[Sunken "Treasure"] Finally on solid ground again.

[LEX-7O2]

Lost track of time spent at sea, but its safe to say I spent at least a year in total at sea acquiring sunken "treasure". 

 

 

No clue why Klei named it sunken "treasure" when it is everything but that, Klei decided to bring Klaus's trash tier loot to the ocean. The process of searching the ocean for messages in a bottle to lead to sunken "treasures" in itself is rewarding, otherwise I would not have spent the time I did searching for them. But the feeling I got when opening the chest is equal to that of a kid asking for a gaming console for X-mas and waking up to find Google's Stadia, I would've much rather not opened them. The loot as you can see is equivalent to your average noobs inventory, barely anything of worth. I regret unboxing them. I don't understand who the rewards of the sunken "treasure" is aimed for, the time it takes to get them could've been much wiser spent focusing on one aspect of the reward, say fishing gear/ruins gear or boat gear. This paired with the fact that most experienced DST players I've played with spend as little time out at sea sailing as possible and opt for covering the map with boat bridges, meaning many people never really experience the sailing aspect of ROT which is a big loss. Therefore, in my opinion there should be more incentive for players, experienced or not to explore the ocean, e.g. better sunken "treasure" rewards, but of course, ROT is still young in it's life cycle, guess we'll have to wait and see.

 

 

TL;DR- wtf are you thinking Klei, the loot for sunken "treasures" is dogshit for how much time it takes to acquire them, they are better kept as base decor. 

Hopefully Klei will rethink the rewards and perhaps include more ROT based loot, if not, just pretend I'm screaming at the ocean... anyways, I'll get going, the ocean needs cleaning and not just The Constant's.

 

[ADM]

I can just agree that looting chests is not very worth compared to the original resources farming like gems and moon glass. But it might be actually interesting for new players, right ? Once more, we all play the same game but not with the same experience so finding a free walking cane or thulecite suit can make few people happy at least.

I think you'd better just suggest a couple of improved loot tables, I'm certain they're going to add more since updates are coming along and the QoL of August could be the best candidate for this if it's not too late already.

[WoodieMain45684]

I also think it needs some serious loot buffing, the amount of effort it takes any player, new or old, to obtain them is quite large compared to the amount of effort put forth to simply obtain the items themselves. I think the biggest issue is what exactly CAN be loot that's worth the amount of time spent and not be disrupting the balance of the game?

[MondayNight]

1 hour ago, LEX-7O2 said:

The loot as you can see is equivalent to your average noobs inventory, barely anything of worth.

So "your average noobs inventory" has Salt, Moon Glass, Gnarwail Horns, Malbatross Feathers, Gears, Thulecite, Thulecite Suits, Yellow and Orange gems, Canes etc. What an interesting noob! Meanwhile "my" average noobs inventory usually has some Flints, Twigs, Rot, Bones, a Cat's tail, more Rot and a couple of Bat $hitties. 1st World problems vs.. rest of world's necessities

 

Beyond pretty blatant exaggerations I understand your point: for amount of time spent on seas, one could have better/higher loot rolls more frequently.

[shadowDigga]

Completely agree with everything, thanks for bringing this up once again. The whole sea treasure thing is weakened several times - first you can easily miss spawned bottles because they spawn outside of screen range, then bottles only have 1/3 chance to result in treasure and the rest - pointless hermit message, then finally the the treasure very likely can spawn at the other edge of the map. Even with 2 malbatross sails + completely cleared from seastacks ocean it will take several days to reach it. For the amount of time spent just to reach the treasure it should have much, much better rewards. Even boss-loot level rewards. And most importantly, it should also have unique rewards. Something you can only get from sunken treasures. But even then, uniqueness won't help if these unique items are useless or mediocre.

[Charesque]

One man's trash...

 

I would've called plain sailing in exchange for these items a somewhat fair trade-off, since it just takes time and a bit of boat steering (and you have caves disabled for some reason), however considering some of the new threats such as rockjaws or even Wavey, this might not be as fair...

[wigfrids hat]

well, i am still a novice and a lot of this loot is well and above what i could mange to get otherwise but at the same time the labor to get there is also well and above what i could manage. at this stage i am still stuck within three screens of the shore at all times

[Seafood Dinner]

Just remove the sea fishing rod from the loot table, and it'll be fine. Seriously RNG, what is one sailor to do with three extra rods?

[wigfrids hat]

5 minutes ago, Seafood Dinner said:

Just remove the sea fishing rod from the loot table, and it'll be fine. Seriously RNG, what is one sailor to do with three extra rods?

feesh hard?

[Seafood Dinner]

2 hours ago, gaymime said:

feesh hard?

I can catch all the fish I need with one rod. Guess I'll just donate to my local lureplants.

[wigfrids hat]

2 hours ago, Seafood Dinner said:

I can catch all the fish I need with one rod. Guess I'll just donate to my local lureplants.

you could make an aquarium? XD

[Yuuko]

So true - Sailing is fun.  They nailed that well enough.  Steering, sails, anchors, debris, message in bottles, treasure hunting, fishing, its all great mechanically.  BUT none of it is actually worth going out there for.  It takes about as much time to just build a boat to get out on the water as it does to rush the ruins and come back with star caller staves, thulecite crowns, and piles of gems and nm fuel.  All that invested time just to get on the ocean and nothing you find out there compares to ruins loot.

And what is our new patch?  Here's another way to get your boat sunk and more annoying interruptions.  Might as well include tl/dr build boat bridges in the patch notes next time...  Since the last patch I haven't spent much time boating at all.

[wigfrids hat]

18 minutes ago, Shosuko said:

So true - Sailing is fun.  They nailed that well enough.  Steering, sails, anchors, debris, message in bottles, treasure hunting, fishing, its all great mechanically.  BUT none of it is actually worth going out there for.  It takes about as much time to just build a boat to get out on the water as it does to rush the ruins and come back with star caller staves, thulecite crowns, and piles of gems and nm fuel.  All that invested time just to get on the ocean and nothing you find out there compares to ruins loot.

And what is our new patch?  Here's another way to get your boat sunk and more annoying interruptions.  Might as well include tl/dr build boat bridges in the patch notes next time...  Since the last patch I haven't spent much time boating at all.

if it helps i haven't seen wavey even once. it's been just as pleasantly calm as playing in the caves after the worms have been stomped

[Yuuko]

1 hour ago, gaymime said:

if it helps i haven't seen wavey even once. it's been just as pleasantly calm as playing in the caves after the worms have been stomped

Wavey is just one thing.  It takes so long to build a boat and get it outfitted with the structures you want so that you can just go live on the boat.  Then every new feature just destroys it :\ I get that RoT is still being developed, but I kinda feel the developers are taking a different direction then I wanna go.  I want to boat and be a pirate, and live on the sea but since this last patch I've switched to boat bridge meta because why not?  The mechanics of sailing are fun, but there are a lot of problems to deal with that just don't reward you.  Its like every thing that they add just has to suck in some way enough that you might as well use the easily accessible main-land staple than build a boat and get out there.

[KeshS]

The only loot I don't quite understand is why give fishing rods inside these chests? At least with boat parts you can use as fire fuel, but rods can't be burned, are cheap to make, and just litter the whole place. In addition, add a larger variety of floats and bait, not sure why I need stacks of dusk spoons and jet quill floats. Having extra floats and bait is always nice.

Have some sort of use for broken sea shells; it's another litter in the sea.

I can agree that boating is expensive. Ruins rushing takes much less time than building a solid boat. Also upkeeping it also takes a lot of resources.

Klei did a good job on treausure hunt. Despite Klaus, you don't have to wait a whole four seasons to try for better loot. Maybe trade 3x bottles for a treasure map, if you are unlucky finding treasure spots. Good loot feels so much better after consecutive chests of "ok" loot.

[Cheggf]

Messages in bottles (Or would it be Message in a Bottles? ) spawn every 1-2 days while you're sailing, and it then has a 1/3 chance to reveal the treasure. The treasure then has a 1/10 chance of having anything useful, unless you need walking canes then it's 2/10. This is a little better at the start of the world when there's already some bottles floating around but even then it's not very good. Even disregarding the time it takes to find a bottle that shows you where treasure is in the time it takes you to sail what's probably going to be around the entire perimeter of the map to get to the treasure on the other side you could've easily just gotten what's inside by running around on the mainland.

You have a 30% chance to get some cookie cutter shells and salt, a 30% chance to get some malbatross feathers and useless clutter, a 20% chance for a small amount of cut stone and gold, a 10% chance for a walking cane, and a 10% chance for a small amount of ruins loot (4-8 thulecite, 1-2 gears, thulecite suit, 2 gems). For something that spawns every 8-16 minutes (which you can easily miss so you have to wait another 8-16 minutes) and then takes awhile to sail to.

Honestly after opening about a hundred of these across various worlds I've gotta say that the best part of opening them is seeing how many gold pickaxes you can get. Each has a 50% chance to drop a gold pickaxe and they aren't really useful since they're trivially easy to make compared to the effort it takes to sail around like this, and it takes up a lot of inventory space, but it's at least pretty funny to have a chest or two just full of gold pickaxes given to you by the ocean.

Unfortunately just like the rest of the ocean content, there's not really any incentive to do it other than you want to do it. You have to put in so much effort making the boat, then so much effort doing everything to be able to get the winch on your boat, then so much effort finding bottles, then so much effort sailing over, and then for your reward you're probably going to get something like a duplicate anchor you have no use for.

[ArubaroBeefalo]

Why are you farming those? Its just something that you go after if you find them but farming them is your problem lol

[wigfrids hat]

3 hours ago, Shosuko said:

snip

took me 10 days at the start of a new world to make a boat with a sail, an anchor, two paddles and a wheel and that is only because i was playing womwood and had to get all of my boards from pig houses and took four days to grow veg. that isn't long at all??

[Mooagain]

5 hours ago, Shosuko said:

It takes about as much time to just build a boat to get out on the water as it does to rush the ruins and come back

But the ruins hold a much higher change of dying

[Well-met]

agreed, loot tables are horrible.

Buff them greatly but also maybe have players be forced to use a deer antler to open one? I don't really get the hammer thing.

[Cheggf]

1 hour ago, Mooagain said:

But the ruins hold a much higher change of dying

Debatable. Someone inexperienced to the ruins is likely to die and have their inventory drop in a place where they can walk back to, while someone inexperienced in boating is likely to crash the boat, drown, have a large portion of everything they were holding or created for the boat immediately destroyed, and the rest in a difficult to access area that requires another boat to get to.

Someone who brings enough armour to the ruins and knows about bluecaps (or other healing methods) is unlikely to die, and even if they do think they're going to die they can just easily retreat or come get their corpseloot and be a lot richer off either way. Someone who's crashing a boat can't just stop boating and leave, nor can they easily retrieve their items.

I'd say the ruins is a lot safer, a lot less of an investment, a lot faster, a lot easier, and incomparably more lucrative.

[ShadowDuelist]

3 hours ago, Cheggf said:

I'd say the ruins is a lot safer, a lot less of an investment, a lot faster, a lot easier, and incomparably more lucrative.

This.

Most players can go by just by finding the moon island to get the stone fruits and the kelp fronds, and mining some salt, and that's the end of really profitable sailing altogether. Since I play Woodie most of the time the only thing that forces me to sail a tiny bit is to get salt, just once, and spend the rest of my time doing bosses and resetting the ruins, for much better loot and overall quality of life.

Question to the community: Would you like if the ocean was instead not new players friendly? to become a sort of alternate ruins trip, High risk, high stress surviving, but big rewards (possibly higher than the ruins themselves) 

The new shark mob, Wavey jones, and the new sea shadow creature could hint the ocean content turning into a more hostile place at some point.

[Yuuko]

5 hours ago, gaymime said:

took me 10 days at the start of a new world to make a boat with a sail, an anchor, two paddles and a wheel and that is only because i was playing womwood and had to get all of my boards from pig houses and took four days to grow veg. that isn't long at all??

Boat, anchor, wheel, 2 sails / lightning rod and light upgrades, science machine, crock pot, sea fishing rod, boat patches, and that's just to get on the water.  And yes, 10 days is a long time considering you could have explored the entire perimeter of the map or be clearing the ruins in the same time frame.

4 hours ago, Mooagain said:

But the ruins hold a much higher change of dying

Not really, you can die either way.  But on the water you're risking everything you've built so far where in the ruins you can just res and come back.

[Cheggf]

16 minutes ago, ShadowDuelist said:

Most players can go by just by finding the moon island to get the stone fruits and the kelp fronds, and mining some salt, and that's the end of really profitable sailing altogether.

I'd also like to add that the ruins loot is irreplaceable while all the sea loot that's worth getting has to do with food, which already isn't really hard to manage. While the stone fruit bushes and kelp fronds are very powerful food sources they are just a food source. You can replace them with something like a bunnyman farm. While the salt box is rather nice to have it does just slow the spoilage of food, to a greater extent than the ice box but a lesser extent than bundling wraps. You could just make more food, make less food, or use bundling wraps. So while they're both rather nice to have they are just alternatives.

But the ruins loot? Where else are you going to find a chest slot item that makes you move faster and emit light? Where else are you going to find an item that summons a stationary light/temperature source that lasts for a real-life half hour and has 20 uses? Where else are you going to find an item allowing you to teleport? Or an item that can deconstruct anything into its base materials, allowing infinite pan flute uses among other things? An item that automatically picks up nearby items even if you aren't in range to grab them? An item that halves the cost of crafting anything? A case could also be made for the forcefield, permanent sanity clothing, and tentacle summoning.

I'm not saying the ocean needs to get exclusive ocean goodies (even if that would be nice), though. Just pointing out another reason that the ruins currently offers a lot more even though it's a lot easier and less risky.

[MondayNight]

1 hour ago, ShadowDuelist said:

Question to the community: Would you like if the ocean was instead not new players friendly? to become a sort of alternate ruins trip, High risk, high stress surviving, but big rewards (possibly higher than the ruins themselves) 

The new shark mob, Wavey jones, and the new sea shadow creature could hint the ocean content turning into a more hostile place at some point.

First off: current Ocean isn't "new players friendly". New players will die 100 times till they manage to reach Moon Island or even locate it. They most likely will crash by their own ineptitude/lack of knowledge and experience, have their boats crashed by Wavey on account of insanity in various degrees, or being totally destroyed by Sharks.

Second: to make ocean "high stress surviving, but big rewards" KLei kinda needs to redesign all oceanic mobs' and bosses' loot table. Even now, with Ocean being what it is (kinda middle road between peaceful sailing and high stress surviving), all loot from said entities is ranged from "Meh!" to trash-tier: some small or big Fish Meats, Monster Meat (squids, Cookie Cutters) or Normal Meat (bosses), rare Light Bulbs (squids), some Feathers you only use once or 2ice in your boat design (Malba loot), a Trident that's circumstantial at best (and requires you to kill a lot of Gnarwails that in turn will make your boat a big patched Swiss cheese in relation to Crab King's bp loot) are marginally okish now. Don't know if this will be a trend or not, yet "Return of Them" bosses seem lackluster in terms of taking-down rewards or functional mechanics: in pubs Malba can be quite rare (or am exceptionally unlucky), a joke in teams, redundant in loot; and Crab King hard as iron balls (no meaty balls given that day, nope sir!) with silly gem combinations accounting for... no difference in end-loot, plus all you get is, again, a mediocre weapon (yes, I know about Celestial Tribute - I doubt it will have future "so f%&king amazing" builds to make me rethink 180* my impression about CK); and Shell Bells because oh joy! we ever need more shells! always more of those things from everywhere...

Lastly I really-really hope there's a cohesive idea about what all this "Return of Them" expansion has as core-concepts, direction, themes and so on. But... Sure, what we got by the moment of this post is fun-ish (I for one sure had fun sailing the seas of Constant). However is totally facultative. To have what you propose we need a lot better rewards from Ocean, as stated. Else most people will just gloss over in future or some (proverbially "select few") will do it as a challenge - and maybe that was the plan all along: high stakes (soloing sharks for example is a hurdle; but with 2 people one can "ez pz" stun-lock them - rather laughable).. mediocre rewards