Paleontological/Archeological aspects?
gigabytespyder
Join Date: 2015-05-02 Member: 204060Members
Join Date: 2015-05-02 Member: 204060Members
My friend and I are loving Subnautica, but we thought it'd be a great thing to be able to piece together Subnautica's history similar to how Earth's history can be traced with fossils and geology; specifically, it'd be awesome to be able to find fossils and archeological artifacts (perhaps from a lost civilization) that spawn randomly in particular biomes of Subnautica's planet. Perhaps the fossils/artifacts can be analyzed like the machine fragments, allowing us to bring back prehistoric life forms or communicate with lost civilizations. Just an idea. 
I'd especially geek out as an aspiring paleontologist if this indeed became a thing.
I'd especially geek out as an aspiring paleontologist if this indeed became a thing.
Comments
Paleontology I hadn't though about, but it would be cool to find fossilized creatures eroding out of the sea bed or deep in caves. I'm not sure what they could do other than be points of exploratory interest or to collect for your museum, but that's enough to make them interesting, I like collecting stuff. Maybe analysing a proto-leviathan could give you a clue to dealing with a modern day predator or something of that sort.
It would be great ! And perhaps the main thread of the game ?
Or maybe the source for some awesome technology. (Maybe they were just so damn good adapted that they found a very good way of reinforcing their homes and allow for deeper base building)
i would love to decorate my base with artifacts and fossils of various shapes and sizes...
in my opinion, it would be cool to find various pieces of artifacts and then reconstruct the whole thing...
finding ancient texts of long gone civilazations or shipwrecks of other spaceships that crash landed on the planet like our's and then exploring them in order to find new technologies.
this would be a great addon to the game
Cant wait to spawn a megalodons right at my friends faces if this and multiplayer comes out
The general idea was that you could construct the radio antenna I described in the thread, and essentially pick up on echoes and weak signals that are not transmissions, but byproducts of old machines and such. You could then use these signals to track down structures and wreckage.
The idea I had for the history of the planet is. Based on knowledge we have so far, the planet seems quite temperate, the waters are not too cold, actually they're quite on par with the sort of temperatures you could expect to see on earth. Based on the position of the sun, and that fact that you don't need oxygen to breath above the water, it would imply this planet is very earth like, save for the fact that it's covered entirely in ocean.
So here's some food for thought. What if, once upon a time, this planet WAS like earth, it had landmass, continents etc and a civilization that was growing upon it. Then a global extinction event occurred. There have been quite a few of these in Earth's history, but none more famous than the meteor that is scientifically accepted to have brought about the extinction of the dinosaurs. A GEE, does not necessarily have to be a meteor, it simply has to wipe out life on the planet to make way for new life, so what if the planet underwent some kind of cataclysmic flooding. Perhaps a massive chunk of ice entered from space, and as it melted it rose the sea levels and that in turn helped to melt the polar caps, raising the sea level to a point where it swamped even the tallest landmass. Live was all but wiped clean from the planet, except for the single cell level, and as life started once again, the planet we see now is created.
So if a cataclysmic flooding occurred then it would not necessarily destroy all of the buildings of this now lost civilization. So I would propose that it be possible to find small towns, or even large cities. They'd mainly exist down at depth, as they were not usually built on the tops of mountains, but you'd be able to go deep and explore the ruins of ancient civilizations, and for the paleontologists there would of course be many retrievable artifacts which would come with a nice lore dump for expanding the universe subnautica is set in.
The above idea would also add an interesting aspect to the depth of the game. Think about it. The shallows, are mountain tops and ranges. The "depths" are actually the old continents, where the landmass used to be above the water, this would be like... 1000 - 3000 meters down. Then for the VERY brave, we'd have sections which could go as far as 10,000 meters, aka the bottom of the planets' original ocean. possibly even some sea trenches that run as deep as 15,000 meters.
the book was called 'Flood' -- that would produce a world like that.
What if Earth or another world had a similar disaster? In the case of 'Flood', the cause was never certain, although there were references to water that does actually exist in immense pockets in the Earth's crust.
With such flooding, we could rediscover information about the original inhabitants -- perhaps we could even recover ancient cryonics or the like. Perhaps we could decode archaeological riddles as Vaknathi and Blackfrog suggested. And what if we learn things about ourselves or our people in the process?
Brilliant idea. It would make sense too because my friend and I noticed that the stalkers, bone sharks and lava lizards all move by moving their spines vertically like whales and other aquatic mammals do, so we theorized that they've descended from formerly land-dwelling creatures. A mass extinction event caused by a massive flood would indeed pose an environmental pressure on populations to quickly adapt or re-adapt to the water.
This gave me the idea that the DNA samples made with the sampler should have us analyze the genomes of both flora and fauna, and with an ability to find fossils of older organisms, we can construct an evolutionary phylogeny, in addition to the history of the planet as a whole.
Well we wouldn't learn much about ourselves because the character is a human and the planet is not earth.
I did actually notice their spine movement as well, it just never occurred to me that they came from the land. Makes sense though. I think the civilization would have been similar to humans, not in looks or evolutionary development, but in frailty. Basically what I mean is, if you take away all our technology, and all our creature comforts, humans are actually very frail. Look at any major disaster happening in Earth's history, such as the current earthquakes in nepal, despite all our technology, we're still at the mercy of nature. So this civilization would be extinct, no survivors, that would add to their allure and it would also mean the creatures came from other land creatures. Stalkers seem almost... Canine or Feline like in a way. Sand sharks have distinctly reptilian looks about them etc.
This GEE would have occurred a LONG time before you arrived of course, allowing for the new evolutions to Dominate the planet.
But here's my next idea:
I've been thinking that floaters as a creature doesn't make a lot of sense. I mean, they are really helpless and stick to every dang thing they touch. So maybe the ancient civilization knew some basics of bio-engineering, and floater's were their creation. They noticed the rise in sea level and decided to create giant floating organisms to float some landmass they could live on. These kinds of flooding catastrophies don't happen in an instant, so maybe they thought that they had enough time. They managed to complete the creature, but didn't have enough time to make island float.
However, the experiment was a success, and after the flood some floaters spread all over the world. Some of the late specimen actually managed to grow to their full intended size, and thus the current floater island was born. That would also explain why the ruins are really near to the island. There could be a future update that increases the amount of floater islands, and maybe adds some carcassess of the alien intelligent lifeforms.
Also one of the end-game goals could be to find a nearly mature floaters under a cave system, and using some growth-boosting technolofy you could make them fully grown. The landmass above them would float to the ocean surface, creating a new floater island.
Is it possible this planet was chosen for colonisation primarily because it has never been touched by civilisation?
Also, I am seeing people assume the character is from Earth. I would say, that while the character is certainly human-like, there is nothing anywhere I have read officially that says the character is Human or from Earth.
This is science-fiction after all, so to be using an Unknown Race from an Unknown World (see what I did there) makes a lot of sense.
There exists lots of non-natural lookin buildings underwater near the floater island, and there's also a huge mysterious obelisk. That kind of confirms it to me, that there were some intelligent species on the planet in the past.
I don't think it would've been possible to tell that this planet is 'untouched' by intelligent life. And what being untouched or not has to do with anything, since the planet is stable and habitable anyway.
If I remember correctly, the intro to the game tells something about 'humankind starting to colonise space'. So, the Aurora is an earthly spaceship, and the main character is a human being.
It is pointed out in the introduction that the character is from a human civilization (I can't remember if Earth is specifically mentioned but it can be assumed as it is humanity's home world).
An extinct civilization would not have to be native to the planet, it could be the result of a failed attempt to colonize by a long-dead alien civilization. I agree with SalmonJEDI that the floaters, or specifically the floating islands, don't seem particularly like something that would occur in nature. An alternative theory to SalmonJEDI's excellent suggestion might be that they are an attempt at "terraforming" or creating habitable above-sea landmass by a colonizing expedition, but it was only rarely successful (hence the underwater islands) and they never adapted very well to subaquatic life, or were destroyed in a massive storm or earthquake, just died out, or any number of other scenarios.
I don't think it should be a dominant feature of the story, the exploration or the planet. If they are introduced, ruins of an alien civilization should be sparse, very occasional discoveries, and mostly very ruined, the civilization that produced them should be long extinct. I think it should be something that doesn't have to be explored if the player isn't interested, but might bring a few interesting tidbits for those who are, even if it is just patches of the story of that ancient civilization and a decorative artefact or two.
This.
It is entirely possible there was simply some form of energized particles bouncing around the planet's Ionosphere, and these were not the cause of the pulse, but rather a component, like the gunpowder in an explosion. This would mean something the Aurora had on board it was the catalyst for this energy pulse.
The reason I mention it at all is, something providing an energy pulse large enough to bring down a massive ship like the Aurora, would require a massive power source. So it would have to be an active civilization and thereby hostile NPCs or something, which I'd rather avoid. It would need too much power for it to be rationalized as a really big creature.
Basically, my thinking is that the Aurora was the match added to the kerosene, something the aurora had on board, perhaps the dark matter, had an adverse reaction with something in the Ionosphere, and thus the massive pulse of energy tore up the Aurora and brought it crashing down.