Farming Feedback/Balance
Gimboid
France Join Date: 2016-03-28 Member: 214956Members
France Join Date: 2016-03-28 Member: 214956Members
Hey Guys!
So, I played Subnautica early on and dumped about 30 hours in prior to seabases and shortly after they were released, I exausted all the content and stopped playing for some time. I recently restarted a fresh save and have managed to drop another 40-50 hours in andh ave been loving the new content!
I wanted to give feedback on the new farming content, especially in regards to balance!
Overall
Overall, the farming content is fun, I enjoy getting into it and building my underwater farming base and it provides a nice alternative to constantly swimming around to find fish
Balance
Right now, the 3 fruits available are way too effective, a single interior tray with Marblemelons makes me entirely self-sufficient, I just stuff my face with them until my food/hydration is full, because of this, the other two plants are useless
Suggestions
Introduce a new Health Factor to the game
So, I played Subnautica early on and dumped about 30 hours in prior to seabases and shortly after they were released, I exausted all the content and stopped playing for some time. I recently restarted a fresh save and have managed to drop another 40-50 hours in andh ave been loving the new content!
I wanted to give feedback on the new farming content, especially in regards to balance!
Overall
Overall, the farming content is fun, I enjoy getting into it and building my underwater farming base and it provides a nice alternative to constantly swimming around to find fish
Balance
Right now, the 3 fruits available are way too effective, a single interior tray with Marblemelons makes me entirely self-sufficient, I just stuff my face with them until my food/hydration is full, because of this, the other two plants are useless
Suggestions
- Make the Marblemelon give little food but a lot of Hydration
- Make the Hanging Fruit give a lot of food but almost no Hydration
- Make the Purple Fruit give a little of everything
- Drastically increase the time it takes for a Marblemelon to grow (500% or so)
- Drastically increase the time it takes for Purple fruit to grow (600% or so)
- Drastically increase the time it takes for a Hanging Fruit Tree to grow (1000% or so)
- Drastically increase the respawn of fresh hanging fruit growing on the trees (400% or so)
- Make it so that, if you are 100% full on food, you cannot consume something that gives food (you are full), so that I cannot simply stuff my face with 10 Marblemelons to increase my hydration to maximum
- Interior Grow-beds should consume a small ammount of electricity to provide lighting for plants
- Introduce a new large interior growbed (that is placed across the center of the room like the large Aquarium is, this grow bed consumes electricity, with a central pillar that also provides water for the plants, plants grown here grow faster than in plain grow-beds
- Perhaps require water to be added to grow beds to facilitate the growing of plants
Introduce a new Health Factor to the game
- Certain events in the game can make you ill
- Blood Crawlers make you bleed, constantly losing 1% of health until you die or heal yourself with a medkit
- Drooping Stingers make you ill and slow you down and lose health down to a certain amount for a certain duration
- Other Fauna can make you sick, causing your hunger to drop significantly quicker (as you will constantly be sick)
- Certain Flora from both the floating, mountain and underwater areas can be used to fabricate remedies which cure these ailments
Comments
Your new health factor point is good but theres already something in the game that does that kinda, as in if you eat too much of a certain food type you eventually loose alot of food/water (plus the computer wife tells you something about blood loss or sumthing)
At my current beta state, power is no issue, I have three thermal plants, 9 solar panels and a nuclear reactor I have only ever filled up once, my power chugs when I empty all 4 of my condensers, but never runs out, I think needing great power requirements inside the base is great for all.
Also, if the Observatory bay doesn't breach everytime you hit a f******* marblemelon it can make a good farm if you are above 50m~ of depth, that wouldn't be too hard to make solar beams diffuse in water ?
Cause i agree with many of you, farming is too OP for now. with one marblemelon farm and an aquarium no more farming or hunting, NEVER
"It feels like survival games are often built on a broken premise: the bulk of the player’s time is spent gathering food, water or other resources without much opportunity to break up the experience. Rather than engaging in interesting actions, players largely find themselves reacting to whatever gauge they need to refill the most."
Hence why I WANT THE FARM. Leave it alone!
I like the 'feel' of it, though. Eating a 'breakfast' each 'day' then going out in the Seamoth for a trip to do whatever, then coming back 'home' to cook up a Peeper or a Reginald, or whatever; or curing some food in prep for a long trip. Initially it should be a bit of a struggle until you get yourself established with a base, fish farm, grow beds, etc.; then you SHOULD be able to relax and explore.
We're talking about the productivity of the farms, not about making Subnautica a farming game, gathering ressources already need good planning, why try to expand the gameplay if this give a shitty repetitive gameplay ? Doesn't make sense both if you are surviving day to day from hunting Or if with just one farm you have unlimited food/water, so, what is the purpose of the water purificator now ? Better call that a salt extractor !
I just use to think farming doesn't have to be the ultimate Subnautica's horn of plenty. Two big aquariums allow you to grow airsacks and reginald. So, in my advanced game, the fruits are just a nice supply for the Cyclops, no more.
I've tried to convince people that the survival pace is better suited for hardcore and that the freedom mode is no replacement for a paceless mode, because it cuts of any food and energy in the game. So in the end the devs simply broke their own survival pace with farming. With farming the game effectively has only two modes: Survival (No pace, but simply the needs) and Creative.
I don't want to lose/remove the farming, I just think it's 'too' easy at the moment, one tray of marblemelon and food and water can be entirely forgotten about. Compare this to the constant effort and difficulty of finding fish and I think it's gone too far.
I think it's reasonable to need multiple trays, along with a small power requirement to simply make it more balanced (A power requirement would too discourage people from dropping a single tray in the Cyclops and having permanent food.
You could update the Cylcops to have some built-in storage boxes, and one of the future cyclops upgrades could be "cooling pipes" which, when installed refridgerates the built-in storage, allowing you to store a small supply of fresh food aboard but not be 100% self sufficient.
Zero effort should not equal all the benefits. Yes, you have to go out and find them, but once you know where that island is, you're set for that game and every future playthrough. I can power swim out there with a new game with no danger to myself. The crabs are easy to dodge or run by.
I think a good middle ground would be an unpowered growbed that grows more slowly and produces a lot less. Building a powered version would give you faster growing times and a little more produce.
Barring that, growing times just need to be significantly longer than they are. I also like idea of not being able to eat any food when you're full. It would make water more important and curb some of the plant gorging.
I think the fruit is OP. How to fix it is not so simple in my mind.
The farming only works for us when we are at the base, we still need to plan and have food and water on long trips. Until we get the cooking knife (Thermoblade) then we no longer need to bring cured fish anymore. So then water is the only thing we need to have on hand for long trips, even that is supplemented by the still suit.
If the devs changed the grow time, people would just plant more plants to compensate for slower growth.
Grow beds needing power, like the water filtration system, needs a second look. "there is no free lunch"
We should have to work some how for the free food. Providing power makes sense to me.
I look at it this way.
How many people die of hunger and thirst, in their home or base in the games case.
If l have a farm, am I going hunger?
If I plant a big garden wont I get lots of food?
If I have an aquaponics system, filtering fish poo water into my grow beds, then ill have lots of food and fish.
Our base in SubNautica is our Home, once we put up the 1st room and start to build it no longer is a do or die survival situation living in a life pod. But becomes something different, more of hey I will live here and make the best of being on this dam water world. Or something like that.
I like most build the big fish tank first and stock it with airsack fish and boomerang fish, so I don't deplete the area of fish or have to go salt mining until I get my gear load out list.
So I am wondering what the Devs have in mind, is SubNautica a survival game or exploration game or a
happy balance of both? Before the farming update we had to always think about where the next meal was coming from, and this made it a survival game. IMHO
Update: With a little digging with google I found this Quote Form this link unknownworlds.com/subnautica/story-time/ I'll post a little here because it answers my question.
"Subnautica's gameplay is about exploring and surviving on an alien world, and learning how to live harmoniously with your environment. That is literally what you do minute-to-minute. The story, then, is going to be about concepts quite alien to video game narratives in general: survival, environmentalism, life itself. I think these are topics which I can do justice to."
But the farming update kind of takes away the minute-to-minute part.
One idea I had on the floating island is it should move or drift with a current and be in a different place every new game, that would make it harder to find the farming grow beds beds/pots and the plants.
As it is now I know a group of 5 or 6 stars to steer towards, I call then the 6 sisters, and can hit the island blindfolded, like everyone here probably can. But if the Island had an orbit/path lets say around the Aurora we would never know where it would be, thus removing the easy button early from the game.
Do you realize just how slow the growth rate would be if the growth rate was set the way you want it to be? it would take weeks for the flora to grow, that isn't cool brah
Not really, one tray of marblemelon grows in less than a day, 1000% (sorry, maybe unclear, percent, not times) so a full tray would take several days, so at least a person supporting themselves would need 2-4 trays of the current system in order to stay live.
Perhaps not 1000% of the fuits themselves were more balanced too, then perhaps only 600% or such.
the 100's range in percentile of time is ridiculous, lets start with 50% slower... besides the amount of code that would have to be rewritten is immense just to change the timing of one fruit, not even the whole tree, let alone harvest number and amount
50% increase would have zero meaning, a whole tray of Marblemelon regrows in less than a day, 50% might mean you would need 2 trays to be comfortable.
It's unrealistic and removes an entire aspect of the game, when a player can find and drop one growbed and then has infinite easy food forever.
At least requiring some effort (a room dedicated to farming, ala 'The Martian', although via science, even that room wasn't enough for him to remain permanently nourished), using power, not just being able to plan 16 plants and come back 6 hours of game-time later and pig out on 8 fruit.
Before them that never been a problem to store some water and salted fishes in the cyclops. Also you can find airsacks in some average depths.
So I don't understand why you doesn't wan't the fruits to grow more slowly, think about it, the only existing plant you can see grow by eye is a special bamboo.
1. rooms of various size for farming.... one the size of what is now the multi-purpose room, one the size of moon pool, and a 3rd that is twice the size of the moonpool which will allow the growth of trees (think of 2 moon pools side by side with a moon pool on top of it.... the other two won't let you plant anything that grows over a couple feet in height... or just make it so we can only grow fruit bearing trees outside the seabase.
2. have a larger (multi-purpose) room for the aquarium.... basically choose to build a 3 story multi-purpose room for the aquarium, can even make the aquarium larger buy either stacking the room on top of each other or expand the width of the aquarium by building another next to it.... but not both... and no higher than 9 stories (multi-purpose room size, only 3 wide for the sideways aquarium. could the rooms be squared instead of the round multi-purpose room?
3. Farming inside the seabase should require special lighting and water sprinkers..... so you will need to have a filtration system to distill the sea water... farming outside doesn't require as much, but would still need a filtration system.
4. a special farming structure for outside the seabase.... filtration system on one side with sprinkers along with pre built growing platforms... of course no height restrictions.
5. slow down the growth speed... small plants should take atleast 5 -7 days (game time), trees should take 2 weeks (game time).
6. You travel through space on a ship your are going to have a hydroponics lab somewhere on your ship... Perhaps a wreck that was off the ship that contains part if not most of the hydroponics lab or a room on the Aurora you can go to after taking care of the radiation leak... you will need to scan 5 parts to get the hydroponics lab blueprint. it includes the grow pots/troughs (1 fragment) , water filtration (different than what you would use for self) would be 2 fragments, the specialized lighting fixtures (1 fragment), and then 1 for the actual room.
7. Also the Aurora comes from Earth right?? so you are going have food from there.... give us some plants found in the hydroponics lab... ie tomato, potatoes, oranges, apples, etc etc.
8. Another room you can add would be a cooking station.... for storage and cooking of food, so it won't spoil on us. (nice touch with that btw!)
3. have a larger (multi-purpose) room for the aquarium.... basically choose to build a 3 story multi-purpose room for the aquarium, can even make the aquarium larger buy either stacking the room on top of each other or expand the width of the aquarium by building another next to it.... but not both... and no higher than 9 stories (multi-purpose room size, only 3 wide for the sideways aquarium. could the rooms be squared instead of the round multi-purpose room? [/quote]
That's a general request and nothing really to do with farming
That's a lot more dev work, simply adding a 'better' tray, which glows and uses power (all within the existing code) is a simple and effective balancing solution that could be implemented quickly
Subnautica isn't really intended to use much 'outside', you're intended to either be under water or in a seabase, whilst some people have built on the floating island, it's not really meant to be a core part of the game.
This is the main thing a lot of people agree on, they simply grow too fast at the moment.
That's a general request and nothing really to do with farming
That's a lot more dev work, simply adding a 'better' tray, which glows and uses power (all within the existing code) is a simple and effective balancing solution that could be implemented quickly
Subnautica isn't really intended to use much 'outside', you're intended to either be under water or in a seabase, whilst some people have built on the floating island, it's not really meant to be a core part of the game.
This is the main thing a lot of people agree on, they simply grow too fast at the moment.[/quote]
a bit to complex? adding more work? um... we looking at the same game? something tells me since they've put the game out as early access (for what is it a year and a half now?) and still building the game... while giving people they don't even know the ability to help shape the game by playing it. I don't think they are to worried about anything adding more work or being to complex... do you? considering they are taking their time and building this game up from scratch at their own pace.
granted the aquarium has nothing really to do with actual farming.... but it's a great form of getting food in the long run... until you can manage to start growing fruit. the fish you capture do spawn eggs from time to time, which will lead to more fish in your tank... the amount of fish you can have is relative to the size of the tank... so I was thinking of a module room that was three times the size of multi-purpose room. Where you can build it either sideways or up... they would be able to do that easier if the room was squared instead of round. Also having the aquarium stocked with fish will help with the local population outside that you don't kill off all the fish swimming outside the base.... hence there by saving the fish population from over kill. IE more environmentally friendly.
to farm inside you do need special equipment.... filtration system, water distribution (sprinklers), grow beds, lighting, etc etc... one way to do that would be to make a special room (one that you can add on to to make bigger, much like you can do with stacking the multi-purpose room) to grow food indoors. What better thing on a world mostly water, than a hydroponics lab?
having a spot outside to build is just more vanity than anything.... but in all honesty, how many places do you see actual trees growing indoors? being able to build one on the surface would be a great way to start the player's out with farming until we could find the fragments for a hydroponics lab. it would require less resources, and very little power (mainly for a filtration and sprinkler system). besides wouldn't you want to be able to go outside an sit down in a nice little area instead of hiding away inside a seabase or surrounded by water all the time?
also would be nice to have a module where we can prep the food we can make and store it without fear of losing it so rapidly.
btw wasn't wanting all this implemented into the game.... would be nice to know I actually had some input that the devs liked and thought was a cool idea... all in all... just giving some ideas.
Yeah, you're right, but they also have a huge roadmap on Trello of all the planned features and content (as well as the story stuff they are keeping from us to keep it interesting), so they can't take on huge game changing suggestions (and dev's normally don't, due to legal reasons ans simply have enough of their own inspiration and creativity planned as it is)
I don't think we need particularly bigger tanks at the moment, 2 2-high tanks, one with bladder one with enough provides enough food/water for constant consumption, let alone the water machine that once you have 2-3 gives you permanent water availability.
You're totally right too, but it does make coding a lot more complicated, adding an energy requirement to the indoor planting stations should be relatively simple (since they already have the coding in there that installing a spotline creates an negative electrical drain), but adding more like water management gets a bit more complicated, it would be new code/systems to support, which would have to get added to the huge backlog of stuff the devs are already working on, it's not that it's a bad idea, it's not, I'm just trying to be realist.
I think the dev's vision really is to keep people under the water surface and I like that, if they expand on the above ground stuff, Subnautica just gets added to the list of generic survival games.
Expanding on food would be cool, hopefully this is on their long-term roadmap.
Re OP'ness, I think they'd be aware of that but it is very much a work in progress. They've said they have plans for more recipes in the fabricator. Until they do, the raw fruits and veg are as nourishing as they are so that poor players like me who don't want to kill the fishies can survive. We've been waiting about a year since they made acid mushrooms inedible.
So this is the first update where I've actually been able to play the game properly, without using the console. Hooray!
yeah, tried reading the roadmap... just ended up getting a headache from trying to follow it. But, if I give out an idea and one of them liked it enough to expand on it.... They could use it to their heart's content for all I care... I would just be happy knowing I had an idea that helped expand a game that is extremely cool and fun to play. Any documents needed to be signed would be signed ASAP stating that.
But in all reality, I know nothing will most likely be used.... or even if they did like anything I came up with would be implemented any time soon.... probably would take atleast a year or so before it would be seen.
the pre-built fishtank I was thinking of would be only able to go double story and double the width.... compared to now is how high can you stack multi-purpose rooms is how many fish tanks you can build.... only difference in the rooms would be the shape of it... say a room half the size of the moonpool (putting another next to it would make it the size of the moonpool) combining the fish tanks to make it a little bigger. You an still walk around it... it's just squared, and you can put another room on top..
same for the hydroponics lab.... start with a room half the size of the moonpool... can make it bigger by putting it side by side.... no bigger than 2x2 and can't stack them higher... everything would pretty much be cosmetics (game wise). only thing they would need to have do is make sure the grow racks actually work. as for the fragments, those would be the names of the different machines that you would need build a hydroponics lab...
as for the garden outside... I was more or less thinking of being able to add a fence of some kind to the structure platform we can build with, we already have the exterior grow bed.... maybe add some different types of furniture (ie table, chairs etc etc) like I said.... just a little more aesthetics...
as for expanding on food.... a cooking module... just a small one where we can prep food and store it to keep it longer.... new recipes would be to make different types of nutrient bars. combine different types of fish with creepvine or other items to give various degrees of benefits of food and water. also dehydration for even longer storage time of food. take a dehydrated item and use it with water (say from your stillsuit).... and voila! 2 nutrient bars!