Yo, what up? Librarian Husky here. Welcome to my Sea of Thieves 2025 top-tier buildage guide. The goal for this article is to provide players familiar with the build role and wanting to enhance their gameplay with more information than they already know from watching other build guides. If you’re a new builder, consider checking out my previous build guide before continuing.

Sea of Thieves 2025 Top-Tier Buildage Guide

#94bd7b;”>Topics covered include loadout viability in the current meta, proper use of wood crates, movement sequences, bags, the fire dart tech, and various strategies. Timestamps for each section are provided for easy navigation.

Changes in the Villagers’ Loadout

The villagers’ loadout has evolved due to game changes, such as the blunderbuss nerf removing one-shot potential. I present a list of recommended weapons for villagers in the current meta. In the S tier, the Cutlass stands out for its movement capabilities, followed closely by the flintlock. The flintlock’s faster reload speed makes it ideal for the current pre-eating meta, where borders need to respond quickly.

AnOther S tier option is the blowpipe, particularly effective with wood crates. Notably, the fire dart and poison dart offer unique advantages, influencing match outcomes. Other weapons on the list, ranked from A to D tier, provide varying degrees of utility. Experiment with different weapons to find what suits your playstyle best in matches.

Efficient Wood Crate Placement for Villagers Restocking

I’ll preface this section with this. How you set your keybinds can drastically change how easy or difficult you want this next section to be. I also don’t know if this tech is possible on a standard controller, so if you are playing on a controller, I highly recommend using paddles or something similar. Wood crates. These crates provide villagers the ability to restock wood wherever they want on a boat. However, some spots are more useful than others, and half-hazardly throwing them all over the bottom deck of a galleon isn’t an efficient way of using these crates.

Here are some spots that I personally like to place these crates. Hopefully, these pictures and reasonings will give you a better understanding of how to use wood crates. The first spot is on the edge of the middle deck stairs. The main purpose for this crate is to restock wood between buckets. On screen is a guide to the inputs to pull off this technique. Let’s say you come back to bucket and you don’t have any wood remaining. You can grab a bucket and as you jump back to the bottom deck, you can instantly restock your jump. This will save time as you don’t need to go back to the wood barrel and skip some unnecessary animations as well.

The second spot is on top of the barrel between hole six and five. Let’s say you have both holes six and three open. You can instantly restock using this wood crate between a sword hop. And if timed correctly, you’ll still have momentum to continue bunny hopping to hole three. [Music]

The final spot I’ll go over is the hole between hole seven and six. This spot is a little odd depending on your heads-up display settings. I’ll briefly explain why using blue juggling as an example. There’s a heads-up display setting for fixed position for interact prompts. If you toggle the setting on or off, the interact prompts work differently. If set to on, the prompts stick to the bottom of your screen so long as you are in range to interact with anything. If set to off, the prompts stick to the item that is interactable. On screen is what both options look like when loot juggling to help show what the setting actually does.

Going back to the spot for the split crate, let’s say you have holes seven and five open, you can use the same technique explained previously to move fluently and efficiently. There are more spots that I like to use, but these three spots are a good standard when starting to use wood crates. Experiment yourself to find more spots that you can use like the examples provided to improve your building efficiency. There are some movement sequences that I think are really useful to get down to muscle memory on top of knowing how to bunny hop and your keybinds.

Understanding Advanced Movement Techniques

Before I show you them, let me demonstrate how the game works with sword hops on inclines. Sword hopping on a flat surface will allow you to hop the full distance. But if you sword hop on any incline, you won’t go the full distance, and the game will stop your momentum when your hitbox collides with something aside from an enemy NPC or player.

There‘s a fast sequence that I like to use a lot when I’m repairing hole three and then going to the bucket. In short, the sequence is this: Repair hole, sword hop to stairs, bunny hop upstairs, hold bucket, jump to map table, empty bucket. This sequence is really quick and can be used when timing is tight. If you practice this sequence enough, then eventually you should see speeds similar to this.

Another fast and easy movement sequence is switching to wood after a sword hop and bunny hopping to whatever hole needs to be repaired. Here are some clips showing a route I like to take to surprise a border. It’s useful to run this route if you finish your repairs below deck or if your flex is repairing the last hole while you push for potential support shot for top deck defense.

This tech has some intricacies that I’ll go over. The first intricacy is how backsplashing actually works. In my previous build guide, I talked about how water affects your movement, but it also affects backsplashes. Using this barrel as a visual reference, you can see at what height water below deck eats your bucket.

Notice how the splash is affected before and after the water reaches the top of the barrel. When water reaches the top of this barrel, buckets will need to be adjusted accordingly with a timed jump. This is very specific and situational, but I want to make sure all the information is out there to showcase the skill gap before building.

The second intricacy is where to shoot your dart. Fire darts will fizzle out when underwater, so you need to be careful where you decide to use them. I personally recommend using the poles around the bottom deck. The poles are far enough away from the hole so the darts avoid any potential hits from cannons or thunder bombs to cause them to explode early. It also gives a clear view of where the dart is. If you shoot your dart too high up on the pole, the dart will get lodged inside the galleon hitbox, rendering it useless.

So, here’s a picture highlighting the general spot you should shoot the darts if you intend on using the poles. You can use the lights from the lanterns as well to give you a good idea of where to shoot them during a match. The fire dart has different timings between just firing it, using it for buckets short of max, and using it for max buckets. The max amount of buckets per fire dart is six.

Deck Strategy and Tactics

In general, one fire dart explodes after 4 seconds and will disappear after six buckets, which will have the fire dart last about 13 seconds. The main use of this deck is to provide Another place to splash buckets, and it ties in really well if you have the option of using wood crates.

Here are some strategies that are applied to building, as well as some tips and tricks. At the time of making this guide, the galleon hitbox for the rudder is still broken. Crews will send borders with blunder bombs to throw them through the rudder to hit whoever is bucketing to cause potential backlashes. The easiest way to counter this is to have whoever is bucketing stand at the map table and bucket from mid-deck as the blunder bombs will not reach that far.

Another counter is to have Flex go deep for a double as long as the double is hole three and onward. You can determine how much water is in a boat by going to the rudder and looking for a blue line that sticks out just slightly from the galleon’s hole. How fast the water rises can help determine how much pressure that boat has. The fire dart itself can also be used in other ways. Fire darts that explode will turn boats that are anchored. Depending on which side of the ship you use, a fire dart will turn the boat in the opposite direction.

At the time of making this guide, they can also be used as an aggressive way to mess with the Flex and build on the enemy crew. Shoot two darts inside the rudder and then follow up with a blunder bomb to potentially back somebody below deck. Pay attention to where the water is on the boat when you shoot the darts. If you shoot them in the water, they will fizzle out.

The harpoons on the front of the ship will retract when water is catchable from mid-deck. Emergency buckets are a useful way of saving your ship from sinking. A couple of ways of how I use them when I’m soloing bottom deck are if I need to hear what holes are open more clearly, then I will pull a bucket. And if I want to gauge how much pressure I have without having to look around, then I will pull to see how fast the water drops.

They are also useful when you send your Flex to get a double as it gives them more time to repair as well as help them sprint if water’s too high for them to do so. Timing your emergency bucket with your Flex double repping can also increase your efficiency building. Get in the habit of having your Flex tell you what tier hole they are repairing and when they are halfway through the repair to maximize efficiency building.

Ship Building Techniques

You can determine what side of finding board is possible from the bottom deck based on two simple things. The water in your boat and the lanterns. Paying attention to the ship’s angle is an important skill to have while building. Here’s a demonstration as to why.

If your ship is slightly nose, then you will have a harder time repairing holes five through eight. If your ship is slightly facing away from the broad, then you will have a harder time repairing holes one through four. You can hear the opposing crew’s cannons even while below deck, so you should adjust what holes you prioritize and win.

Understanding Opponent’s Cannon Crew

You can determine how many people are on cannons on the opposing crew based on how fast holes are coming in. If two holes pop pretty quickly, you can assume that two people are on cannons and adjust your playstyle from there.

An advanced strategy is what I call playing the X or playing the hit marker. If you are repairing a hole and get knocked off of the repair, then you can bait the opposing crew by staying on the hole or hop to a different hole. Mixing up your play style can have the opposing crew second-guessing their pressure and in turn cause a misplay with the border.

Thanks for checking this guide out. Hopefully, I’ve provided you with new information to take into your matches and for you to experiment with your approach to building as a whole.

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