Xbox One and PC gamers hoping to get another shot at Sea of Thieves before it launches in March received some good news Wednesday. Rare announced some weekend “scale tests” starting this weekend along with a larger beta test planned just ahead of the open-sea social co-op game’s release.

Rare receive a bit of a shock as the number of participants in the recent Sea of Thieves beta grew and grew. This tested the game’s services and servers as data bottlenecks appeared, which caused issues with starting the game, selling items, and other problems. The studio has elected to hold a couple of smaller weekend tests as a result to test improvements to the game’s services.

Scale Test

Sea of Thieves will hold its first scale test starting Friday, February 16 at 5 a.m. ET / 2 a.m. PT. This will run until Sunday at the same time. This will only be open to those who had access to the closed beta along with Xbox Insiders.

The developers are using this to test improvements they’ve made to the Sea of Thieves server and are shooting for a high number of concurrent players to really stress the game servers. Those participating should expect to encounter issues as Rare will be purposefully throttling game performance as it tests data servers around the world, which will include simulated outages.

The content of the Sea of Thieves scale test will be the exact same as it was during the recent closed beta test. This means prospective pirates will hunt for loot based on bounties from the Gold Hoarders trading company.

Second Beta

While Sea of Thieves will not show anything new during the scale tests, the same can’t be said for the second beta test. Rare does not have details on this yet other than to say it will occur closer to launch and it will feature more of the actual game instead of the small slice from the first beta.

Sea of Thieves will launch on March 20 with Play Anywhere support for the Xbox One and Windows 10 PCs. Rare has confirmed microtransactions will be added to the game via an update some months after release, but it will not have any loot boxes.