Sea of Thieves Season 2 has arrived with new cosmetics, emissary ships and more, watch trailer here

The second season of Sea of Thieves is live today, with a number of big updates to challenges, mechanics and cosmetics. Rare’s wildly popular pirate adventure game, has just entered its second season since starting its first season earlier this year. Much like Season One but bigger, Season Two offers the biggest changes to the mechanics of the game so far.

The biggest-little change to game

Let’s get one big thing out of the way right away…the ‘barrel hide’ emote. The new emote will enable pirates to hide in plain sight at outposts and in the belly’s of other player’s ships like never before and if you have not “downloaded the schematics” of each and every island and ship layout, you are surely to be assassinated by a pirate hiding as a barrel.

Plunder Pass Season Two

As with Season One, Season Two’s ‘Plunder Pass’ offers a host of Cosmetics for your ship and pirate. There is Phoenix themed sails, a flag and figurehead as well as some past cosmetics that normally a pirate would have had to pay for in the pirate emporium.

Forts of Fortune

As you are sailing the Sea of Thieves this season, one thing you might notice is a brand new skull cloud hovering over skeleton forts. In Season Two, Rare has essentially made these new ‘Forts of Fortune’ more lucrative and more deadly than ‘Fort of the Damned.’ These new forts have you battle waves of skeletons like before but include the skeleton boss adversaries of Flameheart and at least one Ashen Winds Skeleton boss to vanquish before you get the loot of your lifetime. The loot includes numerous Mermaid Gems, Captain’s Chests, Athena Gun Powder Barrels known as ‘Nukes’, Athena crates and the all important Athena’s Fortune Chest. Watch out though, while all that loot is a huge draw for you and your crew, the new skull in the air will also attract plundering pirates looking to ruin your day by blowing up your ship and taking your loot.

The Merchant Alliance enhancements

In the past the merchant alliance was one of the most boring emissaries to represent where you would find yourself simply making deliveries of commodities to various islands while fighting of Reapers on the map. Back in Season One, we saw the Merchant Alliance gain new shipwreck missions, where you would follow along a merchant’s trade route to find their sunken ship and retrieve their hoard of merchant loot from the captain’s quarters, in Season Two the Merchant Alliance just got new features. Have you ever wished you could just buy crates of supplies before heading out on the seas, well now you can buy crates of wood, fruit, cannonballs and more right from the Merchant NPC at each outpost. There is a limit however, you can only buy these crates every three in-game-days. The days progress much faster than in real-life of course.

As if that wasn’t enough, you can now buy commodities from the merchant, check their value that you would get from selling at a particular outpost sail to the outpost that will give you the most. The jury is still out on this new feature, but it could prove to be a new way to gain loot in the game much like the stock market.

Dark Warsmith

In Season One as part of its Plunder Pass, a selection of Dark Warsmith weapons were made available to earn at various levels during the season. There wasn’t much of an explanation behind what ‘Dark Warsmith’ was, but now we seem to have an answer. Dark Warsmith is Flameheart’s adversary and now Pirate’s can purchase the Dark Warsmith costume and ship cosmetics.

New Emissary ships

The Emissary Alliance Ships now have new cosmetics to obtain, which look to be the ship hull and figurehead so far. This addition came after in Season One, more cosmetics were made available for each emissary like weapons, clothing and equipment.

New Ghost Hull

Not to be left out of the new hull fun, the ghost cosmetics that can be found in Athena’s Fortune has a new hull to match with them. The new hull can be had at level 100 renown in the season progression.

What is Dark Waters?

As part of the Season Two progression, there are a number of cosmetics ranging from sails, a flag, face paint, a tattoo set and titles that reference something called ‘Dark Waters.’ Could this be the long rumored and impatiently awaited ‘Trench Monsters’ or ‘Evil Mermaids.’ Much like Dark Warsmith, we may not get an answer to these questions about ‘Dark Waters’ until later in the season or next season.

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