More underwater life would be nice, underwater vehicles that can only operate on/under the water would allow players on water planets increase their playfield. I did try a water planet once but with so little land for resources and water so deep that it took a good 3 minutes just to swim to the bottom, meant it was really limited. With no real water physics to allow us to pump out a water base or allow water to run into a stream or hole, it does limit you to digging below the water level unless you want a lot of work filling and digging out dirt to force the water voxels to disappear. Then you have no water based vehicles so, swimming to the surface every time and keeping all your vehicles up there where they are easy targets is your only option.
At the moment that is correct, a boat has no true purpose as yet as the water is still not in use. At the moment, my hv boats are more flexible than HV in some cases, for the fact that my boats can cross land too, well they are in the future so it makes sense that a boat can cross land now XD but remains boat shaped so that when it goes back to the water it can go in the water and provide a safe diving platform. A boat HV right now gives a more secure and stable less risky dive platform, it is purpose built to be in the water so players would opt for a boat hv in future in cases where the water has more features that makes visiting it more relevant. It wont accidentally sink if you touch the surface of the water which every HV owner is pretty concerned about these days. Yeah the default planets lack enough water. As far as planetary land masses there is a consistent flaw in all eleons planet designs. As it stands the game only generates solid land mass planets with lakes, I suppose this is to allow players to navigate the planet on foot or bike at early stages. A typical real planet containing water would actually be a complete water planet but with islands and continents, lets look at earth as example. As it stands the game only generates solid land mass planets with lakes by default but we can make it do the other way using epd or that ssg tool. I have generated a class 4 and class 5 planet of 80% water and 20% land mass, it gave me planets like earth, water everywhere with a bunch of islands and continents scattered about but allowing a complete water passage of the whole planet. These planets were perfect, beautiful even for my boats and I still run the class 5 planet now on my server where I have a villa on the edge of one island along with its own wooden boat dock/harbour for my few yachts. One thing I would like to see myself, and this applies to all aspects of empyrion not just water, is for server admins to be able to create a network of invisible pathways to assign an ai vessel to follow. For example I could set my cruise ship to slowly navigate the planet across several pre made map lines and that ship becomes active scenery ! I would do the same for cargo ships too giving them a starting point and a destination with realistic stop times at those locations to account for loading/unloading. I am sure everyone would agree that some form of ai course mapping even to a limited degree would provide a little more atmospheric immersion in some cases allowing us to create a living world in a sense. Imagine a water planet where ai boats are tracking from port to port here and there. Players could hitch a ride on them early game Maybe i could then map an sv to auto take off vertically from the depot when the transport barges have returned, giving the impression that the boats have stocked up a depot and the depot is sending the goods into space to be transported to another planet, or vice versa for goods coming in. There would be no actual goods of course, its just vessels moving around.
There are a couple of water planets out there but they are limited as you say, however I generated my own ones and my fav, is the class 5 an ocean globe with some large continents and small islands which on the map look small but are a lot bigger when you see them. There is still a total landmass on this planet that probably adds up to the size of a class 4 complete solid land planet, so there is more than enough build space here and that was setting the planet to 80% water 20% land in ssg. You can clearly and easily use water to navigate the whole planet here. The water is only as deep as the game default planets on my water planet, I did not drown this planet, the reason your planet was bad must have been because its creator made it by simply raising the water level. Instead it is better to just change the land mass percentage settings unless you are looking for extreme deep water and lack of land. Me I wanted to be able to dive for goods on the seabed on my planet so I kept it at normal water height, this was also essential for some of my boats underwater spotlights to work XD
I built boats with SV hulls just for deco in one of my harbors. An SV hull equipped with a fuel tank and generator (Gotta' have lights) will float very nicely.
I'd love seeing hv's become submarines, maybe have a deployable propeller, so when you go into the water the thrusters go off and the propeller folds out, allowing you to use your hv as a sub.
The HV makes sense to me as a basis for a sub. It fits in with the ground-based nature of the HV. That would also make the HV more useful for exploration as well as salvaging underwater wrecks. If it's possible without derailing Eleon's roadmap I would like to see the capability added sooner rather than later. The first implementation can be an installed upgrade with something more fancy later.
Eleon could probably easily add this capability (ideally to both SVs and HVs, though) if they left pressurized interiors until later, especially given that vehicles used to work (but very slowly) underwater previously.
I would love to see some sort of system where water could be pumped to different locations. ie Creating a reservoir on top of a hill where a spill way would lead to a waterfall. I also think it might be an idea to change the need for water. At the moment, it plays little importance in survival. Yes, you need it to create oxygen but you can also do that with the emergency O2 generator and get purified water at the same time. What are the communities thoughts on having some sort of water piping system as a requirement for (or built in to ) grow blocks? Crops do need water. Also, whats the seed for that planet @Furious Hellfire ?
completely support you. The physics of water is very necessary. and you have correctly noticed the extraction of oxygen and the purification of water by an emergency emergency, this is not enough.
The issue with digging in the bottom of water should be easily fixed by increasing the depth of water way below it's current level, then no matter how far you dig you'll always find water, so the water won't fill the whole but it would be there already, or am I being completely stupid ? Regarding watercrafts I think it would be better to add a block devices that makes current vessels (maybe not CV's) water-borne rather than add yet another vehicle type, like a propeler or a waterjet or both.
Unfortunately the seed no longer generates a size 5 temperate manhar and generates a size 3 desert manhar instead since 1 of the patches earlier in alpha 8 release. Even then I had to edit the planet in ssg and change the land to water ratio to 20%/80% To get a size 5 temperate I had to generate a few random seed sp survival games until I finally had one that had a temperate size 5 in the system. Not sure if we can even have size 5 still, did they not remove it ? Anyway once you find a nice big temperate planet, edit it in ssg and change that water to land ratio. I think a size 4 temperate would still be good with land to water set 80% water, and indeed I may have to generate one soon as my manhar planet probably wont have some of the new critter additions.
Will be very cool to see realistic water, for now maybe subnautica is a little to too much for the Dev. Team (if not proof it ) Here is how i think for the first version will be already cool drill a hole next to the water and it will fill up with water, create a waterbase and we don't have to swim inside anymore if the base is water/air sealed and Pressurized. If we can start with this , pretty sure the rest will follow .
I agree abnout the idea of the water base. What I want to see most is a means to teraform some sort of water design into the base to become an indoor swimming pool or even a place to put water generators. On a PVP server, having the water generator where it cannot be easily destroyed by other players would be a blessing. the autominers are not so much of a problem since you can still mine by hand but not being able to generate O2 for your base is a game killer for PVP.
You could always build your base underground such that it pokes up through the seafloor enough to allow a water generator to be housed in an armored bunker. If it becomes possible to move water around, then I'd argue that water sources should deplete in accordance with how much water is removed from them (mass should be conserved). So, sure, you could have an indoor pool to run the water generator from, but you'd have to keep refilling the pool.
Dynamic water is possible but not sure how much programmig would have to be added to incorporate a dynamic volume of water. Ore resources are finite in the game but not fluid so it's easy to remove a given amount of terrain that constitutes the ore deposit. A dynamic resource such as water isn't nearly as easy to keep track of the volume and I think it would require a lot more programming than the devs would care to add, not to mention the lag it would create with the server having to recalculate it constantly. Even in Minecraft, the water is dynamic but does not deplete the source when you dig a hole for it to fill.
Voxel water with a continuity equation might very well be more than the devs want to add at this point. However, without it, I don't see relocatable water being feasible without introducing an infinite source tile like Minecraft has (and most of the exploits that go along with it, like unlimited water (and thus O2 and H2) from a very small finite volume of water). And it doesn't address the issue of building underwater at all. On a related note, water textures for blocks could be a solution for players that just want the visual effects of water (like indoor swimming pools, and such).
We already have unlimited water and the unlimited Oxygen and Hydrogen that comes with it. There is no volume to the water we currently have so a tiny pool of water allows a water generator to run forever. Now you're just making excuses. Before you pass judgement, remember if water can gain access to an underground base to create an indoor water source, so can players. Therefore, despite having water generators safe from direct attack, it also creates a weak spot for enemy players to enter your base. It DOES address underwater builds, with dynamic water, it would be possible to pump out sections of the base and evacuate it into the rest of the pool, using airlocks to secure it from incursion by the water again. We can already do it to a degree by filling with dirt and mining it out again, but this simply destroys the water voxels and can result in ugly air pockets near the walls around the base.
