Sea of Thieves just dropped Season 20 and handed players the keys with Custom Seas, letting you spin up private sessions where you control everything from enemy spawns and time of day to weapons, crew sizes up to 24, and custom scoring rules that track silver on leaderboards you define.

The Xbox Wire post spells it out: summon Kraken on demand, tweak loadouts, fast-travel ships, run cinematic free-camera modes, and build your own game modes with Join Codes for friends or chaos. Rare even teased presets and recipe sheets on the official site, and it's free for all owners—no subscription tax.

Steam charts show around 4k concurrent right now with a 24-hour peak near 10.7k, but launch day chatter on X and Reddit is a mixed bag of hype for 24-pirate sloops and complaints about crashes booting players seconds after hosting. Some PS5 users report immediate connection errors while regular Adventure mode works fine.

Rare's own dev post confirms this is day one for the tools and they'll keep iterating with player feedback, so the real question is whether the sandbox sticks or joins the long list of live-service experiments that flop after the honeymoon.