Message Bottles and Treasure improvements/suggestions

[Maxil20]

With the changes to treasures being made much more lucrative with the addition of the archive boat/ancient tree seeds (which I am looking forward to a lot!), I figured it would be a good time to resurface the main issues that a lot of people have with bottles, those being the compounded 2 issues:

1. Bottles spawn, per player, every 1-2 days. This becomes quite problematic solo to effectively hoard bottles and especially because you don't really have any good indicators to find spawned bottles in a vanilla context other than the horizon expandinator, which makes it very easy to miss them and wait another 1-2 days for another to spawn.
2. The chance to snag a treasure from a bottle is completely reliant on rolling a 1 in 3 chance (assuming you have already found the Pearl island, which given you need the winch from her this really isn't much of a problem)

I feel that the issues by themselves are not too bad, but are so troublesome due to both being in effect. It makes treasure hunting a lot more cumbersome than it should be, since you moreso are waiting for bottles to spawn with the treasures inside then heading to the location where the treasure is buried and snagging it if you are primarily aiming to hunt treasures down.

The solution is fairly simple, as all it really takes is reducing or removing one of the two requirements. Of course, the most popular one I've seen is all bottles post Pearled CK being guaranteed treasure bottles. This feels both thematic and would give another reason to fight pearled CK that isn't just to get the altar to progress the CC questline.

Bottle spawning could also use some improvements. Reducing the time variance from a bottle from a full day to around half a day would go a long way to making bottles more consistent to get, along with a way to reduce the spawn delay if the player had not picked up the bottle that spawned and had become unloaded.

It could also be neat if the bottles spawn was dynamically adjusted based on players, where one player would have more effective bottle spawns, but more players would have a noticeable but not as much of a requirement (Ex: 1 player has bottle spawn rate times cut in half, a 2nd player on a boat improves the rate to a third of the time, a 3rd to a forth, etc.). This would help solo players a lot without boosting rates by a comical amount with a full party of players on a boat, only really diminishing with 5+ compared to the current system that is in place at the moment.

Overall, I am hopeful changes are made to make spawning treasures more intriguing. The alt pirate raids seem very nice as a boost, but I do hope the original system gets changes to make it more smoother to farm those, as well!

 

[HeatAndRun]

I agree current way to obtain bottles is a bit tedious. I also think a point of interest that guarantees constant empty bottle would be nice.

[arubaro]

Dont forget the limit of 4 X marks per world at once

[Valase]

message bottles could start to "spawn" in other places too, such as Ocean Debris, pirate stashes and maybe washed ashore on lunar island/beach turf.

As those are things that a bottle could end up "clinging to".

[ADM]

I feel quite successful at finding the bottles already, but then I only play multiplayer, so a fair way to buff it for solo without making it ridiculous with friends would simply be to change the spawn rate to a fixated amount regardless of player count. Could be the current equivalent of 2 or 3 people and that just doesn't increase.

 

And regarding treasures... it's not even funny to get letters after letters at some point, it can go on a streak so damn high... yeah, I'm all for making it guaranteed post the point you have pearled CK done, or rather give back the broken pearl because how do she knows otherwise, I like the symbolic but I want it to have an use too.

 

If the chance for treasures vs letters doesn't change then @arubaro raises an important problem. Because with high bottle spawn rates like I already have, the limit can be reached so quickly at times that a pile of bottles can realistically only increase in size as I only open them to spawn fresh treasures, otherwise that's gone to waste and I'm not too happy about this unstackable hoarding. Since treasures loot can be... not that great, which is likely about to change, I don't typically bother going after the treasures too fast (but one of my friend tends to), because distance, because busy with something else. So it doesn't help my sentiment that this is out of balance, not in a sense that it's "op / weak" but rather a boring loop because there's more supply than demand but it might become actually too good if the limit is increased and loot will become reliably strong.

Not sure if anybody else would like this but I might prefer the idea of unlimited amount of treasure on the map but they will "despawn" (more like stolen by the Moon Quay, explanation wise) after a couple dozen days if ignored and off-screen, only if the icon on the map goes away obviously too.
That'd just be so I can open as many bottles until I'm satisfied about a certain hunt to somewhere.

[lowercase skye]

I'm of the opinion that message bottles don't require any tuning in the same way that seed drops from birds didn't need to be tuned: that is to say, I don't think it's necessary at all, but I won't complain about something being buffed in a way that strictly makes it better for me. I already find myself with piles and piles of message bottles because of the way they spawn directly in your path while just existing on the ocean (which I do a LOT), but I'd be perfectly happy with that pile getting bigger if such a thing improves other people's experience!

[Nogard78]

How about defeating Crab King to spawn 2-3 sunken treasure chests somwhere on the map? That would make both chests better but also give CK better loot and a reason to refight him. Or you could get them some other way sort of like trading (we already have Antlion) or even better when you socket gems he reveals one of his treasures in order to "trick you" to give him gems. 

Since we are on the topic of sunken treasure I always Find it hard to Find them on the map when they spawn on explored area. I am not sure if other people have this problem too but this dark red on dark blue has just not enough contrast. 

[Primalflower]

I really think it would just be nice if after you defeat crab king/give the pearl to pearl then the bottles start to exclusively contain treasures. I don't mind in the loot sense, I think sunken treasures are fine as-is, and i don't have trouble amassing bottles to read. but I think its sad the implication that after you give her the pearl she just keeps fruitlessly doing this thing. It would be thematically satisfying if she stopped sending those notes and just focused on this level of interaction she is maintaining with the survivors.

[Jakepeng99]

8 hours ago, arubaro said:

Dont forget the limit of 4 X marks per world at once

They should remove the limit, or make them visible on the map for all players after some time.