A Look Back at Season 12 Community Weekend

Hello! It’s been a while since we’ve had one of these lookbacks, so just give us a second to dust off the inkwell and make sure we didn’t leave any pineapple and Pondie sandwiches lurking under the pile of unsolved bottle maps.

All clear. There’s still a bit of a smell but we can’t spot anything… oh well!

Right, Season 12 Community Weekend. From 11am UTC on June 15th to the same time on June 17th, we hosted the second Sea of Thieves Community Weekend of 2024, but the first to welcome in our pirates on PlayStation®5! How did you all find it? It’s no good talking, these are words typed a few days ago at least, they don’t have ears. Judging from the responses and numbers we’ve seen, though, we’d say a lot of you had a right lovely time of it.

In case you’re not sure what people were having a lovely time with, here’s a quick refresher so you can understand not to miss the next Community Weekend: pirates who set sail during the Event window earned the Season 12 Community Weekend Flag and Performing Pup Emote, while over the course of the first 15 hours (after a short hiccup getting started – apologies for that) the viewing hours of Sea of Thieves on Twitch increased the Community Emissary Grade and pushed in-game rewards of all flavours to the highest possible multiplier of all the Events we run, this then being active until the end of Community Weekend.

Plus, Raid Voyages on Skeleton Forts were open for all, regardless of your reputation levels – and all pirates, Legend or not, got access to a single-use Legend of the Veil Voyage to let newer pirates have a taste of the legendary Voyages that await!

Another spot of seasoning we sprinkle on Community Weekends is the draw of Pop-Up Plunder, with Season 12 Community Weekend offering up 12 new maps shared via social media that led crews to random loot, leading to them brawling with nearby crews to claim a single, shared dig spot. This Event’s maps took pirates around some iconic locales, from the traps of Thieves’ Haven to the shores of the Coral Fortress, but it was the joy of seeing crews try to pry chests from the very middle of a spike trap on Sailors’ Bounty that proved to be our crew’s highlight. We’ve been doing this for a while, it wasn’t going to stay easy forever…

A final bit of flavour comes to these Events via the Picture Walls present at every Outpost, and crucially, as detailed in our livestream on the day, not at The Reaper’s Hideout, because it is not an Outpost (they’d probably deface it anyway). Crews took a myriad of photos throughout the Event. From solo snaps to huge group shots, silly poses to highlights of rare spoils, these commemorative moments never fail to give us a grin.

We mentioned a livestream just then and we’d definitely be remiss not to elaborate as, again, this was a fine community endeavour hosted in honour of the Event. Titled The Trading Company Tour, it tasked four groups of top-tier pirates with the job of earning as much gold as they could for a pre-selected Trading Company, with the aim for these crews to showcase the variety of activities and play styles that comprise the Sea of Thieves experience, and they truly did not disappoint with a range of tactics on display from sinking to loot trading. You can catch up on the Tour and connected ‘banter’ from members of our Community team right here.

But that’s enough about what we organised for the day, we’re far more interested in what you all got up to. The easiest way to work that out? Numbers! The biggest of which was 290,191,761,714, being the total amount of gold earned, HUGE! That’s enough to buy 207,279,829,795.7 Greggs sausage rolls, if we assume one gold is worth one UK quid. Or some Dark Adventurers gear! Maybe, like, three boots or something (which would be an inconvenient number if this wasn’t a pirate game).

But what else occurred while you were all making such stacks of coin? Some quickfire numbers for you: 52,997,680 cannonballs were fired, while 3,557,318 pirates were also loaded as cannon ammo. 9,091,054 bananas were cronched. 3,513,974 tankards of grog were quaffed. Aside from all that fun, plenty of you visited the Ferry for a number of reasons: 3,472,599 took a trip from a gunpowder explosion, 434,650 succumbed to volcanoes and somehow 1191 pirates got on the wrong end of a firework.

The new features of Season 12 seem to be making an impression too. 700,404 Bone Caller Skeletons were summoned to help in combat, pirates were sent flying by a Horn of Fair Winds on 819,395 different occasions and you collectively ran 279,421,500 metres along tightropes, which works out to roughly 62 trips from one coast of America to the other. Pirates also fell off tightropes 905,948 times. We’re hoping that wasn’t all the same scoundrel.

Also, 3702 Burnt Grubs were eaten. A new record! For some reason…

Speaking of your antics, we also awarded a bunch of Hats of Unfeasibly Glorious Fame across the Event for a multitude of marvellous reasons. Long-overdue bonnets were bestowed upon consistently brilliant buccaneers like Pipsuwu, InkyGhosts and Didichat. Community MVPs were highlighted and honoured with people such as D4ndano and Carrillo, and creative efforts like DatLlama’s jacket and LzySoren’s actual coin also saw them receive surprise head-warmers.

You all joined in with our own fun on social media channels too. From asking if the colours of the flag were one shade or another to encouraging us to stack an unnecessary number of Gunpowder Barrels on a ship, with an unfortunate conclusion, it’s always a joy to see the amount of fun had over a Community Weekend across all of our spaces, and not merely in-game.

And that, in give or take 1000 words, was Sea of Thieves Season 12 Community Weekend, huzzah! As always, these Events are what they are due to the efforts of so many, so we’d like to extend our thanks to the hard-working Community Managers, Moderators and Deckhands who support our social spaces, the team behind the scenes who help fix the things our Community team panic about going wrong, our Video team for engineering a genuinely foolproof (and now fool-tested) stream setup and everyone else who remains on call to ensure these brilliant weekends can happen.

And, of course, a huge thanks to all of you, the pirates who turn up with your fun, your antics and your infectious spirit for the seas we share. Cheers to you all, and we hope to see you next Community Weekend so we can do it all again!