My thoughts, wishes, and mostly sugestions, for the incoming ocean qol

[Malfario]

First, hello and thanks to open this post, this is mostly a list of my wishes for the future Ocean Quality of life update. Even though I am going to rationalize and explain why the things I am asking for are the way I want them, this is not an objective truth about why the ocean is not in a good state and I don't want to push my arguments as the only valid ones.

 

This is a list of suggestions, all based on my experience doing ocean content.

Sailing

-All the structures of the boat could have a progression, we already have this in the case of the sail, a basic one and a better one with the ones from Malbatross. More versions of the items that are straight up better.

 

An anchor with a faster animation to when you are retrieving it. Wheels that are most responsive, Boats that are more sturdy, have fire protection, have preinstalled chests , masts with multiple upgrades, or an item that makes any mast have multiple items etc.

 

-This led to the biggest problem I found when sailing. Boats need to be more responsive, if you ever took on the effort to clean parts of your ocean removing all the sea stacks to have clean sailing routes for your waterlogged biomes, pearl island etc. You will have noticed that sailing is not that bad, some might even say pleasant.

 

My biggest problem with sailing is that in order to be fast, you give up all your reaction time for the numerous obstacles the ocean has. I like the system of actually managing a ship and the room for mistakes, that you need to be engaged in not sinking your boat. The problem is that all the room is for mistakes, the only way to sail fast without slamming into any sea stack is rowing, or give up and slam them and repair the boat as you go, losing a big amount of resources.

 

-Here goes the Third request, more structures placed like bumpers.

Rather than having boat armor, the addition of the bumpers in curse of the moon quay, let me to think how handy would be to some of the boat structures to be place like these items, on the edge of the boat to save space in our small wooden raft:

 

The pinch and winch, a new type of sail whose benefit is this type of placement, bumper chests etc etc.

 

-More boat upgrades and related items, very straightforward, there is a long list of necessities we have when sailing and i would appreciate items that supply them, these include but are not limited to : 

 

-Items to improve or visibility in the boat, the horizon xpandinator has proved to not be enough at least for me, in the same style infinite light upgrade for a mast post cc would be nice, so we didn't need to place a glowcap on our boats cluttering them more,

A post rift mast upgrade that gave night vision to the players on the boat would be very sweet.

 

-Items to protect our boat better from sea encounters, maybe a magic item that gave the boat “armor”, that would make the boat to not generate leaks before you break said armor. Better cannons or even just better bullets with bigger areas of effect, auto aiming etc. Maybe a new kind of item that made certain creatures passive to players on that boat.

For example, trading a winter fish with frostjaw gives you the “shark friendly mast flag “ that's a mast upgrade that makes the sharks neutral to you. The monkey queen could give a flag to prevent the boat from spawning pirate raids and so on.

 

-Items for more efficient and more manageable ocean cleaning, very straight to the point, we have cannons, tridents, bs bombs and weather pains, magnificent resources to clean sea stacks, all of them highly expensive and difficult to use while using the wheel to drive. Give us a bumper drill, a cannon that auto targets sea stack that will slam with out boats, a sea companion that we can befriend and will break all sea stack near us, etc.

This would not only solve one of the big problems with ocean navigation but will also set the stage for more difficult obstacles to which we will have tools to deal with.

Location of Biomes an ocean set pieces

This one gets a category on its own.

 

The ocean is big, ridiculously big, and exploring it is not rewarding and it's not fast. 

Speculation of mine has always been that the ocean is this big because originally there were plans to fill it with a variety of biomes that would make it feel as dense as shipwrecked did years ago. But in its current state the ocean is mostly empty and it's tedious to sail for hours avoiding sea stacks to find out the monkey island was 1 screen away from when you turned your boat right an hour ago.

 

Anyway, legitimately anyway, to get the specific locations of ocean biomes would make the whole experience better in a way I can not even describe with words.

It doesn't even have to be all the same ways, give us different npcs that sell us the maps to different biomes, make it so certain events can trigger the biomes revealing themselves on the map, set pieces that give us a rough approximation of where to go, any aid is welcomed.

 

A personal suggestion I would like to give, is to make it so, pearl will tell you the location of the biomes you need to complete her tasks (Say, the second bundle of thanks gives you a map for the nearest salt formation). And after you defeat crab king, and you give the broken pearl to pearl, she finally lets go of crab king, starts living her best life, and starts exploring the ocean going out of her shell. And now she will sell you maps for all the ocean biomes.

 

There could even be an event in which the player encounters a pearl on her little boat if her island is not loaded and other players are in the ocean.

Fishing

First to say i really like the direction fishing has gone lately, the introduction of frostjaw made me use the fishing rod more than i ve done in my last 1000 hours, fishing used as currency makes a lot more sense than as a food source and i really would like to see more interaction like frosjaw. That being said.

 

-School of fishes need to have at the very least 1 big fish, and very hig chances of additional ones, something on the lines of 

“fish1-Big/fish2-80%of being Big)/fish3-65%of being Big/fish 4 and 5-35% of being Big”

 

-Every kind of fish should have a designated point on the map where you can fish them, on top of them randomly appearing on the ocean. Maybe in the future when we get more ocean biomes we could reach a point where there was a biome for each fish. For the moment I will be happy with fish spawners, in a similar style to albatross, across all the ocean, maybe with a different looking sea stack to differentiate them.

 

In the case of these two suggestions, I don't think I have to even point out the problem most players have with rng, in all scenarios it doesn't add anything to the experience but makes it more dreadful.

 

-Fishes shouldn't fight as much as they do, let me know if you ve been here. a surprise catfish gets hooked by your rod while you try to summon malbatross, now you need to lose your items, or fight for 40 minutes with a fish going back and forth with him. This comes to say that some fishes are a bit too time consuming to catch, that's it, make it so the longest a fish needs to be caught is 15 seconds, after 15 seconds of back and forth the fish doesn't fight anymore.

 

-Linking with this last one, A better explanation of the lure system.

 Again, say I am a new player, I found the farming set piece with the gardener hat, I know I can farm, and that there are crops and fertilizers that I can research. I grow my first plant and now i know plants need water, that they consume some nutrients and restore others etc. All the basics of farming are taught naturally to the player, obviously they need to put in a lot of effort to learn it but they have the tools. Why can't we have the same for lures, a little enciclopedia from which the player can get the necessary information to sort out fishing by themselves.

 

And related to this, please simplify a bit the lure system, Here's a concept thought as i write this, make it so all lures have different perks and give us new types of fishing rod that can have multiple lures attached, Instead of each lure having different stats in how much they attract the fishes and so on just make it like:

 

Lures that tires the fish faster    Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 4

Lures that attract the fish more  Tier 1 Tier 2 Tier 3 Tier 4

And on top of this some have special perks like attracting only big ones etc.

 

-Fish food should spawn 9 schools of fishes. Not much to add, this will interact nicely with the fish spawners mentioned about, throwing bait so they will come out from the depths.

 

Bosses and Resources

-Crab king rework, i am gonna quote myself from another post made about the topic, just to clarify in case the five people that read it get a deja vu from this one:

 

Current problems:

-Effects given by the gems are inconsequential and there isn't a reason to fight him wit anything but purples

 

-The copious amount of items needed, not even fuelweaver or cc asks for so much

 

-the act of fighting him isn't fun or correlates with anything in the game, it's just counting attacks and cooldowns and using the right weapon, and one slip and you are down. It's mechanical more than it is skill based.

 

My suggestions, based alone in what i would like to see:

-Make the gems you use actually impactful, maybe give him new attacks and make certain gems buff said attacks. Not only in number increases but making them more interesting, say blue gems now not only make his freezing stronger, if enough are plugged he now makes the surface of your boat slippery.

 

-Give him different rewards based on the gems you used, say one special reward for each type of gem, and if you plug three of a kind you get the special reward related to that gem. 3 blue gems gives you an item like the pugilist wand in hamlet that freeze enemies in place, three greens give you an autocrafter etc, this would also improve the replayability of crab king severely after the cc quest.

 

-Remove all abilities that make the player not be able to row or move their boat. Damaging the boat, damaging the player or making the boat move around harder is fine, but making the boat stay in one place and damaging it's not fine or fun, because it interrupts the work flow abruptly and feels more like the game forcing you to pause, do a boring task, and keep going.

 

-Make it so you don't need so many different items to fight the boss, make it similar to fuelweaver, you don't need weatherpains to kill the wovens, it just makes it 10 times easier, same with crab king, gathering more items will make it easier, but they are not compulsory to do the fight, as weatherpains and ice staffs currently are. 

 

Also in the previous post it was said this was the current state but i think using bees and row around the boss it's not a good design

 

-In addition to all this, on top of the already mentioned rewards, it will be great if crab king served as way to get a big amount of bottles to craft from pearl, lore wise it could be him keeping them because he also has not forgotten pearl but he can't go back to her because alter yada yada yada. Which leads us to.

 

-More accessible bottles, make crab king drop 100 bottles(stacked), make sunken chests have 20 bottles each, make them craftable after giving pearl the broken pearl, The possibilities are endless just please pick one

 

In a more serious manner, the main problem with the bottles is that you get more the more you sail, and the player tries to avoid sailing as much as possible, not to mention now that we have boots, the few that we actually sail we do it in far less time and we see far less ocean for bottles to spawn. Also them being rng doesn't help, nobody likes stuff obtained exclusively by rng.

 

-Finally Malbatross, just give us an action or event none dependant on rng that the player can activate to summon her, and maybe buff the sail a little more, the speed and better deployment is lovely but realistic you can not use it because you go so fast you ram through all the sea stacks of the ocean.

 

And there is that, probably the longest post i ve made so far and hopefully the longest i will ever made, There are far more many things i would like to be added to the ocean, especially related to the fauna and flora of it, but the more i thought about i realised that those fell more under the “straight up new content” category not necessarily Quality of Life, so i decided to stick with changes related to the content that we have.

 

I can't wait for the ocean qol, probably one of the updates i ve looked for the most in the past years. Thanks Klei for this amazing game that I love so much and the outstanding amount of work and love you put into it with every update.

 

Thanks for Reading, cheers.

[Radicaljoe]

I do hope they add more life to the ocean. It feels rather dead, you see kelp and fish silhouettes, but mostly empty water and sea stacks. Some peaceful mobs in the ocean would be good too. So far the only two peaceful ocean mobs are the grass gators and gnarwails (and gnarwails are pretty rare.) I miss seeing jellyfish or the cormorant bird areas when randomly sailing around.

[Floguinho]

Firstly hello everyone. I think we need more exciting things for the ocean like ghost ships, merm variants that exchange specific fish for turf blueprints or new structures or even new biomes such as volcanoes or separate biomes from the main map (like the lunar island).  Imagine a jungle biome in the middle of the ocean with new passive or aggressive mobs.  In the end, there are many possibilities for the ocean.