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Sea of Thieves packet loss explained: How to fix it?
5 min. read
Updated onNovember 21, 2023
updated onNovember 21, 2023
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Key notes
Sea of Thieves is an awesome game where you can live your childhood fantasies of becoming a pirate without actually harming anyone. Unless you’re that type of gamer.
If you’re a sociable gamer, you’ll love to hear that Sea of Thieves is online-exclusive. Even if you don’t enjoy teaming up and shipping around the world in a crew, you’ll still encounter other players along the way.
However unlikely, there’s a downside to this whole multiplayer-only situation. Like any other online service, Sea of Thieves can experience connectivity issues from time to time.
Among the most severe ones, we remind of high ping, jitter, and the dreaded packet loss.
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What is packet loss in Sea of Thieves?
Let’s put it this way: you’d rather have another player loot your ship than face heavy packet loss. Just kidding, getting looted is not fun. But neither is packet loss, and you’ll soon understand why.
This phenomenon occurs whenever packets that are transmitted through your connection never reach their targets. As a result, the server might panic and throw a delay your way, or a desync, which is way worse.
If you ever experienced lag so bad that you started teleporting randomly across the map (rubberbanding), the culprit might’ve actually been packet loss. And if you’re unfortunate enough to get it during an encounter, well…
Other symptoms include:
What can cause packet loss in Sea of Thieves?
Anything awry with your connection can be a potential trigger for packet loss. For instance, if you use Wi-Fi instead of Ethernet, you might as well point signs your way reading Packet loss welcome.
The same goes for not using high-quality Ethernet cables or logging into the game during peak hours when the network is close to being overloaded. Therefore, it’s not exactly easy to identify a surefire cause.
Here’s a list of potential reasons for experiencing packet loss in Sea of Thieves:
As you can see, the list is quite varied. We can safely conclude that packet loss can occur anywhere on the connection: on your side, on your ISP’s side, or even on the game server host’s side.
This is why it’s so difficult to troubleshoot leaking packets most of the time.
How to fix packet loss in Sea of Thieves?
1. Try using a reliable VPN service
More often than not, a VPN such as Kape Technologies’ Private Internet Access will fix your packet loss problem. However, in order for this fix to work, the issue should be caused by your ISP (bandwidth throttling, improper routing).
Private Internet Access
Therefore, if you or the game server host are what’s causing the packet loss, this method won’t work.
2. Flush your DNS
ipconfig /flushdnsipconfig /registerdnsipconfig /releaseipconfig /renewnetsh winsock resetexit
Now all you have to do is restart your PC, launch Sea of Thieves and see if there’s any improvement. Alternatively, you could switch your ISP-assigned DNS addresses to free, public ones.
Just look up alternative public free DNS and you’ll probably find one that suits you better. Just make sure to back up the ISP-assigned DNS in case they’re not set to be obtained automatically.
3. Manually troubleshoot your connection
Final thoughts on Sea of Thieves packet loss
All things considered, fixing packet loss in Sea of Thieves can be a hassle. However, most of the time this issue is kind enough to fix itself without us even noticing.
In the unfortunate event that you experience packet loss regularly, then you must dig deeper and isolate the cause of this event.
If your ISP is what’s causing it, then the fix is quite straightforward: either talk to your ISP or use a VPN to circumvent their limited connection.
On the other hand, if the underlying issue is on your side, you might want to buckle up and start troubleshooting, because it’s not likely to go away by itself.
More about the topics:gaming,packet loss,VPN
Vlad Constantinescu
Vlad might have a degree in Animal Husbandry and Livestock Management, but he’s currently rocking anything software related, ranging from testing programs to writing in-depth reviews about them.
He spent 3-4 years as a software editor at Softpedia and another year as a VPN specialist before he landed his current job as an author at Windows Report.
In his free time, Vlad enjoys playing guitar, doing jigsaw puzzles, researching cybersecurity, and even having a good read on rainy days.
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