A new Sea of Thieves update will free up space on your hard drive

A new update is heading to Sea of Thieves next month and will reduce the overall installation size of the game on your hard drive.

"What this means is that overall, the game install size will go down." explains Joe Neate, executive producer of Sea of Thieves. "[The update] ultimately means the game install size goes down so it takes up less space on your hard drive and we have much more control over the patch process, going forward."

Neate goes on to explain that while the size of future patches may slightly increase, the overall space that the game takes up on your system won't increase to any significant degree. The current installation size of Sea of Thieves on PC is 47GB—this is expected to drop to 27GB following the update.

So while having to do a complete reinstall of the game to implement the new update may be a little inconvenient, the 20GB that will be freed up—not to mention the overall space you'll save in the future—seems like a fair deal.

The update is due on February 6, so if you were planning on rushing home from work and jumping straight into Sea of Thieves on that day, you may want to allow for the time it will take to do a complete reinstall.

Sarah started as a freelance writer in 2018, writing for PCGamesN, TechRadar, GamingBible, Red Bull Gaming and more. In 2021, she was offered a full-time position on the PC Gamer team where she takes every possible opportunity to talk about World of Warcraft and Elden Ring. When not writing guides, most of her spare time is spent in Azeroth—though she's quite partial to JRPGs too. One of her fondest hopes is to one day play through the ending of Final Fantasy X without breaking down into a sobbing heap. She probably has more wolves in Valheim than you.