How To Make Custom Treasure Maps In Sea Of Thieves: Quest Board And How To Bury Treasure

In Sea of Thieves Season 5, user-generated content has come to the game in the form of the new Quest Board, a place where players can leave their custom treasure maps for other players to discover. When players complete these quests, both they and the map-makers will reap the rewards. Here’s how to create or play custom treasure maps in Sea of Thieves, as well as how to bury treasure yourself.

Sea of Thieves custom maps via the Quest Board

Starting with the launch of Sea of Thieves Season 5, new Quest Boards will appear at every Outpost and Seapost in the game, and each one will feature unique, player-created treasure maps that can hide whatever secrets their original creators deemed worthy of a quest. To find a Quest Board, look for it near the Shipwright’s Shop on any Outpost–and if you’re on one of the tiny Seaposts, you surely won’t miss it.

Interacting with it reveals two categories: the available quests and a My Maps section. The available quests section features the user-created maps already pinned to the board, and you can add up to five of them to your quest radial menu per day. This upper limit is likely to prevent players from boosting gold and glory with overly basic quests. You can see which island you’ll be heading to, but you can’t see its number of loot stashes until you’ve added it to your inventory.

Add the maps you like to your radial menu, and you won’t even need to propose them in the Captain’s Quarters. They’ll be made active automatically for your whole crew. From there, you can treat it like a traditional treasure map: Sail to the corresponding island and locate the buried treasure with the red map markers. The trickier part is making these maps yourself.

How to make custom treasure maps in Sea of Thieves

If you’d rather make a treasure map than complete someone else’s, you can do so by taking any loot you have and burying it on any island of your choice using the new burying treasure mechanic. To do this, follow these short steps:

• Be on an island with eligible loot, such as a Gold Hoarders chest or Order of Souls skull
• Place it where you’d like to bury it on the island
• Equip your shovel and look at the placed loot
• Use the bury prompt (hold LT on controller) to quickly bury the loot

As soon as you bury loot, a custom treasure map will appear in your quest radial menu, which will help you not lose track of it. From there, you can take your new map to a Quest Board and pin it alongside the others. If other players come along and complete your quest, you’ll earn the same rewards that they will, including some seasonal Renown (Plunder Pass XP).

Whatever rewards the quest-completing crew earns in real-time while you are away, you’ll see bestowed upon your pirate when you return to the game, no matter when that is. You could feasibly create several treasure maps, pin them to the Quest Board, then not play the game for weeks. When you return, assuming others played your quests, you’ll enjoy the rewards that will be immediately deposited.

Note that you must pin the map to the board in order for it to persist after you exit the game, however. If you create a custom map by burying treasure, but do not pin that map to a Quest Board, it won’t be in your inventory when you load into a new instance of the game. In that way, it behaves just like other quests left incomplete in Sea of Thieves.

This new burying treasure mechanic is useful beyond just making new quests too. If ever you find yourself being invaded by enemy crews, you can stash your loot by burying it, and only you and your crew will have the map that reveals its location. You could even set traps by presenting a custom map to another crew, only to have an alliance of pirates and gunpowder chests waiting for them at the dig site.

As always, Sea of Thieves is built on the foundation of “tools, not rules,” so go discover new ways to live the pirate’s life with the new Quest Boards and user-generated content. Here’s everything new to Sea of Thieves in Season 5, as well as what’s in the Season 5 Plunder Pass.