A truckload of ideas !

Osydius

Hi all

After having played the game quite a bit, I thought I would share a few ideas with you on the game (because I know nothing excites you more than reading a stranger’s opinion online you perverts).

Warning, this is a very long post (2 posts actually)! Sorry about that. I’ve tried to organize it best I could so that you can skip parts you don’t like. My goal was to post every ideathat came to me and which can (potentially) be implemented in the game before launch. I have lots more big ideas but I decided to keep it reasonable.

I assume a few (maybe many) of my idea/comments will have already been posted on this board. To be honest, I haven’t checked each and every post to make sure I was not repeating something as I did not have time (simply writing this already took me a while).

This post is in no way meant to be critical of Subnautica, I’m just offering my 2 cents and do not pretend to be an expert or even in a position to give advice to the devs. I just love this game, and I sincerely think some of those ideas would make the experience even better (at least from my point of view). If at any point you feel that my tone is somewhat judgmental or negative, it’s probably because English is not my first language.

PROGRESSION:

• Progression curve:

The biggest issue I have with the game right now is that progression is quite chaotic. I assume its normal at this stage and that the devs are working on it but I feel they really need to play with pressure, heat, and Oxygen way way more in order to provide players with a cleaner progression curve. The diver should be submitted to pressure and need a sub to go beyond a certain depth (say 300m, at least until the suit can be improved). Seamoth should be needed beyond that and, in order to pick stuff up, mechanical arms should be added to the Seamoth (so you don’t have to go out and be crushed). Oxygen supply in the Seamoth should also be limited until it can be upgraded with larger Air tanks, and eventually recycle CO2. Then beyond a certain depth, Exosuit should be required (with same O2 limitations and upgrades). Cyclop for me is a different issue as its only purpose should be to provide a mobile base, so it should be able to go deep but not as deep as the Seamoth or the Exosuit. Heat too can be used as a way to limit progression until you have built the necessary upgrade, because as it is now, you don’t really need anything other than fins, 2 upgraded air tanks, a rebreather and an air bladder to reach any material you need to progress in-game (lithium, uranium, you name it.). As it is now, the story basically stops once you have fixed the radiation leak. So the objectives currently look like this:
o Objective 1 : find out whether there are survivors or usable stuff on aurora;
o Objective 2: Radiation prevent objective 1, find a way to bypass it;
o Objective 3 : secure food, water and shelter while you work on Objective 2;
o Objective 4: use the radiation suit to go on the Aurora;
o Objective 5: radiation can be fixed with a welder, make one;
o Objective 6: fix the leak with the welder;
o Objective 7: hum… give up on Aurora exploration and go have fun in water forever?

Fixing radiation leak should serve a purpose like opening other parts of the Aurora, and give the player a huge objective that forces him deeper and deeper in the water to fulfil it (like you gain access to a terminal that can make an “escape space shuttle” but you need components that can only be found under a certain depth – or you can radio for help but the transmitter is broken and you need X to fix it). This would give us a reason to basically settle in and start the “to the deep and beyond” process, which should force us to jump various hurdles (to reach a wreckage, you need a laser cutter, which needs a material that is at 400 meters in depth, which thus requires a Seamoth, which itself requires… etc. up until the point you have a huge base and a fully upgraded Exosuit which allows you to mine a certain mineral you need to get the hell out of the planet).

• Material rarity:

this is tied with the above but basically, some material should be hard to get, both because they are scares, and because they are deep. As it is now, you can easily get anything you need very easily and in large quantities. Last week, under a recent new game, I decided to make a Cyclop. It took me about 1 hour to assemble all materials I needed, and that’s only because those stalkers refused to lose their teeth despite me throwing wreckage directly to their faces. For Lithium, which is supposed to be the hardest component to find, I went around the mountain region and came back 10 min later with 15 of them. That’s hardly a challenge to build the most prestigious in-game object;

Starting status: your Fabricator should be empty when you start, and you should find a scanner in a “scanner rack” in the life pod (so you don’t have to build a scanner). Your mission should then be to take that scanner and scan every plant / rock / life form so that its potential use can be discovered and registered by the Fabricator. It’s weird to reach a new planet and have your fabricator already know that you need 2 acid mushrooms and copper to make a battery… it should learn like we do. It would actually be cool of you had an animation in which you load your PDA’s information, as obtained by scanning, into the fabricator.

TECHNOLOGY:

• Items change /removal:

while a lot of things in the game are quite cool, they are also useless as they are now (or almost useless), such as the Current Generator, the Gravsphere, or the Reel. Others should, IMO, not be in the game at all, and I’m talking about the Terraformer… yes, I love it too but it’s OP as hell(this game is sometimes weird from a technological point of view… you can magically teleport an infinite quantity of mass to another dimension, and call it back whenever you want, but the best submarine you can make is crushed at half the depth of modern submarines…). Those objects need to be improved, and I think many of them can be improved by making automated robots (see next section).

• Automated robots:

I would assume that any advanced culture would be using robots quite a lot. Look at us, we’re about to launch self-driving cars, and already have robot vacuum cleaners, robot lawn mowers, etc. It would be surprising for such an advanced culture not to be able to make robots. So I thought of a few things on that issue:
- For the Reel, you could replace it with an object that is divided between a tracker and a small luminous fish robot. Before entering a cave, you put the tracker at the entrance and when you want to get out, you take the robot fish out, activate it and it will automatically rally the sensor, so you just have to follow it. That would be cooler and avoid the line getting stuck in rocks and such. If you get distracted and lose the fish however, you’re on your own.
- For the Gravsphere, assuming the purpose was to create a trap for small fish, you could also create some kind of simpler automated fishnet which would swim in circle around a designated area and capture fish. Then it would come back to base and dock to a wall docking system, recharging and transferring the fish via a tube to a tank inside the base. This way the fish stays fresh, and when the Robot’s batteries a full, it goes back to work.
- We should be able to send a probe from the Cyclops which would go to a designated area for a short time (like a cave) to map the place and also detect any usable materials or potential dangers. What would be cool for instance is you send a probe down a deep cave to see if it’s a dead end or may lead to a new zone, and you lose contact with the probe after a warning signal is sent… so now you know there’s something dangerous in there, but you also want to get your probe back… will you go in?
- Once the farming starts, we should have robots who tend to said crops;
- How about a robot butler? It would reorganize your lockers while you’re away (putting identical materials together) and talk to you when you come back (“hello sir, did you have a good swim?” or ”I see you’ve found more rocks to store. Fantastic…”). Maybe we could adjust its sarcasm parameter… It would be our Wilson from Castaway but without the sexual tension. Not really necessary but fun. It could even have a mustache… just sayin’

• New tech:

Let’s not forget that the hero is stranded on this planet because it was taken down by a mysterious pulse. This would drive us to search for the origin of said pulse and the best way to go after a deadly pulse, is clearly t do it remotely from a safe location. So it would be cool to see:
- Cameras outside our bases to see what’s happening at night (first with floodlights, then infrared). It could be used by the story too, such as your central computer telling you there was some unusual activity during the night and when you check, you see that a warper came next to your base and watched you sleep through a window… creepy.
- Sensors/detectors: heat, pressure, motion, energy… sensors that you can place outside your base and that are connected to your central computer, even place in each zone so that you get readings from said zones at any given time (end game). That way if you see a spike in energy reading, you may think there’s a warper somewhere and go investigate.
- Sonar: how about fitting the subs with sonars that works on sound? It would be a cool experience once we all have the oculus (one can dream).

• Other vision modes:

the light we have early is great to explore caves but later on, it would be cool to get night-vision or heat-vision… how cool would it be to be facing the darkness of the sea and not seeing a thing, and then putting on the heat-vision and see a huge reaper coming your way… and even later one, maybe we could get X-ray vision. I understand the Exosuit will have drilling abilities, so it would be nice to be able to use Xray vision (very limited in depth, maybe a couple meters, and using energy) to see veins of minerals in the rocks.

• Modification station:

I love the modification station but it could be used on way more objects. Aside from the obvious upgrade for each item (such as bladder goes up faster, welder welds faster and for less energy, etc.), the few I thought about are:
- Bladder: how about upgrading it into a temporary beacon?Say you find something interesting and don’t have a beacon in your inventory, you could activate the bladder which would inflate just enough to stay in place and emit a beacon signal, allowing you to go back to your base and get a real beacon and replace your bladder with it. Another one would be some form of super charged bladder that you can attach to rocks that are blocking your way, and it moves the rocks when inflated. You could even attach it to your Cyclops if you go too far down and need to get it back up for repairs.
- Flashlight: we could had an upgrade to the flashlight that gives it a stroboscopic effect, making it flash in rapid successions and have that light hypnotize creatures. The point would just be that as long as they look at the flashing light, they don’t attack (I’m thinking of those damn Crash for instance) or stop moving (for hunting peppers for instance). It would of course not have an effect on all of them (especially large predators) and leave you vulnerable from behind.
- Flares: in the same way, upgraded flares could emit an anesthetic gas that would numb all fish in a certain radius for a short amount of time. So if you cave dive and you find a room full of biters, you drop this flare and they all go to sleep for 1 minute, leaving you time to harvest stuff or just keep going. Of course you could grab the flares back on the ground after use but you’d have to recharge it as the gas would be expanded.
- Mobile Vehicle Bay: I like the design of this, but it stops being useful once you have built your 2 subs. So how about we recycle it either in the GPS system I talk about later or in something else, like a transporter that would move outside of the sea, just a few inches above the water. Endgame, this could be the best way for instance to move from one base to another quickly. So say you are working on making a base in the lava zone and realize you’re out of Lithium. You go back up a bit to your cyclops which is waiting for you at few hundred meters above and nope, it’s empty too, but you know you have some in the base you have next to the Aurora. Well, instead of moving everything, you grab your Mobile Vehicle Bay, go the surface, deploy it and go from the exploration zone to your old base quickly above the water. It would be the fastest option in game and you would only really use it for quick transits (maybe long recharge time?).
- Beacons: Those could maybe be repurposed once you have you map and GPS and I was thinking they could be used to tag large creatures. Since in this game we don’t want to kill stuff, might as well know where they are. So this would turn the beacon into a small beacon which would attach to a big creature (think Reaper) and emit a beeping sound. So if you’re mining stuff at 400m, not paying attention, and you start to hear a beeping sound coming from the deep, you know it’s time to pay attention…
- Scanner: so the scanner could be, in conjunction with the DNA analyzer, used as a detector. So imagine you have analyzed and downloaded the DNA of a Reefback. I for some reason later on you need to find one, you set the scanner on “Search Reefback” and then point it in various directions until you hear a beeping sound, which indicates it has noted that the requested DNA exists in said direction. This would only be useful if creatures can have another purpose late game of course.

• Small stuff:

we can’t use our PDA in the Seamoth or while sitting on the bench. That’s too bad because those are basically the best places to use it.

BASES:

• Previous post:

I once made a post on expanding bases and I think it still contains good ideas, especially the points about having a Laboratory, an Infirmary and a Command Room, which I feel is vital to any base. You can find it here:
http://forums.unknownworlds.com/discussion/138917/lets-make-bases-even-cooler

• Oxygen supply:

I think this is in the works for the Seamoth, but we should have to manage our oxygen supply in bases. It’s just weird to be able to create a base out of nothing and have it already filled with unlimited oxygen. We should have to create an oxygen line at first to the surface, and then, when we want to go deeper, maybe connect it to brain coral, and then, later on, create machine which can recycle CO2 (still forcing you to resupply oxygen once in a while, which could be achieved with a special item or automated Robots provided you have the energy for it), and late game, have a machine that simply extracts O2 from the sea. So you should reach a stage where your technology is such that oxygen in bases is no longer a problem (provided you have managed your energy supplies carefully) but it should be late game.

• Airlocks:

I assume there are no airlocks in game to gain some time and avoid an animation every time you enter or exit a base (or a sub for that matter)… and yet it bothers me. For the sake of realism, we should not be able to just open a door underwater without flooding our base. We should have to create an airlock which fills with water when we exit, and fills with air when we go in. Same with the Seamoth. It should fill itself with water when we exit and then fill with oxygen when we get back in. I know, you’re thinking “but we’re exiting all the time, we’ll use oxygen too quickly and lose time with the animation”. Yes that’s right, but as you progress in-game, you will see this less and less as you will mostly use the MoonPool and the Cyclop’s docking system to get in and out of the Seamoth/Exosuit (for fear of being crushed by the pressure) and you could even come up with systems that allow you to gain some time (such as mini-moonpool for the diver alone to enter your bases or even, at a later stage some form of energy or force field). And for me, making old things easier as you reach late game (but facing new challenges) is part of the progression curve, of you gradually changing your status from “small weak creature trying to survive” to “God of the Sea”. Even having to go through an animation everytime you open a door in the beginning would help the game feel more realistic and help you better feel your own progression in the game.

• Energy storage:

I’ve seen that a couple of time so I think it’s pretty clear for everybody but we should have a way to store energy in our base at some point down the line (not beginning though, I love the lack of energy at night in the beginning… all lights should go out though, no reason you can’t cook a fish but can still light a whole base). This will become important later on in the game as your base may be attacked at night, so you have to manage your energy supply as best as you can (i.e. if you deplete your energy reserves by using the Fabricator + Water Filtration + recharge the Seamoth 2 hours before nightfall, then it’s your fault if you find yourself without energy for your defense perimeter when the night comes). It would make the game more challenging until end game when we’ll all make 5 Nuclear Reactors per base and forget about energy management all together.

Osydius

EXPLORATION:

• Mapping/GPS:

this, I know, has been discussed a few times but I’ll simply add my voice to the trend. We should be able to access a map on the PDA. Now, the difference is that for me, (i) the map should basically draw itself once you have made the necessary item, like a scanner/sonar that pulses as you swim and draws a map in 4D in your PDA, but without placing you inside the map (i.e. like a paper map today you can open it but you have to assess your position yourself based on your surrounding) and (ii) later on, you can create a GPS system that places you in the map. For the GPS, you need triangulation which could be provided by… robots. So think about the Mobile Vehicle Bay, it has small flying robots that come out of it and build subs in the air. It would be the same: you would build and power some form of antenna from which 3 or 4 robots would fly out and stay stationary in the air at various map positions, connecting with your PDA and placing you on the map. The cool thing is transmission could be affected by weather, or rock formation, making the map work weirdly at certain depth or in certain caves… until you upgrade it of course on your way to God status.

• Aurora:

I’ve read somewhere that the plan was to have a piece of the Exosuit placed in the room that’s already available in the Aurora. It should be in another room. There should be more rooms in the Aurora to which you always come back once your tech has evolved. So for instance, imagine you have a huge door that won’t open because of the radiation leak. So you fix the reactor and wait 3 days. You get back in and now that the radiation is fixed, the computer agrees to open the door. Behind, you find some tech that allows you to go deeper (such as the Seamoth) but you are stuck because the next door requires a Laser Cutter which requires you to go deeper to make, so you go back, buid a Seamoth and use it to go deeper, get the Laser Cutter, and then get back to Aurora to open the door and behind you get another tech, say the Exosuit, but the next door is blocked by X which requires Y, etc. I would love for the Aurora to have more to offer than just one room.

ILLNESS / MUTATIONS:

• Illness:

I proposed in my previous post (linked above) that certain illnesses be added to the game that would affect the player and force him to find a cure. As I mention in said post, such illnesses could lead to bleeding, shortness of breath, or even more fun symptoms like emitting pheromones which attract predators. We can of course think of many others such as light sensitivity (making the game during day time look like the gamma was pushed to the max), or the player having seizures at the worst times, or a condition which requires the player to drink way more than normal, forcing you to spend quite a lot of time hunting. This would add a lot to the game and make the player spend some time finding cures, and late game, finding a way to become immune to said diseases.

• Mutations:

we know that playing with DNA will be added in the game, which is great, and I thought of a few effect which could benefit the player and help him. Each mutation would of course require you first analyze the relevant DNA before you can inject it. But maybe up to 4 samples could be stored in your belt in a separate inventory so you can use them when relevant:
o Bioluminescence: you become bioluminescent, lighting your surrounding and attracting small fish (and maybe bigger ones sometimes…);
o Gills: you can breathe under water for a short while, mostly used in case of emergency if your oxygen runs low and you’re a long way from the surface;
o Ultrasound: you can emit a sound which reverberate on walls and comes back to you, allowing you to form an image of your surrounding up to 100 meters (like Seamoth scan but without Seamoth);
o Heat sensitivity: what I mean by that is that you could actually need this to find your way to the Lava zone. So you get this and you can suddenly see some sort of color or shimmering effect coming out of cave which ultimately lead to the Lava zone.
o Bioelectricity/electric sensitivity: would allow you to see bioelectricity emitted by some creatures (hidden sharks, bitters, crab snakes, …) so that you can avoid them, as well as allow you to find wreckage and blueprints from further away;
o Mucus: your body produces mucus which reduces friction and allows you to swim faster in water;
o Pheromones: you emit pheromones that makes most fauna wary of you, except for the bigger creatures (finally bitters will leave us alone as we harvest Silver);
o Warping: after having gotten the DNA of a Warper, you can create a warp tunnel to any other location you have already visited (would only have one use and need a long recharge time and maybe have adverse effect).

Overall I’m not sure whether those mutation, or some of them at least, should be permanent. I think there could be 2 categories of mutations, (i) the type 1 which can be permanent (but only one at a time), such as night vision, Mucus, or Pheromones, and should not affect the game too much, and (ii) the type 2 that can only be limited in time and should even bring adverse consequences if used too much (warp or Gills are for instance clearly type 2).

FLORA / FAUNA:

• Flora / Fauna interaction:

It would be great to see more interaction between the fauna and the flora. So it would be fun to see specific predators’ behaviors that we could document (bone shark circling its prey, or sand sharks attacking from underneath, etc.), or some predators using bioluminescence to hunt, but also small fish feeding on flora or using flora to protect themselves. Fish playing with Brain Coral bubbles, hiding in plants when a predator comes nearby, etc. It would also be fun to see battles between predators (two sand shark fighting for territory for instance) or even between giants. What do reapers eat by the way? Reefbacks? Let’s see that. Seeing creatures lay eggs would also be cool.

• Specific fauna:

Some fauna is zone specific but much of it isn’t. You can see the same type of fishes in shallow reef and Mushroom forest for instance, which is weird. I think they should be depth specific. So the flora and fauna at 600 meters should be completely different from the one you find at 50 meters. For instance, you should not see a peeper at a certain depth, it clashes even with its model since it obviously relies on sight to defend itself, and sight is not really useful to defend yourself at 600 meters.

• Day / Night cycle:

I think creatures should creatures should change behavior based on the time of the day. It would be cool for instance to have bone sharks be neutral during the day (unless attacked) and become active during the night. So you could actually think “well I need to get X to build my next item but it’s dark out and it’s in a bone shark zone… I’ll wait for the sun to rise”. That way we get to learn of creatures’ habits which will be even more immersive. It could also affect the way we set up our defenses depending on the time of the day. So for instance if we know Bone sharks are resilient to sound but dislike electricity, since we know they attack during the night, we could set our base defense system to redirect energy to electrical defenses during the night, rather than the defensive ultrasound system (and revert it for sand sharks for instance during the day).

WEATHER:

• Weather effects:

Simple one, it would be cool for the weather to change and have wind and rain be an issue. Tornadoes / tempests would be cool. Lighting would be great, especially if later on we can harvest it and use it to power bases that are near the surface. Those effect would not have huge effects aside from maybe screwing with our GPS once in a while, or changing some of the wild life’s behavior (fish in shallow waters hiding in coral / plants).

• Sea currents:

finally, I think we could benefit from having a few sea currents added. They could be more or less powerful depending on the zone and could also be harvested to make energy for our bases using an underwater mill. Otherwise, it could be used as a “progression hurdle”, forcing us to update the engines of our subs to still go forward in the current and get to point X (for instance in a cave from which a powerful current comes out), or on the contrary allow us to get from one point to another using less energy is we ride the current.


That’s it. Once again I’m sorry for the long post, even if I believe that probably only 2 people will have read it from top to bottom. But if the devs find even one idea interesting, I’ll be happy and consider my work as a “tester” done!

Cheers.

Osydius

Ok I know it's a long read and very few people would read it entirely but come one, not even one reaction?

I mean some of the ideas in the Technology section are cool

Bale

Well. Many things here were already said. There are nice ideas but i'm not sure with your illness/mutation part. It feels like too much to me.

Osydius wrote: »

- How about a robot butler? It would reorganize your lockers while you’re away (putting identical materials together) and talk to you when you come back (“hello sir, did you have a good swim?” or ”I see you’ve found more rocks to store. Fantastic…”). Maybe we could adjust its sarcasm parameter… It would be our Wilson from Castaway but without the sexual tension. Not really necessary but fun. It could even have a mustache… just sayin’

I have to admit i kinda like this part. The idea of having a robot as a companion that could talk to you really pleases me. I would create a GLaDOS2.

Rainstorm

Bale wrote: »

Well. Many things here were already said. There are nice ideas but i'm not sure with your illness/mutation part. It feels like too much to me.

Osydius wrote: »

- How about a robot butler? It would reorganize your lockers while you’re away (putting identical materials together) and talk to you when you come back (“hello sir, did you have a good swim?” or ”I see you’ve found more rocks to store. Fantastic…”). Maybe we could adjust its sarcasm parameter… It would be our Wilson from Castaway but without the sexual tension. Not really necessary but fun. It could even have a mustache… just sayin’

I have to admit i kinda like this part. The idea of having a robot as a companion that could talk to you really pleases me. I would create a GLaDOS2.

+1
I also admit that the PDA isnt enough, the character needs to hear more voices in order to not become completely insane. humans arent able to be completely alone for extended periods of time or else we go crazy eventually

jhs3k

Droids might be very handy and not just as pets. Once they do away with free oxygen in your base, the droids could be used to tend O2 producing plants. Plenty of things I'd rather do than be forced to make rounds with a watering can each day. They could also be useful as scarecrows in outside garden beds too

Osydius

Rainstorm wrote: »

Bale wrote: »

Well. Many things here were already said. There are nice ideas but i'm not sure with your illness/mutation part. It feels like too much to me.

Osydius wrote: »

- How about a robot butler? It would reorganize your lockers while you’re away (putting identical materials together) and talk to you when you come back (“hello sir, did you have a good swim?” or ”I see you’ve found more rocks to store. Fantastic…”). Maybe we could adjust its sarcasm parameter… It would be our Wilson from Castaway but without the sexual tension. Not really necessary but fun. It could even have a mustache… just sayin’

I have to admit i kinda like this part. The idea of having a robot as a companion that could talk to you really pleases me. I would create a GLaDOS2.

+1
I also admit that the PDA isnt enough, the character needs to hear more voices in order to not become completely insane. humans arent able to be completely alone for extended periods of time or else we go crazy eventually

I knew somone would like the robot buttler. He has to sound english, obviously.

It doesn't even have to be very complex at first and maybe have like 10 or 20 reactions, but the idea was indeed to be able to interract with someone on the planet as isolation would be an issue.

In the end, it could watch after your base when you're not there and even take over your PDA. How cool would it be, instead of "30 seconds of oxygen" to have a british voice say "Sir, you are running low on oxygen so unless you can grow gills in the next 30 seconds, I suggest you start swimming up."