Scanner room, Mapping, Player upgrade and drones!

donvdp · January 2017

I recently got inspired due to a post from Malsqueek. He replied some interesting new features that i extended uppon in this thread. I thought it deserved its own thread so i created this one!

Maybe its handy for additional drone usage to have a special drone bay. Much like a repair/upgradeshop. A place where you can store 4 or 6 drones like you do with the seamoth.
You could make it so that the 'DroneBay' can only be build next to the scanner room (where the drones are opperated from).

Additional Drones

Repair drone:
Which can load resourced (automaticly) and (when active) swim arround a marked area (setup from the scanner room) and repair anything that is within its range (lets say 100m). When the Repair drone cannot get any valid materials (resourced) nessicairy for a repair you would get a message in your hud / scanner room that these materials are no longer in storage.

Hauler Drone:
Which you can set to transport materials / resource from 1 base to another.

With the propper upgrades in place the Scanner drones from Malsqueek's post should be able to go to a beacon that the player has setup and do its thing there automaticly, and afterwords return to the DroneBay. Additionaly The scanner/ Scout drones can gather geographical map data that could augment the progressive map.

Progressive map gathering
As mentioned all arround this post there is a need for a map system. This map should not kill the fun of exploring the game yourself, so the map should be filled with the information where you have been so far in the game. Sort of a Progressive map system. Later on in the game when you have drones you could task special scout / scanner drones to gather (geographical) map data.

Additional player upgrade slots. Right now we have 2 chips that we can use to extend player comfort/functionality. Like the compas and temperature meter you would be able to have not 2 but 4 upgrade slots.
Additional upgrade item:
- Commlink upgrade for communication with the base / and maybe in the future to other players
- - With the Commlink you could dispatch a scanner drone to scout your recently placed Beacon. This without having to go to the scanner room.
- - So in short (add remote commands to your base)
- Mapping upgrade. Adds the ability to use the gathered topographical data to view a map of the enviroment. The player should be able to mark locations with notes on this map for easy and quick location storage. Somewhat like a favourite locations list.
- - When the Commlink upgrade is also active the map should also should the different bases / beacons and vehicles that are sending out a signal on the map!

Because drones are small it might be fun to have different kind of sizes drone.
Small size drone:
- should be the same as the currently available drone.
- Basic in functionality
- Cheap to craft

Large size drone:
- Upgradeable via the DroneBay
- - Defensive capability upgrade for vending off aggressive fauna
- - Range upgrade to extend the operational range from the scanner room that they are linked to.
- - Storage upgrade to extend there storage capacity
- The larger size drone should have a camera that you can zoom in and out with
- more expensive then small drone to craft.

Malsqueek wrote: »

Oh yeah.

- Differentiate drones: Scanners, Scouters, and Miners
- Change the "Scanner Room" name to "Remote Control Room" (or some such)
- Room itself no longer does the scanning, just controls stuff
- Have 4 slots of "processing power"
- Drones are stored in a bay (Locker), and launched using the center console
- Drones use 1 slot of processing power (or two in the case of the Mining drone) to operate
- Allow Scanner rooms to network scanning commands, painted resources, and mining controls to 1Km distant (eg, 2 scanner rooms must be no more than 1 km apart and you can issue commands between them)

- Honestly, if this room also inherited the ability to manually control power functions around your base (like turning off Desalination stations or if it moderated the use of Nuclear and Bio Reactors while the base was uninhabited) that alone would make the room worthwhile.

-Scanner Drones:
- Automated search within a 350m range for defined resources
- Scanners "paint" resource nodes for display in vehicle HUD
- sent out one at a time from scanner rooms, to either scan for multiple different things or more quickly find a single thing

- Scouting Drones:
- Can be manually controlled and left on site as a beacon
- "General Scan' could be done which sends out the probes to look for "noteworthy areas" like caves, wrecks, etc

-Resource Drone:
- Requires 2 processing power slots
- Collects painted resources (at a relatively slow pace, still faster to do it yourself)
- Deposits to a locker in the Scanner Room

- Room upgrades (two slots maximum):
- Base Power Efficiency (either extra storage or reduced static power usage)
- Drone Range Increase (to 750m)
- Extra Drone Processing Power (2 extra slots)
- Network Range Increase (to 1.5Km)

smellslikebleach · January 2017

Very nice ideas to make the scanner room more reasonable.

McBoo · May 2017

donvdp wrote: »

Progressive map gathering
As mentioned all around this post there is a need for a map system. This map should not kill the fun of exploring the game yourself, so the map should be filled with the information where you have been so far in the game. Sort of a Progressive map system. Later on in the game when you have drones you could task special scout / scanner drones to gather (geographical) map data.

I think this is a great idea! The scanner room had a much smaller range at one point so how about we go back to that as the default and then add a separate mapping module (or possibly an upgrade for the sonar module) for the SeaMoth and Cyclops. That way a player would have to sacrifice some other functionality in favor of mapping out their surroundings.

My other though on this subject was allowing multiple scanner rooms to communicate with one another to map out the world. The player would need to collect the resources, work out the best placement of each scanner room and build them in order to make the entire map visible in any of the available scanner rooms. This would also mean making the map interactive enough that a player could move around the map or zoom in sections of it. It would also be great if, as players zoom in on a given biome, information on the flora and fauna scanned by the player was included. Maybe even add something on the wrecks (Aurora section number or some such) that players can scan so that they are marked on the map as well.

The idea is to make the player work for the information but once they have it it is basically at their fingertips.

Nansen · June 2017

This is what I also feel Subnautica is needing the most. A mapping function. Not like Fallout or The Elder Scrolls system where the environment, topography etc is pre loaded on entering the world, but where you can first scan an mapping upgrade for the player. Then you can have a seperate map tab in you inventory which is empty. You will only get a empty x,y,z grid coordinate system. Then it will not be updated by you traveling places, but if the player sees a point of interest you can manually put in its coordnates and have a name tag for it. It should maybe be required to be at the coordinate to put the point in the map to prevent just adding locations from a forum. Then it should be possible to sync the map with different scanner rooms which would reveal topography and scan for different objects. So by placing scanner rooms around the map you could eventually get a complete topography map. Rigth now I really do not see a use for the scanner room. Yes it is kinda usefull. But it is easier/quicker to just look for reasurces without the scanner room than to check the scanner room. For me the scanner room only seems usefull if you look for a rare thing (like places for thermal energy) or when you have scavanged the whole area and is only missing a few resources.

This system would be really good for the gamplay. It would make the player have a reason to try to make different sea bases at different locations which may be unsuited for a base otherwise. It would as well encourage the use of a independent player which could map the world. It would really add to the already good exploration atmosphere that Subnautica already is depending and perfecting.

It could be cool to scan different spieces and sync it to the map, to see where different spieces prefer to live (and map biomes). This could be a great edition to the game. To handle the z coordinate (the depth) it could hace a slider to select differnt levles (kinda like a zoom but not zooming but going deeper).

angeluscaligo · February 2018

Marvellous ideas! As for the larger Drones, perhaps add a Drone Station as a Module for the Moonpool, similarly to the Docking Controls (which are exclusive to the Moonpool). Then you could add an external model to the Moonpool where a larger Drone sits docked untill deployed.

Stormtempter · February 2018

I cannot support a mapping system hard enough. Its what I want more than anything. Let the scanning room map over time, increasing in accuracy and fidelity over time. Let us have a tool that allows for automapping around us the same way, and modules for our vehicles for the same. It would encourage more base building so there are more scanner rooms to cover more area, and you could even have the drones pitch in to map extended ranges, at the risk of losing drones.

I hate leaving dozens and dozens of beacons everywhere, cluttering up my HUD just so I know where I am, where things are and roughly the way to get to them.

Scanner room, Mapping, Player upgrade and drones!

Comments