Sea of Thieves update requires players to download and reinstall game

Before you set sail again, you must take your ship apart and put it back together. The Sea of Thieves developers have been tinkering with the game's install and patch process, so the latest update will require a download that reinstalls the full game.

On February 6, 2019, a larger-than-normal update for Sea of Thieves will go live, but it will ultimately lower the install size of the game and optimize the patch process going forward. You can watch Joe Neate discuss the changes in a developer update, but here's the quick breakdown from the official Sea of Thieves website:

Overall, the game install size will go down. For the different platforms, this will mean the following improvements:
- Xbox One – from an install size of 35GB to 10GB
- Xbox One X – from an install size of 47GB to 25GB
- Windows 10 PC – from an install size of 47GB to 27GB
Changes to how we generate game updates/patches will better enable us to manage future content being added to the game. This might mean that patch sizes increase slightly in the future, but the benefit is that the game install size won’t increase significantly. If we didn’t make this change, the game install size would continue to increase, taking up more and more of your hard drive space.
Due to the game install changing, we’ll be able to more quickly generate and transfer builds which is a significant part of day-to-day development internally at Rare. It’ll mean improvements to various areas of our development process, including how quickly we can generate builds and ship them to players.

Storage space is a premium, especially on the home consoles, so this change should be a very welcome one. It'll be a short-lived celebration, though, since the team warns that patch sizes will increase in the future, but that means more content. Can't be too mad at that, right?

If you haven't set sail in Sea of Thieves yet, just know that it earned our Best Art Style and Best Story (Non-Narrative) awards for 2018. It has incredibly charming visuals, perfect water animation, and it gives players the ability to tell their own tales. Check it out and stay tuned to Shacknews for additional updates.