Rare has announced that Sea Of Thieves will be receiving a big update that came from work that the studio was doing behind the scenes, mainly for the install and patch process of the game. The update will occur on February 6. Joe Neate, the executive producer, had this to say about the update: “This change will both greatly reduce the game’s overall install size and optimise the way we update Sea Of Thieves moving forward.”

Since the update changes the install and patch process, it will download and fully reinstall the game at a different install size. The install size for the Xbox version will go from 35 GB to 10 GB, the Xbox One X will go from 47 GB to 25 GB, and the Windows 10 PC version of Sea Of Thieves will go from 47 GB to 27 GB. Rare says that doing this update now will benefit Sea Of Thieves in the future. Otherwise, the game would continue taking up more of the hard drive space available on your particular platform.

Joe Neate states that “changes to how we generate game updates/patches will better enable us to manage future content being added to the game.” Patch sizes might increase in the future, but the install size isn’t going to get out of hand. Another thing that this update does is that it changes the day-to-day development of Sea Of Thieves. Rare is going to be able to generate and transfer builds more quickly than before, so more new builds will be available for players at a faster rate.

In their recent developer update video, Rare discussed some other features that will be coming to the game for the February 6 update. New quality of life changes are coming to the game, one of which gives the option to turn off Gamertags so players can be deterred from identifying other crews and possibly jumping in on Twitch Streams. Another change is a combat tweak that removes a double gunning exploit. The last change is a secret that’ll be revealed sometime in the future. As for big picture events, the next upcoming one for Sea Of Thieves is The Arena, which they announced during at XO18.