New loot system and tech tree design - Subnautica
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Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
Join Date: 2013-01-29 Member: 182599Members, Super Administrators, Reinforced - Diamond
New loot system and tech tree design - Subnautica
If you’ve been playing the Experimental branch of Subnautica on Steam Early Access this week, you may have noticed that the entire loot system and crafting tech tree have been...
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It give's you more the feeling of having achieved something.
I mean I would be naturally curious to explore.. but if I quickly realized that everything I needed for progression was back at that one area, I'd be hard pressed to leave it for progression's sake, let alone explore risky zones elsewhere. This makes me concerned that the issue of not having loot feel "special" by discovering it throughout the world through your exploring efforts - may still occur?
I misread!
Ideally eventually we should be able to just filter the salt from the saltwater and the water to well.. drink through some kind of machine but i would guess that something like this is already planned in the eventual fleshed out base system. Really though im enjoying the game quite a bit more then i thought i would and im extremely impressed by your guys openess in regards to development with your trello page, public feedback and changes pages and even this post. Star citizen likes to tout themselves as the people being involved in development but not even with them to do you get this close of a look. Keep up the good work I look forward to seeing the future of this game.
Im not sure where you get this assumption? If you look at the diagram you'll see that loot is distributed across all biomes from playing experimental a lot of this isnt in the game yet but thats the eventual plan. The only mention of loot being in safe shallows is in reference to
" Loot elements are now put in the world primarily in one and only one place (“coral walls in safe shallows”) to make it clear to players where they must go if they want something. This also means that old areas won’t become obsolete as the player plunges downward."
Which just simply means certain items are found in certain biomes to make them never useless. If you have a base 200m deep where all the minerals you currently need are but you need coral walls? well you gotta go back to safe shallows to get them. In effect its the opposite of what you said, you'll need to go to all different places to gather materials giving a reason to go to biomes, not stay inside one.
You do in fact give stalkers scrap metal, its how i got my stalker teeth, hold it in your hand, they'll take it from you, they will now have dropped 1-2 stalker teeth on the ground, and they look like.. well teeth so go look for them on the seafloor, it helps not to do this in an area like the kelp forest cause the grass makes it impossible to see the teeth, do it in just an open sandy area.
My only issue is having 3 salt deposits to form magnesium. This is the same salt deposit we use to make food from the fish we catch, so I'm just going to assume the salt deposits are our regular sodium chloride (NaCl). Magnesium (Mg) is a wholly different element, so you can't get magnesium just from NaCl unless the fabricator knows how to perform nuclear fusion. However, unrefined sea salt does contain small amounts of magnesium among other things, so is this what the devs intend to happen when crafting magnesium from salt deposits?
Maybe instead of just crafting from A to B you could implement an extraction and purification system. Example is to use a salt deposit in a fabricator and from it you'll have a high probability of receiving refined sodium chloride for food use and a moderate probability of receiving refined magnesium to use for other items. Other things you could receive from salt deposits could be calcium, sulfates, and salt-resistant bacteria. All of these exist because their trace amounts are found in substances that interact continuously with a wild environment. From that you could possibly receive more loot just from one item and hopefully condense the loot system. Although, I'm not sure if this would make loot feel more "special" or solve the stumbling upon loot rather than finding it issue, but I trust the devs in understanding that more than I.
yup awesome for the tip managed to get a good supply of teeth. Another thing I noticed... you can sort of tame Stalkers by giving them two fish, after that the things follow you around like a pet and don't attack you lol
holy crap.. seriously? Must try it.
You might want to change it because it's utterly and totally wrong in the context it's being used. Magnesium Chloride is a salt and can be found in seawater, however it's not typically used in food. That's Sodium Chloride. This is a science fiction game. Science being the first word there, it makes more sense to keep things at least within some proper scientific context.
I lament the loss of sand as an ingredient, however.
Oh well
XD
Total self sufficiency is a hard thing to do, but limited self-sufficiency can go a long way. Fish farms would be difficult to do because of the need to feed the fish that are feeding you.. so I'd say fish farming is out (although it shouldn't be possible to deplete the natural population as just one person), but having a gizmo that produced 2 salt crystals and 1 filtered water per day (leeching power off the cyclops/base power grid) would go quite a ways in extending player ranges. At some point, you may become fairly self-sufficient for salt and water needs, but you wind up needing more copper and quartz for the power cells instead.
I do too, but it also took up a lot of space in the inventory when accidentally harvested.
You are correct as sand has been historically used to create glass. It's the silica in sand that's vital to create the glass we know and use. However, natural sand does contain impurities that will give glass coloration. It also can affect its melting temperature, durability, and other physical properties. In modern and contemporary use, purified silica sand is preferred to create transparent glass. Other chemicals such as sodium carbonate and calcium oxide are added to improve the workability of the glass.
Quartz is a silica mineral and can be a perfect substitution to make glass. It's possible to make a case for the use of quartz over sand in Subnautica to create more durable and reliable windows for our scientist.
However, I worry that the loot system will place too much dependence on quartz and there doesn't seem to be any indication of it respawning. Although, future patches and the dev team might give us new tech that will allow us to artificially create our own materials and make us self-sufficient as Requiemfang has suggested.
which might I point out with the copper issue is that they have a drilling platform in the works which I think will solve long term resource issues in terms of metal materials.
My only concern with the drilling is that it's, at least at a concept level, a functional replacement for scuba-scavenging, which currently forms the backbone of Subnautica gameplay. Helpful, sure, but it needs to help support a more ambitious goal than just 'free batteries'.
That said, the Shallows provide enough raw material for current gameplay, which I will tenatively call "Starter Survival" gameplay. Completing a Cyclops is the most logical step up in completing larger projects for Quality of Life/Scaling Survival Needs, but that's still where it ends for now. If Fins, Tanks, and Beacons are Starter Survival, then what is the Cyclops, Sea Bases, and Mines to help achieve besides simply themselves? Good Dev questions, if a little out of scope for the discussion still.
Anyways, I think most things will come clear once we finally have the ability to analyze creatures ... IT should clear up a lot of questions