You can choose to play a Sea of Thieves game with your friends on Discord or find a random team while exploring the game. When they join your team, you have to rely on voice chat to communicate with them quickly. Some players, especially those who play Sea of Thieves on Steam, continue to have issues with the setup, and there are a few ways to fix it.
To use in-game voice chat, the default setting for the push-to-talk option is the Alt-left key, and for those using a controller, it should automatically detect your voice. While you can configure a push-to-talk option, we don't recommend it because you have a few buttons for a controller. You can change any of these settings by visiting the setting options in the main menu or Sea of Thieves pause menu.
Those who are having trouble with voice chat settings or when trying to talk to other players, try 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 then go to the "Microphone" option. Make sure Sea of Thieves is one of the available apps that are allowed to use a microphone, and then try to see if the game will allow you to talk to other players. If you continue to see a bubble above the player's name while playing the game and can hear it well, but still having issues, another solution might work better.
The next step is to make sure that the microphone you want to use is the default one. You can change the default microphone or audio device by going to your taskbar, clicking on sound settings, select the recording option, choose the microphone you want to use and select it as the default setting. Once you have it as the default option, make sure it has the correct sound volumes by right-clicking it in the options and setting the headset microphone level to a desirable level, or higher than the one initially defined.
If you play the game through Steam, you may need to enable online communication through your Xbox Live account. To do this, sign in to your account, go to privacy settings, and scroll down to the option "You can communicate outside of Xbox Live with voice and text" to set the status to allow. After setting it to this option, scroll through the options and submit your choice.
After none of these issues seem to work, you may need to unplug and plug in your headphones, restart your computer completely, and try to see if there are any drivers available for your audio settings or headphones. If none of that works, your next option is to contact the Sea of Thieves support team to see if they can help you further with voice chat issues.
It is essential to make sure that your teammates 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 playing the game, and if it's crossed by a cross, they are cut off.
