Sea of Thieves speedrunning is in shambles due to a throwing knife glitch that kills one of the game's toughest bosses in seconds

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Knives out

Sea of Thieves
(Image credit: Rare)

Sea of Thieves just added new weapons to the game for the first time since launch; the Double Barrel Pistol and throwing knives; and a glitch affecting the latter is being exploited to utterly decimate one of the game's hardest bosses in record time.

According to Speedrun.com, the fastest anyone's ever beaten an Ashen Lord is 40 seconds, accomplished by YouTuber YooKay and a friend using carefully timed cannon fire to obliterate the boss. Well, that world record could be shattered fairly quickly if someone puts their mind to it before Rare patches out a glitch that turns throwing knives into a machine gun-style rapid-fire assault weapon.

In this video from Sea of Thieves streamer NessieDoes, an Ashen Lord is defeated in just 43 seconds. While that's a few seconds shy of the world record, consider that it was done by a single player, while the current record holder was teamed up with someone else. If a full crew of four, or even two, pelted the Ashen Lord with turbo knives at the same time, it's hard to see how the current record would stand.

Granted, it's also hard to see this glitch not being patched out pretty quickly. Speedrunning aside, I can only imagine how much of a bombshell this would be to the PvP meta if left untouched for any length of time. According to the player in the above video, the glitch "can happen to anyone randomly when picking up a throwing knife while holding 2 guns," so it's not as if it's a complicated exploit to perform but rather one based mostly on chance.

That said, they also followed up to clarify that "you can only walk and most inputs you do cancel it," so in hindsight it probably wouldn't be all that effective in PvP unless your enemy was paralyzed for some reason.

Either way, it's a "funny bug to see on day one" of Sea of Thieves season 12, which is live now on Xbox, PC, and PlayStation, which will always feel weird to write.

In the spirit of Sea of Thieves' launching on PlayStation, here are the best PS5 games and the best Xbox Series X games to play today.

Jordan Gerblick
Jordan Gerblick
Staff Writer

After earning an English degree from ASU, I worked as a corporate copy editor while freelancing for places like SFX Magazine, Screen Rant, Game Revolution, and MMORPG on the side. I got my big break here in 2019 with a freelance news gig, and I was hired on as GamesRadar's west coast Staff Writer in 2021. That means I'm responsible for managing the site's western regional executive branch, AKA my home office, and writing about whatever horror game I'm too afraid to finish.