General Improvements to include in DLC

xmrmeow

I love Subnautica. The environments, creatures, and sound design are all amazing, and I've experienced the game in 4 or 5 full playthroughs, but these issues I kept noticing in each playthrough:

• Problem: Copper and silver were a pain to get until the game was nearly over
  
  Solution: If the rocks gave only copper instead of a chance for copper or titanium (titanium is easy to get many other ways), it would've made a bunch of crafting less grindy.
  
  
• Problem: some blueprints like moon pool and vehicle upgrade console are necessary for progression, but inconsistent to find
  
  Solution: Add a module that lets vehicles detect unscanned parts:. This would help a lot for finding more stuff in the game by exploring. Attaching multiple could extend the range. Alternatively put these BPs specifically near story beacons.
  
  
• Problem: Some biomes I never felt I needed to go to for more than a brief moment for 1 thing, let alone build a base there, but they were very cool biomes.
  
  Solution: Perhaps add some resource nodes that require a permanent settlement to gather (a room in a base over it to drill, like some special oil or mineral under the sea floor). This would make building bases in more areas more useful (I usually ended up building just one big base in the safe shallows because I never felt inclined to do more, this gives advantages for setting up multiple bases). These base drills could also allow lategame recipes to have inflated resource costs since you can automate gathering of resources.
  
  
• Problem: Late game power generation leaves me with way more power than I know what to do with. A nuclear generator with 1 fuel rod is usually enough to power me for a full playthrough.
  
  Solution: It'd be nice if there were some lategame machines that needed more power like a nuclear powered sub (can just leave forcefields on if you got enough fuel rods), or denser power cells to go along with vehicles that use way more energy, or maybe just machines that use a lot of power like the drills i mentioned above, or metal refinement
  

A few mods I use in every new playthrough after I found out about them (would make for good general improvements to add to the official game):

• Base Clocks and Lightswitch: just some little nice things to have to add to the aesthetic
• Easycraft: fabricators pull resources from nearby storage containers to craft
• MoreQuickSlots: gives 12 quickslots instead of 5
• Map: adds a map that reveals as the player explores
• ToggleMachines: lets you turn off machines. It's annoy to disassemble water filter because it's using all my power and there's no off button
• Drillable scan: lets you scan for resource nodes that the prawn can drill (not sure why this isn't in by default)
• White lights: the flashlight's white light is nice, but the seaglide's light is blue. White light looks better imo so there should be an option in game to change the flashlight color
• Unleashed Lifepod: random lifepod starting location. It'd be cool if the game had a few biomes you could choose to start in with different difficulty each (all made to be able to start in aka containing resources and BPs made for early game, but each with different challenge level, mainly to spice up additional playthroughs)
• Prawn and Seamoth storage access: access these vehicle's storage from the inside
• Blueprint tracker: Lets you pin BPs on your hud so you can easily track how close you are to getting what you're trying to build