Patch of ILZ in the Western Mushroom Forest
Rezca
United States Join Date: 2016-04-28 Member: 216078Members
United States Join Date: 2016-04-28 Member: 216078Members
Alright so if you go looking at the biome map in the Subnautica folder, you can see that there's still two patches of Inactive Lava Zone present. With the Crash Zone entrance filled in with sand that one disappeared from the map, but the former Dunes entrance still has a patch on the map - and sure enough, swimming in the water column just above the meteor will say "Inactive Lava Zone" on the debug info.
However, there's also a little patch of it in the Mushroom Forest, and it's been there for a very, very long time. However unlike the Dunes and Crash Zone, there's... Never really been anything here. At least not in the time I've been with Subnautica (I joined a little bit before the 'Machinery Update')
Here's something interesting though. If you go into Freecam and dive straight down from around this point, you'll find a very large hollowed out cube in the terrain beneath it.
Way back when the Lost River was still just a concept, an early draft of the map suggested the Mushroom Forest would open up into it. I still maintain that'd be a cool idea, given the 'organic' themes of both biomes, but I feel that even post-1.0 it'd be terribly unlikely to ever ever ever happen. That aside though, do you think that this might have been where it'd been planned to open up back then?
However, there's also a little patch of it in the Mushroom Forest, and it's been there for a very, very long time. However unlike the Dunes and Crash Zone, there's... Never really been anything here. At least not in the time I've been with Subnautica (I joined a little bit before the 'Machinery Update')
Here's something interesting though. If you go into Freecam and dive straight down from around this point, you'll find a very large hollowed out cube in the terrain beneath it.
Way back when the Lost River was still just a concept, an early draft of the map suggested the Mushroom Forest would open up into it. I still maintain that'd be a cool idea, given the 'organic' themes of both biomes, but I feel that even post-1.0 it'd be terribly unlikely to ever ever ever happen. That aside though, do you think that this might have been where it'd been planned to open up back then?
Comments
Oh yeah I see that Grassy Plateau - ILZ patch on the biome map haha... I wonder if there's anything under it like with the Mushroom Forest one....?
That latter one's a leftover from when they used to have a ILZ connection in the Deep Grand Reef, but closed it off because ... I think it was two reasons? One was that it was too close to the Lost River (Understandable) and the other was something about people skipping story progression or something (Also understandable, even if I feel that's kinda up to the player and stuff) Though that also meant that the Twisty Bridges are again on the chopping block, since when they never showed up on the surface they got planned to be relocated to the DGR-ILZ corridor as a junction between them.... Then that got removed xD
Sometimes I wonder how these things woulda looked if they hadn't been cut. If the Dunes/CZ corridors got fleshed out in as lovely a way as the Mountains entrance is... If the Lost River really sprawled out across the map and had openings in the places they showed... Aaah, love to imagine that. Maybe in a year or two they could release a map editing tool, imagine the cool stuff dedicated world crafters could come up with!
P.S. If I had one additional tunnel it'd be something to give the jellyshroom caves or maountain caves more of a point? Maybe have tiny tunnels just big enough for the player between the jellyshroom and the lost river?
I don't really see how that would work unless they decided to put Brain Corals all over the Lost River.
You can put Brain Corals all over the Lost River! Or anywhere else!
Use the Habitat Builder and 2 Titanium to make an Exterior Growbed. Then plant it with a Brain Coral sample and 5 Bulb Bush samples. 27 inventory spots, so you can carry the items for one while swimming out. Let them grow up and you can use them to extend your free swimming range! Oxygen and with careful reaping Water and a bit of Food.
I intend to put them in the Lost River and below. If my sub gets destroyed, it could be the only way I get back to a base.
I actually tested the connection (using the terraformer) - and it is possible to make such a deep dive. One would need to build a base at both the entrance and the exit to the tunnel though. I think the main benefit would be to allow a player to shuttle between two bases (with their own subs) without having to go the long way around. Given the location of the Lost River teleporter, and the number of jumps, the route between the lost river and safe shallows is one of the longest in game.
If they wanted to get the tunnel they could just make it be caustic (to require the player to have a reinforced suit).
It wont ever happen. Part of why the Dunes and Crash Zone corridors got removed was because they didn't want surface-level access to the zone and they didn't want people skipping past the Lost River to reach the ILZ. IMO, that'd be a good thing though for an Open World game, whose genre thrives on variety like this, but these are the way things are I guess.
Which is again why I'd love to see a Map Editor some years from now. People could be as creativr as they want, and if you've seen some of the "better landscapes" (or whatever it was called) series for Oblivion.... Think of the interesting things people might do. We might make a second Dunes on the otherside of the Aurora, make the Grand Reef like it was in early development, double the size of the Lost River, create additional ILZ pockets not connected to the main chamber, create surface-level abyssal biomes at 1k meters and recreate concept art that didn't make it into the game as best as we can....
Plus, the replayability. I don't 100% agree that games NEED mods and map editors and so forth to have good replay value, but I can't deny they add a lot to it too. Even before the Silent Running update, I already had 250 hours in the game. Yeah, others likely had so much more than that - but that's just showing how much value SA already has even without those things and even before its been released from Early Access. That's a good game there! Imagine how much more could be added if we could tinker with the map too
I'd try carving out the Lost River to match its original plans. Maybe relocate an entrance to it on the far side of the Aurora rather than the tip of it... Then try and match the beautiful detail the devs put into the Mountains Corridor (And lament that I'm unable to xD) Plus.... Abyssal surface-level zones >///>
Yeah, time will tell if they'll officially implement mod support and/or map editing. Doubt it's a priority right now but once they get the game polished up, we'll see.
If it is done right then it can be amazing, like Garrys Mod, MC, and other games. But do it right or else you end up with something horrible.
IDK why they thought that, though... because, honestly speaking, that rationale makes no sense. Put aside all the lore inconsistencies about Sea Dragons (a lava-zone-adapted creature) going through freezing waters of the LZ to get to Reapers instead of having natural or carved out access - forget the unrealism of there not being such corridors drilled in by the Precursors themselves to facilitate transport of leviathan specimens to their containment facilities, as well.
No, what really shoots a whole in the devs claims on this... is that the Lost River is still completely skippable. No matter how many corridors they fill in or ruin or how they railroad players toward the LR... there's still ultimately no actual, physical reason to ever stop at it, ever find the DRF or even consider it anything else but a through-zone; there is absolutely nothing in the LR, let alone the DRF, that is physically required to enter the prison. The prison needs the blue key in the Lava Castle - to my knowledge, it needs nothing else.
Simply put... the devs have put all this effort into gating - all this effort into (in my opinion) ruining two perfectly good biome areas - for something that doesn't even actually fix the problem. Unless/until there's something in the LR that we'd actually need to do or obtain to enter the prison, the LR will always be fundamentally skippable from both a story and gameplay perspective, no matter how hard the devs try to trim the pathways and make there be no real way to avoid it.
The new Mountains path makes it even easier to skip the Lost River's story content, since you can go straight from the Mountains and through a fairly short bit of LR right into a tunnel that descends into the ILZ. So maybe they decided to dial back a bit on that line of thought, who knows. It's too late to do anything about the Dunes corridor, unless by some minuscule chance they shift the Meteor over somewhere else or remove it outright, and the Crash Zone corridor's pretty much obsolete with the Mountains path (Though it would be interesting to see it link up with the Lost River portion of that opening instead).
The game can still be expanded post-1.0, and if they ever give us a Map Editor we can do these sorta things ourselves.
In the end though it doesn't really matter how much people disagree with these changes or how much people support implementing "more pathways" or etc. If it goes against the developer's vision for how they want to shape the game and its world, then it's just not going to happen. That's their decision and I still respect the immense amount of effort and love they've put into this game, even if I do feel a little disappointed at some decisions being made :P
Nothing a map editor wouldn't fix though hah (Well okay, there are some things that wouldn't fix, but world-crafting things could be to an extent!)