Sea of Thieves adds exploding skeletons event for a limited time

Sea of Thieves' latest time-limited event adds skeletons that will rush towards you, light the fuse on the gunpowder keg they're hauling around, and blow you to smithereens if you give them half a chance.

Rare wants you to kill the "Gunpowder Skeletons" in interesting ways, as senior producer Drew Stevens explains in the video above. Perhaps you could try to herd the skeletons together for some cluster kills, or set off a chain reaction of keg explosions, which sounds fun.

You'll have a new way to kill them, too: you can now light gunpowder kegs yourself by left-clicking, which will start a five second countdown. Players have been blowing up the kegs to damage enemy boats, so they'll now also physically effect vessels, rocking and pushing them when they explode.

The aim of the event is to earn commendations as you encounter the skeletons around the world (they'll be "everywhere", apparently), which will net you Doubloons. In total, you can earn 150 Doubloons in the event, which lasts until July 10, including 50 for new "legendary commendations" that offer more long-term goals for players. It's not clear if the skeletons will be removed from the game after the event ends, or if they'll remain but the commendations and new items will be dropped.

You'll be able to spend that gold on some event-specific cosmetics such as the Bone Crusher Sword, or trade it in for reputation with factions.

Skeleton pistol and blunderbuss accuracy have also been toned down as part of the latest update. For all the changes, including a few bug fixes, read the full patch notes.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.