Ponderings of a Malnourished Ham

[Gotheran]

So after a few hours of toying with Shipwrecked, I noticed immediately resource abundance was absurdly low as well as how widely spread out the first island can be from just about everything. My biggest concern right now is where is the food, one would imagine in the water, but fishing holes are pretty far apart, there's no quick and easy ranged weapons to hit the rather speedy dogfish with, and while I haven't survived very long on any given run the Snails on rocks don't seem to respawn, assuming they do they're pathetically weak food for waiting so long. Seaweed seems to make a decent food but it's very spread out and on my last run where I used the console to view the whole map I found no area's of significant seaweed that one could gather.

 

Starving aside, I did find a couple of bugs worth mentioning.

 

I found that Spider Dens can be planted upon the ocean at your leisure.

 

This greeted me on the beginning of a New world, it's one of those Jungle trees that seemed to be designed intentionally to block your view of the situation.

 

In general my framerate was quite poor at all times, especially worse in Jungles and Deep ocean area's and around the volcano for obvious reasons. It's comparable to being in a really thick pine forest in the base game while it's on fire. (I have a fairly low end system but DS:RoG runs quite nicely 90% of the time)

 

And while not a major issue, Maxwell's shadows don't seem to be able to machete things, and sometimes get stuck on the ocean when dismounting their boats.

 

For the world gen, I would say make the center of the map a medium/small archipelago of small islands with only a few key biomes vital to starting your adventure, with the outlying area's boasting more sizable landmasses(or reefs/swamps) with multiple biomes and greater risk/rewards the further you stray from the center of the map. I'm also seeing potential concerns with some materials not existing naturally in the SW world, such as hounds teeth for the sewing kit as a primary example. Another thing to strike me was the noticeable lack of minimap icons, some seemingly important resources I found to not be on the map (food being chief amongst them). For the most part I feel Shipwrecked feels very much like caves, very empty and not survivable for long without bringing some equipment with you to make a stable footing with.

 

For now I'll probably be putting SW down until a couple major content patches have been added, but I'm very willing and eager to share some creative thoughts on things to add.

[CameoAppearance]

Limpet rocks do respawn, but it takes a few days and there aren't usually more than a handful of them on one small to medium island, so you can't eat just limpets if you're stuck in one place for a while. (Although when it's literally the first day of Early Access I wouldn't rule out your limpet rocks being bugged.) They're similar to berry bushes that way. And the snail rocks do have their own map icon, although crab holes don't. I would also suggest chopping down jungle trees, but with care, since snakes fall out of them sometimes instead of food.

 

Hound teeth should be obtainable, because there's hound attacks, although I don't know if they still come after you if you're on the water when they arrive. Might take a while for two teeth to drop though, you're at the mercy of the RNG. (By contrast, I haven't seen a single spider. But I know they must exist because I looked at the crafting recipes and lots of them still need silk.)

 

I also think the place where the player spawns should always be within a few islands of at least one gold-bearing boulder, so that you don't have to hunt all over the map for a single piece of gold to use in a Science Machine if you were unlucky with your spawn.

 

So far Shipwrecked doesn't remind me of caves, it reminds me of Adventure Mode. That's for two reasons: 1) It seems like you're intended to keep moving onward and not spend a ton of time in any one spot, but you'll need to make a camp at some point early on, to prototype recipes and cook advanced food; 2) The resources are scarcer than Sandbox Mode. It is harder to get food, even though many basegame foods have a nautical equivalent.

[TemporaryMan]

If only you could make a sewing kit with shark teeth...

[Gotheran]

I've been thinking, there are many creatures in DS with some rather nice looking choppers, would it be that unrealistic to rename them say Eviscerating Tooth and have things like the Depths worms, or the little Piranha Sharks in SW drop them?