Scale Test

The Scale Test was a limited-time test of the Sea of Thieves multiplayer servers. It ran over the weekend of February 16th, 10:00 AM GMT to February 18th, 10:00 AM GMT.

The Scale Test was open to any players who'd had access to the Closed Beta. Its purpose was primarily to test the player capacity of the Sea of Thieves game servers and measure performance under stress.

Changes
New and changed game features introduced in the Scale Test included:
 * New graphics for the ship selection screen
 * The option to choose from a selection of pirate character sprites at game launch (the Closed Beta assigned a random Pirate to every player)
 * The addition of the Blacksmith's Shop for purchasing weapons
 * The addition of the Armoury, a new stationary object similar to the clothing and equipment boxes, but for choosing and swapping equipped weapons
 * Only two weapons can be equipped at once (four could be equipped in the Closed Beta)
 * The Blunderbuss was moved to the Blacksmith's Shop (in the Closed Beta it appeared in the Equipment Shop)
 * The Eye of Reach is no longer automatically equipped in players' inventories, and must now be purchased
 * Several new clothing items added to the General Clothing Shop, including Peglegs, Eyepatches, Beards, and Hair
 * All clothing, weapon, and equipment items now have an Admiral and a Bilge Rat version (many were missing in the Closed Beta, especially for weapons)
 * All Shopkeepers can now be spoken to via multiple dialog options
 * The Shipwright is now a named character that can be spoken to, but still has no function or items (a character that appeared on Outpost docks during the Closed Beta but could not be interacted with)
 * Passive Parrot and Fish creatures added
 * Message in a Bottle added, which spawn randomly on beaches and could offer Bounty Quests to kill Skeleton Captains and retrieve their Bounty Skulls (but no way to turn them in for rewards yet)
 * Trinkets added, which spawn randomly on beaches and could be turned in to the Gold Hoarders for a small Gold and Reputation reward.
 * Single items of Wooden Planks and Bananas now randomly spawn on beaches.
 * The difficulty of Skeletons was revamped and now scales with nearby players.