My Limited Thoughts on Captaincy in the Sea of Thieves

Captaincy is one of the bigger updates that Sea of Thieves has had in a while, while also being one of the oldest updates ever promised. The Captaincy update was supposed to be the first major update for Sea of Thieves, but for some reason never came out. Years later and here Captaincy is, with a bunch of pretty nice stuff.

Your own actual ship

The biggest part of the update is the ability to name your ship. It’s one of the first things you do when you become a captain. After all, this IS your own, personal ship. And we get to customize its innards and give it our own, personal flairs.

Of course, there’s going to be repeat, meme and stupid names. I’ve seen a couple of ships called Unsinkable II, as well as a handful of Black Pearls. However, I can hardly talk. As you can see here, I named my Sloop “The Daily SPUF”. Because of course I did.

What’s also interesting is that named ships with captains will display a banner, showing the name of the ship, the captain and a title. This can somewhat defeat trying to be sneaky, but it allows you to track down and more quickly notice other ships, and see if you’ve fought them before. When it comes to more… better known people, the ship banner can be somewhat detrimental. As I mentioned in one of the Stormcloud’s adventures, people have spotted the name Bacxaber and fled in a panic, rather than sticking around to fight.

Trinkets are cool I guess.

Alongside Captaincy there’s a new ability to decorate the captain’s office. You can complete tasks and do all sorts in order to find trinkets, which you can display in your captain’s quarters. These trinkets vary between paintings, bits of other ships and weirder trinkets like a skeleton hand holding a dagger.

There’s also stools that you can move around and sit on. They’re not particularly useful though, at least for sailing. But for roleplay and boredom removal, the stools are kinda neat. And, speaking of roleplay, the trinkets on one’s ship can become twisted and dislodged, particularly any art you have on your ship’s walls.

Finally, the battle scars on your ship are also permanent. Any holes you’ve patched up, any scuffed paint or fixed equipment keeps its cosmetic, broken appearance. You can easily get your ship fixed up back to normal, but the scars of previous battles are pretty damn cool. Adds some badassery to your ship.

Log books are interesting.

What I do find rather cool and interesting is, well, stats. In this case, on every captain’s ship is a log book, which details various facts like the number of times a boat has sank, how much gold has been looted, as well as stats from members of the ship’s crew.

While the log book is neat, it also has some value to it. Log Books work like Emissary flags. You can grab them and sell them at the Reaper Hideout for extra cash. This means that even non-Emissary ships could potentially be targets. The better the log book, the better the stats, the more notable a log book becomes, until it has value similar to an Emissary flag. That being said, the log books are currently bugged, and only give you pocket change, regardless of how notable the captain’s log book is.

Overall, cool stuff.

I think this update is great. We finally get to make our ships our own. Even if it’s a little bit pricey.

The only real issue is the Sovereigns. While yes, they do help a lot, automatically selling things to the right emissaries for you, they’re, well, creepy. They don’t seem to be from around here, and they can’t be doing this for charity. These guys are very suspicious. However, they are also quite useful. So we’ll use them while we can…