Pearl Friendship Tweaks

[Swanky Psammead]

I love Pearl. As someone who actually appreciates the occasional lore/narrative drop into the game, the value of her backstory and evolving relationship with the player to me cannot be overstated. There are two issues that currently bother me with how she is implemented though.

1) It is impossible to lose her friendship once gained. This puts her in a unique position among creatures of the Constant--players can only ever interact with her positively. All other relationships are exclusively hostile, or a choice between friendship and hostility to be determined by the player. Certain actions should be available that strain Pearl's friendship, such as destroying the berry farms or flower gardens set up on her island by other players (I note that there are already unused lines in the .lua files where she responds to attackers; I would be overjoyed to have my butt kicked by crabby grandmom). Since she is an important community resource, it should not be possible to kill her; I would suggest that if she is given HP, she retreat into her shell at 0 and regenerate over the course of a few days (possibly dropping loot in the process??). Crab King's "defeat" animation and the Rock Lobsters' tenacity already allude to the Constant's crustaceanfolk being hardy individuals who can endure near-limitless punishment.

2) Her friendship level is stored in world data, rather than being specific to each individual player. This can be very depersonalizing on large shared servers, as her demeanor is usually not being changed by *your* acts of kindness, but someone else's. It's especially silly to see her describe literally everyone who comes to her island as her "favorite visitor" post friendship level 10. In combination with issue 1), it also permanently denies the experience of befriending her to the vast majority of the server's playerbase, since she can never be reset to friendship 0.

Hope to see more content like her in updates to come!

[Hornete]

I think it'd be a bit frustrating if each player weren't able to work together to level up the friendship with Pearl. Having friendship levels specific to each player would just be annoying in my opinion, it wouldn't add any depth or interesting gameplay.

[Swanky Psammead]

4 hours ago, Hornete said:

I think it'd be a bit frustrating if each player weren't able to work together to level up the friendship with Pearl. Having friendship levels specific to each player would just be annoying in my opinion, it wouldn't add any depth or interesting gameplay.

Players could still work together to elevate a single person's friendship, then use that person as their ambassador to Pearl for resources. Not dissimilar from how one player gets the initial rare blueprint from bosses, and is then responsible for producing the team's bundle wrap/scaled furnaces etc. until more blueprints are obtained.