from week three, alongside the additional Commendations. Each of the Forsaken Shores Commendations on the Bilge Rat progress screen shows the number of Bilge Rat Doubloons it awards.

Customisation Variety

• Time-Limited Items – The Forsaken Ashes weapons and ship liveries are available throughout the Forsaken Shores campaign. Visit Duke in any tavern and exchange your Doubloons while they are in stock!
• Forsaken Ashes Clothing and Items – The Forsaken Ashes clothing and items are now stocked on Morrow’s Peak Outpost. Only pirates who have dared to explore The Devil’s Roar will be able to purchase these items. These are a permanent addition and can be purchased with gold.
• Ocean Crawler Set – The Ocean Crawler clothing, items, weapons and ship liveries are now stocked in their respective shops on Morrow’s Peak Outpost. These can also be purchased with gold.
• Kraken Set – The Kraken clothing, items, weapons and ship liveries are now stocked in their respective shops on Morrow’s Peak Outpost. Save some of your hard-earned gold for this impressive new set!
• Huntress Figurehead – Now stocked by the Shipwright on Morrow’s Peak Outpost. This figurehead was exclusively awarded to players around San Diego Comic-Con and Gamescom 2018, but is now available to all pirates in exchange for gold!

Barrel Improvements

After feedback shared with us about the changes made to barrels and inventory management in Patch 1.2.4, we improved the stocking-up speed which will significantly reduce the number of button presses required. We will continue to monitor feedback, and you can read Design Director Mike Chapman’s further insights into what the future holds for these systems.

• Barrel Take/Store All – Players can now take and store stacks of resources with a single button press.
• Barrel Auto-Advance – When removing resources from barrels, if all items in a stack are removed, the next stack with remaining resources will automatically be selected.
• Resource Capacity – When carrying the maximum number of a specific resource in your inventory, this resource will clearly be marked red in any barrels to indicate that you can’t carry any more.
• UI Close Delay – The short animation of UI closing has been disabled, so players resume control of their pirate immediately. This impacts the closing of all full-screen UI, from shops and barrels to settings and crew menus.

Updates

• Bilge Rat Shop – The Bilge Rat shop now has tabs so that time-limited items appear on a separate page to the Letters of Recommendation and gold bags.
• Maps in Barrels – Similar to messages in bottles, maps can now be found within barrels.
• Map Radial – Voyage maps which have been purchased and voted upon will now appear in front of all the emergent message in a bottle/barrel maps, so the most important maps are always easiest to find.

Performance Improvements

• Multiple memory improvements.
• Multiple server and client crashes have been resolved.
• We are constantly reviewing the performance and stability of each patch and providing performance optimisations and stability improvements.

Fixed Issues

• Gold Skeletons are now appropriately rusted by buckets of water.
• Players’ levels of reputation with each Trading Company are now correctly displayed on the reputation screen.
• NPC dialogue will no longer get stuck on-screen when players are attacked by skeletons.
• Barrel names on the ships are now correctly localised.
• The animation for reloading the pistol will now appear consistently.
• It is no longer possible to drop a chest between the deck and the side of the Galleon at the front, making it impossible to pick up.
• Players holding a Chest of a Thousand Grogs will no longer become permanently drunk, even after dropping the chest.
• The Lowly Merchant Watch no longer appears closed when you show it to other players.
• Previewing items in the clothing shops on Outposts in The Shores of Plenty will now correctly display the item you have selected.
• Items you store in the first slot of a barrel which you previously looted will no longer be invisible.
• The effects that appear after digging no longer appear to have lines running through them.
• “Back” and “Discard” tooltips are no longer missing from the voyages inventory.
• It is no longer possible to clip into the mountain/rocks on Ancient Spire Outpost.
• Looking up with an item equipped will no longer cause your hand to appear invisible.
• Light emitted onto the sea from a lantern no longer causes a pixelated effect.

Known Issues

• Oars can appear to disconnect from the Rowboat along with the player, only visible in third-person.
• Mermaid Statues have been temporarily disabled due to performance issues.
• Improvements to this are being investigated, and the intention is to re-enable these as soon as possible.
• Merchant Alliance crates on board a ship that sinks will not float to the surface and cannot be picked up.
• We have identified the issue and we are working on a fix.
• Walking on a Rowboat can appear jittery.

The next major free expansion for Rare’s co-op multiplayer pirate action game Sea of Thieves, Forsaken Shores, was originally supposed to launch this week. However, that launch has now been pushed ever so slightly by a week. Forsaken Shores will now be releasing on September 27.

Rare cites its desire to have a polished and bug free rollout of the update as its reason for the delay, noting that recent testing has highlighted an issue with the current build that it can take the extra time it now has to resolve before pushing the update on everyone.

“Our priority is to ensure we deliver a stable, polished and bug-free experience that all our players can enjoy,” said Joe Neate, executive producer on the game. “We have just had a weekend of Pioneer testing, which has highlighted a memory issue in the build, which is resulting in an unstable build where a large number of our Pioneers were experiencing crashes. From our investigations this is a complex issue that we are working through solving, but as such we do not feel in a position to release Forsaken Shores to our players with confidence this week.”

Which is a more than fair stance to take, and honestly, I give them credit for delaying the launch by a week (albeit I also simultaneously wish that they had applied this same attitude to the actual game’s launch to begin with… ah well, live and learn). In the end, the final product will only benefit from this delay, so I think the game’s 5 million players can all stand to wait an extra week for the next content drop.

Rare and Microsoft will be adding rowboats into Sea of Thieves with the upcoming Forsaken Shores content drop, and ahead of that, they have launched a new video, showing us how the development team tackled their implementation in the game.

It seems like it would be an easy thing to put in, but there was a surprising amount of thought put into it all, from how it looks, to how it controls, to how it behaves, and more. Rowboats will have a set number of seats, and should actually allow for some very interesting opportunities in-game for players to make getaways, or take down other crews.

It’s also a sign of Rare’s continued commitment to the game, which was otherwise met with a mixed reception at launch because of a paucity of content and mechanics in it at the time- if they keep at this, who knows, a few years from now, the game will probably end up pulling a total reversal in perception.

Sea of Thieves is available now on Xbox One and Windows 10.