New Feature Suggestions. [LFBE - Lifeform Breeding Expanded]
PeterManize
Pandolite Join Date: 2015-12-28 Member: 210458Members
Pandolite Join Date: 2015-12-28 Member: 210458Members
Hi Brave Divers from Subnautica!
I again have another feature to present to you:
LFBE: Lifeform Breed Expanded
No and no, you are not going to "build a farm".
Being serious now, every survival game has the "farming mechanic" and its not an amazing feature really, it sucks, its boring and it will not be the wisest choice for a mechanic in a exploration game like subnautica.
The fun that you feel and witness in subnautica is literally the feels of exploring this unknown "alien ocean" riddle with unknown savage and some docile wildlife.
+ and i add that its much more fun to actually hunt and explore at the same time for food.
This feature is really simple basically.
Breeding should be an natural mechanism in subnautica. If you hunt to much of the animals you would only regret it in a later game. Since it should have a negative impact for excessive hunt, and a positive impact if you only hunt the necessary to survive.
This feature adds 3 things in the game:
First.
- All Species that reside in their favorable biome should breed, no questions asked. Provide that they aren't disturbed (captured) by the player, if they are captured and released in the wild it would need "X days" to the specimen to actually be able to breed.
Second.
- You could analyse the small specimens in the Specimen Analyser, to counter the affects of the "player touch". Whenever you captured any species and releasing them they could breed after an "X number of hours" if in their favorable biome or after "X days" in a diferent biome.
- Another advantage of analyzing species in the specimen analyser, was that it would allow the player to release species in other biomes and these species would still breed. The difference is that depending of the species in cause, if they are not in their favorable biome, they would swim slowly in direction to their favorable biome and breeding at the same time.
Third. (and the one that i dislike, and i hope it doesn't get implemented, but i just leave it here for anyone to have a better suggestion that could replace this one)
- Artificial insemination, it would allow the player to breed the species in the aquarium, provide that the aquarium as enough space for them to breed to begin with.
Please give feedback
- any doubts, ask
- If you support, or don't
Good diving!
I again have another feature to present to you:
LFBE: Lifeform Breed Expanded
No and no, you are not going to "build a farm".
Being serious now, every survival game has the "farming mechanic" and its not an amazing feature really, it sucks, its boring and it will not be the wisest choice for a mechanic in a exploration game like subnautica.
The fun that you feel and witness in subnautica is literally the feels of exploring this unknown "alien ocean" riddle with unknown savage and some docile wildlife.
+ and i add that its much more fun to actually hunt and explore at the same time for food.
This feature is really simple basically.
Breeding should be an natural mechanism in subnautica. If you hunt to much of the animals you would only regret it in a later game. Since it should have a negative impact for excessive hunt, and a positive impact if you only hunt the necessary to survive.
This feature adds 3 things in the game:
First.
- All Species that reside in their favorable biome should breed, no questions asked. Provide that they aren't disturbed (captured) by the player, if they are captured and released in the wild it would need "X days" to the specimen to actually be able to breed.
Second.
- You could analyse the small specimens in the Specimen Analyser, to counter the affects of the "player touch". Whenever you captured any species and releasing them they could breed after an "X number of hours" if in their favorable biome or after "X days" in a diferent biome.
- Another advantage of analyzing species in the specimen analyser, was that it would allow the player to release species in other biomes and these species would still breed. The difference is that depending of the species in cause, if they are not in their favorable biome, they would swim slowly in direction to their favorable biome and breeding at the same time.
Third. (and the one that i dislike, and i hope it doesn't get implemented, but i just leave it here for anyone to have a better suggestion that could replace this one)
- Artificial insemination, it would allow the player to breed the species in the aquarium, provide that the aquarium as enough space for them to breed to begin with.
Please give feedback
- any doubts, ask
- If you support, or don't
Good diving!
Comments
Although LFBE hasn't been implemented I have already been playing "as if" it has been a part of the game, I guess for peace of mind -- I don't want to overfish lol.
On top of this breeding idea I think it would be cool if fish had life spans and genders as well, and maybe have them grow over time - giving more food the larger/older they are, which would also allow for interesting things such as different behaviors between mature/immature/male/female versions of the same species not to mention some species could maybe be poisonous at certain stages of their cycle - like a pregnant female fish, or an immature one that has it built as a defense mechanic.
I honestly don't like the idea of essentially farming the fish. It seems counter productive to the idea of exploring the world. What reason do you have to explore more of the map if you can just sit happy at base knowing full well you have a steady supply of food? I thing natural breeding should occur and take time, making it both possible to drive a biome's creatures to extinction but also allow them to flourish given a chance - so you move to one biome hunt a bit there, move on to the next and so on until you can return to the first which should by then be repopulated. That would promote exploration to keep the ecosystem alive for a food source, and just adds another layer of depth to the actual planet rather than what you can do to it with science.
I don't stay at my base, because I want to build fun stuff, and because I want to scan new stuff (I play experimental). The food bit is an inconvenience that even makes parts of the game look worse by going extinct without farming (and even without the player hunting, other fish make biomes go extinct by itself). I like building out my base, and it's logical. I want a low ecological footprint; so I breed/grow my own food. That's the sensible thing to do when you have technology like in Subnautica. I like that there's a more ecologically / scientifically minded base in this game, as opposed to hard survival.
Subnautica has high technology; it doesn't make sense for things like food and water to be hard. Not sustaining yourself when you can build aquariums, that makes survival become contrived and silly if you maintain the need for hunting.
I would however like that fish would only breed if certain conditions in the tank are being fulfilled, just to expand on the mechanic a bit and make it a bit more in-depth. Not a random 'x-hour' limit to pester people who like setting up an actual base of operations. I'm a scaredy cat, I take things easy. If you make farming completely impossible, you will drive players who are a little less comfortable with jumping into the unknown away, I love that I can now take it a little easier now that I can breed fish. I like to be able to NOT rush the game, because that is how I play games, and that is why I dislike competitive multiplayer. All this rush rush rush, I get enough of that in real life.
Also, @ts farming doesn't suck, and isn't boring; especially not if implemented in a fun way that actually has some gameplay to it. From an in-character technological standpoint it would even be silly not to.
I agree with your points that natural breeding should occur as you leave an area and are no longer taking fish from it.
I disagree, however, with your first statement that farming fish is counterproductive to exploration. That seems almost to be the opinion the developers currently have which is the reason they have given for making fish finite - no respawn. This does not make sense! Removing an easy food source does not encourage exploration, it just makes one area you've been in a lot (like the starter area) barren, dead and lifeless!
Also, you ask: "What reason do you have to explore more of the map if you can sit happy at base knowing full well you have a steady supply of food?"
I ask you in return: "Why would anyone play this game to build a simple habitat with a fish farm and never leave it?"
This is not Aquarium Simulator. This is an open sandbox world full of vibrant life and a wide variety of things to see and explore. People explore in games because they love to explore. Not because they love to eat fish.
If you removed survival eating/drinking altogether (which btw is one of the optional game modes) ... why would you play the game if your number one goal was to become self sufficient on food and water? You would play the game for other reasons and you would have your own goals and motivations to explore.
Lastly, exploration in Subnautica while already a default attraction as part of the theme, also forces exploration in order to gather the resources and blueprints you need to build more complex systems and equipment. They've already created a wide range of blueprints you must search further (and deeper) afield for to find. This is progression. The story and crafting should drive exploration above and beyond a player's love for exploration in the first place. Food deprivation should play no part in it and creates a scenario where we the sole surviving human becomes a parasite stripping the shallows of life. Not how I want to play.
What then becomes the point in survival mode if there is no added challenge due to the ability to farm things? The mode exists to create that additional obstacle. If the game were truly only about exploration that would be great, but it's not, it does in fact have the additional genre of being a survival game for a reason. They easily could have just said your suit turns your crap into crackers and be done with it, but they made the fish and a few plants edible so that there would be a challenge in simply staying alive - a goal in itself.
And to answer your question: People would build a simple habitat to farm because it is a safe zone, and an expandable one at that. With animal farming people will likely only explore adjacent biomes and go diving through the caves nearby still, especially if it's a well placed habitat between two or three biomes, but there's yet to be a major reason to explore much else other than the Aurora for story purposes. Plus the half of players who play the game for the survival aspect won't care as much to get across the entire map, just as not everyone in minecraft wants to go to The End to kill the dragon.
I myself have managed to achieve the majority of the game from a single well placed base and the scavenging between the three nearby biomes, and the caves that lead to tons of resources, go a tad passed the red grass and there's a drop off straight to anything else you care about within the next 10M. Hardly any exploration required other than going down. I've probably remained in the southern/south western area for the entirety of the game so far and have been able to build pretty much everything there is to build or fabricate.
So the issue is either to stop creating things that allow stagnant behaviors (which they will be doing a bit more with bases soon, due to having it's own O2 level), and start creating more interesting things that actually and truly require you to get out there, OR actually make more interesting things to explore. There should be something a bit more tantalizing than a radioactive ship on the far end of the map and a few different colored biomes that you're only there for it's specific resources. Start doing what Minecraft did and create biome-specific events/structures that hold treasure. I understand that will partially be the case with ship wreckage, but there should also just be something native that achieves the same goal, otherwise it like the only reason the planet is interesting is because a ship crashed there.
- Keep in mind that this is an exploration game.
- - What happens really when you setup a farm is that you have established your own limits in terms of exploratory gameplay.
I see it like this: I build the base where i just spawned right? basically its easy to build the base there since it is where there is a ton of resources and loot + Food and water.
And the question everyone should be asking is: "What to do after?" I mean while your building your own base you are active and "excited" to play the game because you have an objective in mind. After building the base you have little things to do.
- well maybe the 5 minute missions to get "X loot" in another biome and return since you will be in a way "scared" of dying of starvationor dehydration in the biome you have traveled.
You actually made a good point: "Subnautica has high technology" - but how far can the character (notice not talking about the player, but it reflects on how a player would behave in a situation similar) go with that technology. You can't make food out of air
But instead of criticizing you, i will give you credit because in terms of the "ecologic footprint" it really is possible to actually reduce it with the advanced technology that the game has, or could have.
You actually made me think about your suggestion. I mean probably we can find a middle ground between the "farming mechanic" and "hunting mechanic".
I do sure hope that the dev's find this "middle ground" so that we can spend a good amount of time exploring and spend less time "babysitting" crops or "alien fishes"
this actually sounds like a fair middle ground, perhaps even having to grow the fish to maturity in order to be edible.