How many people have ever completed this without a walkthrough? I needed hints or help 4 or 5 times, to find things as large as regions and as small as plants, plus point me back at a couple of things like PDAs I hadn’t seen in passing.
Hard to believe anyone would have made it through the full thing without some crowdsourced wisdom!
Great question, I used hints but a lot of it was due to the game not being done at that point. I had to go look up that, “it stops here, no progress until later.” So I stopped. Then when I restarted I did so fresh and forgot about half the stuff I’d found and done so used the wiki yet again.
It wasn’t so much what to do, it was where to go. With no map it was really hard to understand what was where and where the story could be advanced.
As an example, you get a radio broadcast for a location ~near~ one of the entrances to the underground river. But quite honestly there was a reaper near there when I first went down there and I get the stuff from that pod and bailed out. I never EVEN saw that entrance until I checked the wiki and went back on purpose.
Upon playthrough number 2 I found one of the additional facilities down there as well. There wasn’t anything directly needed there but it had additional story stuff and a couple of alien tablets if I remember right.
Yeah, and the cost of rebuilding your vehicles seemed so high early on that it discouraged exploration too. I wonder if the mode with unlimited resources works well, but you don’t know what you gamestyle you need until you’ve sunk a lot of time in :) I can’t imagine playing needing food and water.
I, on the other hand, can’t imagine playing without them. I’m not even sure what a base is for without those requirements. It would just be a big storage locker. I always wished there was a sleep requirement - all that bedroom furniture and no reason to use it.
Bases did seem to lack something of a point. Some air, a scanner, a wall for the fabricator to stick to…
Well, sitting stops food and water drain, so that furniture has a use. And a bed can be used to bypass night if that’s a thing for you; I think it advances charge on batteries and growth time on plants as well.
I just dig building bases. But even with food and water included, you don’t really need much in the way of a base. Like Alistair says, you can probably get by with a tube until you have a cyclops. And once you have a cyclops, you can stuff pretty much everything in it.
So beds get you through night? The things you learn :/
It actually isn’t a problem from about mid-game on. So it’s a strange mechanic to slow the beginning player down. The water filtration machine makes good water, and also salt, which you use to preserve fish. As you wander around you also pop into a LOT of spots where Reginalds swim. But really, once you get marblemelon you just fill up on that, head out, come back and fill up again, repeatedly. You don’t even need your water at that point.
Map mod was one of the first things I installed. No map was insanely annoying.
Holy shit.
I had completely forgotten about that.
I never knew! How are you supposed to know shit like that? Is it in the item description in the PDA?
This is the game I just can’t imagine is good. Underwater scuba diving alien? Do you ever have a resistance to a game you KNOW is probably excellent but you just don’t want to try?
Vin convince me if you ever feel like you want to.
Even better, put marblemelon plants inside the cyclops so that your food & water source travels with you.
Still, I thought the food and water fit well with the survival aspect. Early on it’s more of a big deal. As you progress through the game, you find better ways to handle it. Reminded me a bit of Tom Hanks’ character in Castaway (although not that extreme).
This annoyed me at first, too, but once I started placing beacons everywhere and learned how to turn them on/off, I embraced the no-map concept.
My first playthrough was 3 days and change. Over 72 hours! I’d venture some place, build a satellite base, and then explore from there. Every once in a while coming back to the main base and building the new things I’d learned while out & about.
I can remember a big NOPE the first time I was heading down in the blood forest & one of the warpers appeared. I backed out & said maybe later.
I envy people who play this for the first time.
Food and water were not a challenge. It was just an annoying system. If I ever do another playthrough, it will be with that stuff turned off.
As for the rest of the base, it was mostly a storage system for me. The food part was pretty much the same as well, just a storage system for salted fish and even a locker full of purified water.
One thing I thought was a terrible design decision and is primarily why I spent a lot of time googling stuff was the lack of an in-game map. It absolutely makes no sense from a lore standpoint as well. You have an AI assistant that can analyze flora and fauna, yet a basic mapping function is not included? They have a whole set of crash survivor software in the damn thing. If you had such technology, a mapping system would be one of the first things you had included.
The beacons were a very poor substitute.
Personally I didn’t mind the lack of maps and I didn’t use many beacons. But then I’m really good at navigation, so I could mostly just get back to where I’d been before. Agreed that it seems like a weird omission. Maybe they had trouble making an automatic map that contained the right level of detail, was comprehensible and didn’t give away secrets they preferred to keep hidden. The 3D nature of the world is a bit tricky.
A less detailed map that just has major points of interest and biomes would help. As has been commented on before, some of the sense of wonder does come from the world seeming vast and confusing - a map would presumably change that a bit.
Food and water is a reason to engage with portions of the environment I’d otherwise ignore. As previously mentioned, I doubt I’d have built anywhere near the base I built if farming and water filtration weren’t an issue. I know I’d never have so much as looked at a fairly sizable number of smaller creatures in the game if I wasn’t concerned about them as food/water sources. I’d absolutely have never paid any attention to the portions of the local plant life that were edible, and certain locations would have been vastly less exciting as a result.
Simply put, I found food and water engaging, not annoying. Other aspects of the game (too much hostile wildlife) were annoying, I wonder if I’d have stuck with it long enough to get to the interesting plot stuff without the survival stuff to engage me early on.
It’s an open world survival game in a unique environment with an engaging sci fi plot (once you get far enough in). I’m not entirely sure I understand the block, knowing what I know about your gaming tastes.