Floaty Boaty Knights balance

[DeputyDeath]

So as anyone who's past day 90 or so will have noticed, the floaty boaty knights have a ludicrously high spawn rate. They seem to spawn next to your boat every 10 days (if not less) and next to whale carcasses in groups of 3. The gears they drop are completely useless - unless you're WX-78, in which case you can basically just eat gears to your heart's content - because you usually only need 3 fridges in a base, and ice fling-o-matics are nowhere near as useful in Shipwrecked as they are in RoG because nothing randomly sets on fire in dry season. You may end up using 8 gears for the entirety of your base, and even that's excessive.

I've accumulated over 80 gears in just over 100 days because of how frequently they spawn, and I can only assume my collection will grow and grow to the point where I'll have storage problems.

To tackle this, I propose that something needs to be done about floaty boaty knights (or, as I'll refer to them from now on, FBKs) or the amount of gears that they drop. So, here are my suggestions:

 

1) Create a boat engine that can be attached to a boat in the sail slot. It will increase the boat's movement speed significantly, but will be fairly costly (e.g. 10-20 gears). It could either be fueled like a campfire or have a durability like a sail (or both). This would make the gears more useful in the long run.

2) Add better defenses against FBKs. If there were craftable defenses, like the houndius shootius, that could be deployed on land and target the FBKs, it would not only make the ridiculous spawn rate slightly more tolerable but could also be used as a method of getting rid of gears. Like the boat engine, the turrets would be crafted with 5 gears or so and could either have a durability (let's say 10 uses) or be powered with fuel like an ice fling-o-matic (i.e. using up fuel when turned on, not when turned off).

The turrets would deal 250 damage (being able to 2 hit an FBK) but would not target or deal damage to anything else and would have a limited amount of health. They would also not be able to be placed on a boat and used at sea for balance.

3) Change the FBK's drops to include things like electrical doodads, gold, rocks, flint and gemstones. This would make them actually useful rather than providing the same, near redundant resource every time they're killed; like bees in the base game. This could be implemented like how a whale carcass drops loot when it is cut open, with the FBK dropping 3 items (4 seems excessive seeing that they spawn in groups), with 2 guaranteed gears and 1 extra item which will have a drop rate depending on the item's quality quality.

4) As an alternative to suggestion '2', friendly FBKs could be crafted that would attack anything that targets you at sea. They would follow you if you're on a boat and stay close to land when you're not. The friendly FBKs should be difficult to craft however to avoid people making massive armies of them and becoming incredibly overpowered in combat. Also, the friendly FBKs should not be able to attack anything on land to avoid people using them as an easy defense against hounds or for spider farming.

5) Add more items that can be crafted with gears. This could be anything, but I can see night vision goggles, boats and science structures being obvious options. Robots could also be created (with gears, obviously) to help with tasks like a pig would (e.g. chopping trees and combat) in return for doubloons.

 

I appreciate any feedback on my suggestions, and thank you if you took the time to read it all! 

 

TL:DR
Floaty Boaty Knights have a very high spawn rate, which makes them fairly difficult to control and leads to the accumulation of inconvenient amounts of gears.

Suggestions to improve this situation:

1) Boat engines (crafted with gears).

2) Craftable turrets to defend against FBKs.

3) Edits to the FBKs' drops.

4) Craftable friendly FBKs (as a defense against hostile FBKs and as a way of using up gears).

5) More equipment and structures that require gears in their crafting recipe.

[hyiltiz]

We have too many gears from them. They could simply drop less gear. Also, instead of making the armor boat with 10 seashells, making it with one gear would be great idea, since we have too many gears.

[HeilerderWelten]

TL:DR

Floaty Boaty Knights have a very high spawn rate, which makes them fairly difficult to control and leads to the accumulation of inconvenient amounts of gears.

Suggestions to improve this situation:

1) Boat engines (crafted with gears).

2) Craftable turrets to defend against FBKs.

3) Edits to the FBKs' drops.

4) Craftable friendly FBKs (as a defense against hostile FBKs and as a way of using up gears).

5) More equipment and structures that require gears in their crafting recipe.

 

In my opinion they should only drop 2 gears when they die.

They also need a melee attack of some kind, to make the fight harder.

 

I like your boat engine idea!

I also love your turret idea, they could also be used to defend your base for volcano bombs

 

Turrets should be fueled with logs and coal like ice flingos,

but you should also sustain them with ammo, like coconuts. (maybe even coconades)

[Prakhar]

THIS! I agree with all your suggestions (especially the friend one) but the major thing is they need to have a lower spawn rate. It's getting annoying and was annoying when for 80 days i had 0 gears and now i have 40+.

[DeputyDeath]

In my opinion they should only drop 2 gears when they die.

They also need a melee attack of some kind, to make the fight harder.

 

I like your boat engine idea!

I also love your turret idea, they could also be used to defend your base for volcano bombs

 

Turrets should be fueled with logs and coal like ice flingos,

but you should also sustain them with ammo, like coconuts. (maybe even coconades)

I love your idea of having the turrets defend against volcano bombs! 

I know that it's good to explore the world during dry season, but it's completely useless to do so late game when you have everything you need to survive. This would be an AMAZING way to ensure you can stay at base!

Maybe these turrets could be separate structures to those that defend against FBKs so that we can get rid of even more gears...

[SenhorLevi00]

Someone make a topic with the same problem and I suggested the same thing you said.

 

The boat engine could be craft using 4 boards 10 gears and 6 charcoal and make it attachable in the sail slot.

 

And make the knights drop less gears.

 

I have the same problem here, in the late game I have 1 chest only for gears and it's very anoying

[SenhorLevi00]

They probably are plaining to use gears to fix the malfunctioning novelty ride, or something like that

[Prakhar]

The last time i killed them, i didn't pick up the gears. Haven't respawned since   .

[Urfable]

I like the idea of them dropping other things since flint/gold and other materials might be hard to come by. The knights can almost be like pirates who just accumulated a bunch of stuff so when you kill them they'll drop a few random things instead of just gears? I'm only on day 58 with a new save file as Wigfrid and i already have about 30 gears sitting in my chest collecting dust.