Battery Chargers Fragments are too fundamental to be as hidden as they are
Seiga
Join Date: 2016-08-17 Member: 221448Members
Join Date: 2016-08-17 Member: 221448Members
Hi there. Just started playing the game recently, having a lot of fun. I'm approaching the game as it seems to be presented, as one where you are meant to explore and discover things by your own curiosity, and it works like that! It does it well. But the battery charger fragments are a problem on this front. Obviously this varies based on the luck of where you are initially and where you explore to (I am aware that certain meta information streamlines this, but as I said I am avoiding meta information to enable an exploration play style) as I've heard some players find the battery charger fragments very easily, but I am 7 hours in and haven't seen a one. I have heard that specific biomes contain these fragments, and I respectfully request to not be told exactly which biomes involve which fragments, but my point is that I've approached something of a deadlock.
So I feel like the most sensible thing would be to solve step 4 somehow. Recharging batteries is so fundamental I don't get why the fragments are as obscure as they are. I'm worried I'm going to be told 'oh it's ez you just need to go to this specific location' but as I said, this meta information is not helpful to a new player. Being able to recharge batteries sooner in the game progression would enable the organic exploration and discovery of new things to a great extent, so I am confused as to why this is such a relatively hard thing to accomplish.
Part of me feels that having the battery charger even be something that you have to unlock at all is a bit nasty, though I understand the want to not just give players everything from the start, getting the rest of the materials together for the ability to recharge batteries is surely gateway enough.
TL;DR: Wide exploration is unreasonably slow without the ability to recharge batteries. Wide exploration is currently required to find the means to recharge batteries.
EDIT: I'm going to make a brief list of bullet points based on initial play impressions and feedback from this thread.
- Want to explore to find new stuff
- Spend a lot of time find resources for and making batteries for the Seaglide so I can actually get places in reasonable time
- Start exploring, the Seaglide consumes batteries VERY quickly
- Fail to find fragments for battery charger [have been wondering how to recharge batteries since the beginning due to displayed charge levels]
- Back to square one, except now I am sat on a stack of empty batteries taking up locker space and feeling dejected
So I feel like the most sensible thing would be to solve step 4 somehow. Recharging batteries is so fundamental I don't get why the fragments are as obscure as they are. I'm worried I'm going to be told 'oh it's ez you just need to go to this specific location' but as I said, this meta information is not helpful to a new player. Being able to recharge batteries sooner in the game progression would enable the organic exploration and discovery of new things to a great extent, so I am confused as to why this is such a relatively hard thing to accomplish.
Part of me feels that having the battery charger even be something that you have to unlock at all is a bit nasty, though I understand the want to not just give players everything from the start, getting the rest of the materials together for the ability to recharge batteries is surely gateway enough.
TL;DR: Wide exploration is unreasonably slow without the ability to recharge batteries. Wide exploration is currently required to find the means to recharge batteries.
EDIT: I'm going to make a brief list of bullet points based on initial play impressions and feedback from this thread.
- MAJOR: Battery charging is too fundamental to gameplay to have to be unlocked by such obscure fragments
- MEDIUM: Titanium pipes should have their maximum length listed in the tooltip, I had no idea they were so long! I didn't use them because I thought I'd need a LOT of them, but I really didn't
- MINOR: Swim speed factors should be included as part of the tutorial [not having items in hands, item weight, etc]
Comments
Ah! I never noticed that. Explains why swimming felt so slow.
Also, wether you play in Stable mode or Experimental modes, the fragments are distributed differently
Devs ultimately want fragments to be found mainly (but not only) near noticeable points of interests that will catch the player's eye, so you should maybe try to concentrate your attention to those places
Also, @Sigmalx is right having more airtanks when you are on ''exploration/search'' is helpful since you dont have to go back to the surface so often, but keep in mind that each airtank in your inventory adds some weight, slowing you down a bit, so the more tanks you have on you the slower you swim. So you need to find the proper balance between more air capacity/swimming speed rate.
Something i found useful with depleted batteries is that you can combine them to make fully charged powercells for your Seamoth/Cyclops
Hopefully ive helped you a bit without selling you too much infos that you may not have wanted to see
ps: Also keep in mind that this game is still in early access, meaning that devs are still in the process of balancing every little features as well as tools/fragments placements so expect them to be shifted from places to places a few times until official release
Well of course, my only hope is to throw in two cents on what I think was a little problematic as a brand new player and hopefully put in some feedback as to how it should be shifted!
I was still at a point in the game where I didn't have either of those things, all I was thinking to myself was that powercells were useless since they couldn't be placed into any of the things that needed batteries and I hadn't unlocked anything that needed power cells. In fact, I found myself kind of cursing that the Seaglide couldn't use power cells in addition to batteries since a battery wasn't nearly enough running time for my liking.
Just recently I tried a different game which placed me closer to the appropriate map location for charger fragments. I have settled on honestly believing that this is not a blueprint that should need to be unlocked. Or at least, allow battery recharge at the lifepod somehow. The inconsistent play experience based on the arbitrary location you spawn and choose to swim in is what I'm bringing into question. I didn't care for most missing/undiscovered technologies [like the seamoth/cyclops/anything else] since I had no idea what I was missing or what I could possibly need them for, but battery charging felt like a missing link whose existence is hinted at from the get go. If that makes sense.
Oh, I remembered! I hope I don't give the impression that I'm bull-headed. I do try everything, it's just that I ended up going towards the Aurora or away from it instead of the specific required perpendicular direction to find battery charger fragments.
I am not opposed to the idea but perhaps indifferent. If it were any easier then some other useful early-game fragments would have to be pushed further out in exchange.
There is quite a bit of copper around safe shallows (thermal vents, the coral tunnel) as well as in the grassy plateau and it is no bad thing building a supply of 10+ batteries as you will need them for crafting later anyway.
I do hugely like @Duma's idea of charging one battery at the lifepod
While not relevant to this I would quite like med-fabricator to have to be unlocked as it is too easy to build a couple of them and then just 'tank' dangerous stuff in the early-game - there is the one in the lifepod to start with.
Anyway, they are changing fragment spawns so I wonder how that will pan out.
DIVE
No matter how deep
No matter how scary it looked
No matter how plain it seemed
No matter you think you have sweeped the place clean or not
I too was a newbie player, I did not even have a seaglide until I am around 100 meters deep. Notice when you go up in your lifepod or base it says "Inventory Secured"? That message is not for nothing. You drop some if not all your items that you picked up during your current diving session. But anything you bring from your base or lifepod will not drop. Having a seamoth or cyclops stranded 800 meters deep of course, is another story.
I think fragments are a great idea in principle. They incentivize exploration and add an extra layer of progression. The problem is the ocean is simply too big to rely only on "search everywhere and hope you get lucky" as a means of acquiring them. When you're being held back by that one blueprint you haven't found yet, it puts the brakes on the whole game.
What we need is some way for players to find specific fragments more easily. The game doesn't need to hand them over on a silver platter, but a point in the right direction is crucial, especially since a lot of important fragments are hard to get to. For example, I've only found moonpool fragments in wrecks that are already below the crush depth of the seamoth - which you can't upgrade until you get the moonpool first. Classic chicken-and-the-egg scenario. A player could be forgiven for seeing a 300m wreck and assuming they shouldn't go there yet because they don't have the equipment to handle it.
That said, I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to make some fragments difficult to get. An occasional spike in challenge, like the example above, is healthy for a game, but before a player is going to bother taking the risk they need an incentive. Something that lets them know "this wreck is going to be a real challenge, but it'll be worth it". As a brainstorm, what I was thinking was a sensor that could detect fragments at a distance, say 500-1000m or so, and use a hot/cold indicator to help you zero in. It could be set to find any fragment, only fragments you don't already have, or only a specific fragment for which you have already found at least one part.
As a new player, I think the fragments currently add more frustration than fun to the game, but I do think they show promise and would rather see them improved than removed.