How to use and fix voice chat in Sea of Thieves

You can choose to play a game of Sea of Thieves with your friends on Discord or find a random crew while exploring the game. When they enter your crew, you need to rely on voice chat to communicate with them quickly. Some players, especially those playing Sea of Thieves on Steam, continue to have issues with the setup, and there are a handful of ways to fix it.

To use the game’s voice chat, the default setting for the push-to-talk option is the Left-Alt key, and for those using a controller, it should automatically detect your voice. Although you can set up a push-to-talk option, we don’t recommend it because you have a few buttons for a controller. You can modify any of these settings by visiting the setting options in the main menu or the pause menu of Sea of Thieves.

Those encountering problems with the voice chat settings or when attempting to speak to other players, attempt to close the game and change your computer’s microphone settings. You can do this by searching for “privacy settings” in your Windows search bar, and go to the “Microphone” option. Make sure Sea of Thieves is one of the available applications allowed to use a microphone, and then try to see if the game will enable you to speak to other players. If you continue to see a speech bubble above the player’s name while playing the game, and can hear them fine, but still have problems, another solution might work better.

The next step is to ensure the microphone you want to use is the default one. You can modify what microphone or audio device is your default choice by going to your taskbar, clicking the sound settings, select the recording option, choose the microphone you want to use and select it as the default setting. After you have it as your default option, make sure it has the proper sound volumes by right-clicking it in the options and setting the headset microphone level to a desirable level, or higher than it is initially set.

If you’re playing the game through Steam, you may have to enable online communication through your Xbox Live account. To do this, sign in to your account, go to the privacy settings, and scroll down to the option of “You can communicate outside of Xbox Live with Voice and Text,” to set the status to allow. After setting it to this option, scroll down to the options, and submit your choice.

After none of these issues appear to work, you may have to unplug and plug your headset back in, give your computer a full restart, and attempt to see if there are any available drivers for your sound settings or headset. Should none of this continue to work, your next option is to reach out to the Sea of Thieves support team to see if they can further assist you with any voice chat issues.

It’s essential to make sure your crewmates are not muted or choosing not to communicate with you. You should be able to see this by the chat bubble above their name while in-game, and if it has a cross through it, they are muted.