Also got on more Sea of Thieves with my girlfriend. We realized just how little money you truly make when playing on Safer Seas (private server) compared to High Seas (public). The same cursed skull sells for 250 gold on Safer Seas, but 5000 on High Seas. I don’t fully understand why they do this, the “true” experience is in the public servers, but it punishes people wanting to play completely alone quite severely. I think it’s because they don’t want people to grind out missions solo that are more difficult to complete when there are other people, but that shouldn’t really matter when the only things you unlock and can spend money on in game are purely cosmetic only. No new weapons, abilities, skills, anything, the only progression in the entire game is cosmetic stuff, so why punish private server players so harshly?
We have always played on a private server because we were afraid of people. One day I suggested we try high seas because of the money, and within 5 minutes of spawning in the island, a group of two players killed us because I picked up one guys cat. That proves our point to why we don’t want to play on a public server, but playing private we make a tiny fraction of the gold we could make in public. It kinda sucks but we just try to avoid other people as much as possible now.