Constantly.....
Tom2121
USA, VA Join Date: 2016-09-04 Member: 222057Members
USA, VA Join Date: 2016-09-04 Member: 222057Members
Constantly Trying to Keep from Runing Out of Air
Constantly Looking for food and Water
Constantly Trying to Keep Most Things from Killing You
Constantly Grinding Materials to Survive
Constantly Looking for blueprints
Constantly Rechargeing Batterys and Power Cells
Constantly Trying to Keep EVERY Thing Going
So Whin do i Get Time to Explor?
Constantly Looking for food and Water
Constantly Trying to Keep Most Things from Killing You
Constantly Grinding Materials to Survive
Constantly Looking for blueprints
Constantly Rechargeing Batterys and Power Cells
Constantly Trying to Keep EVERY Thing Going
So Whin do i Get Time to Explor?
Comments
At the very least, the rate at which you need to eat and drink should be cut in half. Having to carry at least three each of food and water every time you step out of your base is needlessly cumbersome, and in the early game, challenging as all get out to constantly collect.
On the flip side, once you reach a point where you're stable and self-sustaining, you can take your time to explore. After this new update I've got a base with 8 Thermal Plants (near a Thermal Spout) so I have constant power, also with 4 Water Filtration machines and an Alien Containment filled with Reginalds so water/food isn't an issue anymore. Now I can explore the Grand Reef and Lava Zone in my PRAWN Spider-Mecha Suit in style.
This is true in the early game and it's definitely a challenge. But Filtered Water (coral+salt) gives double the water of Distilled Water (Bladderfish), and the Big Water (Filtration Machine) gives 50 water in one slot. Likewise, once you get an Alien Containment, stick 2 or more fish of the same species in there and they'll magically spawn more fish. If you get Spadefish or Reginalds they give far more food than even Peepers can. Just gotta keep moving forward!
The way I see it, the game roughly breaks down into three phases; early game, midgame, late game.
Early game: You start with nothing, can't really dive much deeper than 100m (and even that's pushing it). You stay fairly close to the lifepod, gathering the basic tools & equipment you need.
Midgame: Otherwise known as "found the seamoth fragments". Significantly increases your range and depth capabilities. Can now explore wrecks more efficiently, and get back and forth to your base more quickly. Can find rarer resources (such as diamond for the laser cutter) and makes most predators found in the 0-200m range trivial to deal with. Can get what you need to explore the Aurora and get the PRAWN.
Lategame: By this point you've got the tech for the cyclops, and have established self-sustaining (or nearly so) food supply. Focus shifts more to exploration and on going deeper, collecting whatever tech you may have missed and so on.
@Sidchicken put it quite nicely though; Early game you're helpless and have nothing, and over time you come to replace the old ways of getting food watr and so on, obsoleting the need to hunt and gather when you can just farm and breed your own. Then the exosuit and its drilling large resource nodes provides even further raw material you wouldn't otherwise been able to get. Uphill struggle in the early game, and then it eases up once you've got those high-tech toys to play with.
Pretty much. but then i wonder, why all of these needs to be done separately from exploring? you can do all that while exploring!
Most of those things force you to explore.
But not far. Food and water all require you stay near your base as you need access to your fabricator to make said food and water. And batteries and power cells require copper which are only found in limestone and which are finite. So in fact, dependency on these things does the exact opposite ... it forces you stay close to the Shallows and not explore and find those very fragments that would alleviate these problems.
If the rate at which you need to farm these materials was considerably reduced, then you'd be able to actually spend time doing stuff other than just surviving, such as exploring interesting spots and diving at fragment filled wrecks.
It's not that any one of those things is especially frustrating. It's the fact that all of them combined make for a very frustrating experience in the early game. And no one will even stay to play the mid or late game if that's the case. *Especially* if you're the type of player who wishes to blind play and not check Youtube or the wiki to find out where you need to go to get to those wrecks.
Play freedom mode, no need to be in constant search of food and water. Also once you make a battery charger battery are no longer an issue.
You have to be operating incredibly inefficiently to not have any ability to explore, or to run out of food, water or batteries so much that you can't manage to go far from your lifepod. Especially with the signals from the radio guiding you to the interesting things.
No. They force you to farm. There's a difference.
The beacons from the relay get you started, but with all the imposed limitations they do not get you far enough to actually keep going on your own. Your sitting their in your base made of hallways, with a foundation covered with solar panels so you can recharge the four spare batteries you have to carry everywhere with you because you need the seaglide. The seaglide lets you move fast enough with the extra oxygen tanks that you have to carry to dive into wrecks, all of which takes up half your inventory. You think the seamoth will compensate for that but you run out of power cells after one hour of wandering around to look for things. You continue to farm the same stuff becaue you have to micromanage your power consumption to keep the seamoth going and you can't go deep enough to find anything new without the seamoth, so you get trapped in a cycle.
Some players will get luck and stumble across a power cell charging station. Others aren't so lucky, never find one, and quit the game because it's all about grinding an endless supply of power cells.
But hey, let's just drop the exploration element completely and make it a strictly survival game. I wanted to play a clone of stranded deep anyway. Just randomize everything use a procedurally generated map and add MP so that players can sabotage each other's habitats and submersible to steal their resources.
Because who wants to explore? That's just stupid.
aww, that's kinda mean....
anyway, I kinda agree with @kaybe. When I very first played subnautica, I was able to get the cyclops and felt that massive shift from "survival mode" to "exploratory mode." Albeit the game was way older (read: easier) back then, and so this happened relatively quickly. Honestly the way the game works seems a tad ridiculous to me right now.
On the one hand, new players are going to find a game that keeps getting more and more taxing to survive in, what with new updates making oxygen more pricey, disabling a lot of blueprints that you'd have normally, etc. However experienced players can virtually cruise through this game, as once you've got a cyclops (again- easy for vets, just take a trip to the aurora/mountain/floater island- again something new players won't necessarily know right away) you can create a self-sustaining base easily with grow beds, fruits, and fish tanks (not to mention the net power gain from putting power cell chargers in a cyclops.)
It's just kinda weird. What if it were more even? What if survival was made easier, and the ridiculousness of late-game play nerfed a bit? that's just my two cents...
Alright, well maybe this is something that they should work on. Since they're developing stuff they're probably going to want to hear back from some players. (sorry if I hurt anyone's feelings)
I think it's obvious that Cyclops needs a big overhaul. Charging itself has to be a stopgap measure until they make some way of recharging it from alternate fuels, bases, solar, or thermal. I suppose you could go around with a locker full of cells, and spend a day or two recharging them in a power base, but that seems clunky.
I decided to test how far you can go without eating or drinking. I made it from my lifepod (roughly centered) all the way to the void south of the Grand Reef and back. I still have 70 food and 57 water. I can go the entire length of the map and half again before being desperate for water (I would still have 40 food and 14 water assuming a reaper didnt get me). With one or two salted peepers and disenfected waters there isn't anything you can't reach and linger around before food and water become a problem.
You'd have to be avoiding collecting resources to not have an ample amount of copper. I have 23 spare copper in addition to 2 extra power cells and 5 extra batteries and I've hardly been thorough in finding limestone. These resources are plenty common. You have to fail really hard to drain the entire shallows (which would be the problem if you were exploring all of it and managed to run out somehow)
edit: I forgot to mention that I used only the standard flippers in my journey across the map. No seaglide, no seamoth, no cyclops, and no glide fins.
BTW it should be like this in a Game, in wich your under water. What you want? 5 Minutes dive Time for one AirTank?
And when you get Seamoth, there is unlimited Air.
Yes, also known as the Mechanics a Survival Games do it.
You can arrange with that, or play the Mode without Water or Food needs.
Ohhh nooo, there are some enemie Creatures in a Survival Game that is placed on a Alien Planet. Who could expect this crazy thing... The Devs must be craaazy
If you don´t want to play Survival with Food & Water, then go Freedom Mode.
If you don´t want to grind anything, then play Creative Mode.
But don´t blame Subnautica for your not finding the other 2 Gamemodes.
If you find the food and water restrictions of Survival to be a pain in the ass, why not just play on Freedom Mode?
I mean, I know many people love the Survival Mode, and the food and water. But I honestly found it to be a pain more than anything, so I usually play on Freedom Mode. Yeah, you gotta worry about air and power supplies, but juggling those things isn't too difficult.
And I'm actually rather mystified by people saying that it's impossible to find fragments in the wrecks. When I got the wreck near Pod 17, I was able to dive into the wreck a few times (there's a large gap near the top branch that has cosmetic bubbles leaking out, that's probably intended to show people how to get in) and managed to get the blueprints for the bioreactor, the battery charger, and the vehicle bay.
From there, things open like some blooming anime rose.
if I didn't happen to find the seaglide on the first day I do so now which is exceptionally easy to find and build, Again grabbing up salt. Once thats done I fab some water and dried fish and head out to the plateaus.. the KEY I find to early battery needs is only use the seaglide to dive to the floor, use the bladder to surface. Bottom line is by time I go back I have the battery charger, vehicle and seamoth ready to build.
After that the game is cake! Take some time to gather the easy resources, build up a base for the sole purpose of battery charging and storage. Use dead batteries to make your new power cells. And keep gathering salt.
I've been playing the game for QUITE a while now.. but I've yet to find the game difficult even with the curves that get introduced. Follow those early escape pod beacons they steer you in the right direction!
The ONLY time I ever struggle is fighting the urge to head out to floater island until I get cyclops..
- Once you hit that island you never have to worry about food/water again thanks to the marble melons, of course I don't need to use them which usually I don't.
- The tech boost it gives you is unreal and way to easily obtained! I like to work at things to progress not have them handed to me, Again I know I do not need to scan the Multipurpose room, observatory, grow bed etc etc.
- Gating myself to needing the cyclops makes more sense to me.. A lot of open water between pod 5 and the giant jelly's with NO opposition. In my mind there is a MASSIVE current that runs between the shallows and the island.. if you take your seamoth there it would be destroyed by the force.. basically it translates to I need a bigger boat lol.
- The island to me is just a point where I pick up PDA's and as of right now they as well are not needed. And for when I was very new to the game and was still learning all the mechanics.
To get those things I'd rather have to dive down into the jellyshrooms, which takes some prep time and a good ol throw down with the locals!
I prefer to depend on the fish I catch and store in either my on board aquariums or alien containment. And the water I produce from the purifiers. Which also takes some planing altho minor ( base power use etc. )
Not going to that island increases my current play throughs exponentially which means more enjoyment and for longer! I love the accomplishment in surviving. But that's just me
All that being said. If you have any sort of subpar graphics card, it makes the beginning of the game exactly like the OP's description. I tried introducing my brother to the game and at first I thought he was just being sucky, but it really was just the split second delay caused by the slower graphics rendering on his computer. It can make it so you can't catch fish quickly at all, and indeed all your time is consumed with trying to feed yourself.
That's entirely subjective. To one person filling a wall of lockers with silver is nothing. A fun little way to spend time.
Some of us don't have that time, or don't want to spend it doing something like that. Previous poster just said farming seven batteries was nothing to him, even with having trouble finding copper. I never craft more that 4 spares. More then that and whatever I find on the aurora is excessive to me.
For some people the grind is a good thing. Spending 100 hours on it means nothing at all to them. It's a good time. For others, having to spend more than 10 minutes specifically for grinding is a nightmare, because they don't like the grind.
The grind is real. To deny it is simply narrow minded. I can take some grind, even like it at times. But this game, in it's current state, has pushed me to my tolerance. The next thing they nerf for the sake of padding the game's length will be a deal breaker. I know what's coming, needing 20 titanium to make a single room, having to fill our inventory with pipes to explore wrecks. I'm not looking forward to that.
Please don't put words in my mouth. I neither farmed nor grinded to get those. I continued surviving and exploring the beacons from the communications panel, and on the way made sure to pop each limestone I could, and I made a trip to the aurora to fill up with batteries from there.
Incidentally, making a trip to the aurora was one of the first things I did as a new player on my first run, and you definitely don't have to wait to have things crafted before going (aside from the radiation suit). The swim is easy if you take a little care, and new players will probably get eaten once, before they take a little more caution to wait for the reapers to get a good distance away before continuing their trip around the aurora (a full trip around the aurora is the logical way to find the entrance, and definitely possible without any crafting besides the regular fins). And I think it's important to get eaten by a reaper at least once, because it's part of what makes the reaper terrifying. It makes all future encounters with them much more intense.
7 silver might be pushing it, but not copper.