Well it’s nice when things work out. Turns out my starter base really is directly over the first (250m) proposed habitat location; maybe 20 prawn footsteps after dropping out of the moonpool and I drop straight down to it.
The first time scouting with my Seamoth, descending into the deep dark chasm was fairly unpleasant, but then once I could see the floor it was fine. The walls do help, but the ceiling makes it so much worse. Maybe I am a little claustrophobic after all? Also, those snakes are dicks and I love punching them with the prawn suit so much…
So I explored everything down there with the Seamoth, and am loving the fact that all those blueprints are so close. No plants or seeds, but the multipurpose room so close to the shallows is very nice.
My immediate thought on finding the proposed habitat was that I should build my second base down there for mining the larges. There’s even some sweet volcanoes down there for energy. But then I checked on YouTube and yes, a base model prawn suit can jump out of the jellyshroom caves easily. Just ends up about half a kilometer away from the entrance I’m using, but that’s not the longest walk in the world, and once I get the jump jet upgrade I can go directly back out the way I go in. So my starter base turns out to be already where the second base was going. Score!
So anyway, after scouting everything down there, I hop in my prawn suit, drop out of the moonpool (after adding three storage upgrades) and for the first time ever start walking around with it, directly to the cliff edge / cave entrance. It’s night but I’m going deep so who cares, right? Over the edge, going down, down, down, bang, jet, down, down, no!, so dark, down, scary! Managed a pleasantly light touchdown but boy that descent was horrifying. Doing it at night turned out to be a bad decision. But okay no problem, walk up to a large magnetite (HELL yeah!) and start punching the s*** out of it. And, nothing happens, because drill arms are sold separately? Are you f****** kidding me?! On the plus side, the 5-minute YouTube video demonstrating the exit with a base prawn suit paid off big time. The climb out was trivially easy both to recognize and to control, and the 450m walk back to the base was perfectly acceptable.
Looked up where the blueprints for the goddamn drill arm (lol) are, limited to large wrecks less than 300m deep (I need the drill arm to mine the magnetite to upgrade the seamoth to go deeper), there’s only one but it’s only half a kilometer away directly south, jump in the seamoth and go. Quite the drop off getting to this large wreck – queasy – and as it’s just coming into view I saw some weird creature creeping around it. The music changed, the whole soundscape was signaling danger, and this medium-sized blue/purple squid/octopus kind of thing was flitting around the wreck; almost seemed to teleport. Short distance, like nightcrawler. I did not want anything to do with this thing so I booked it. Halfway home I remembered that I was in the middle of something, so I went back, cautiously, and found the drill arm fragments on a ledge above the wreck. That sketchy monster thing wasn’t around so I just scanned and ran. (You know the lemming/idiot impulse, where when you look over a cliff you get that faint urge to jump? When I first saw it, I had the impulse to get out of the seamoth and swim up to that thing and try and scan it. heh. I still might, but I want to play around with stasis guns first.)
So now I finally have a functional reason for putting a base in a particular place. Easy prawn suit access to plentiful large lithium and magnetite. Highest roof is less than 20m deep so solar power should be good. Overlooking a grassy plateau, nice for parking a cyclops. Close enough to the shallows that it can be the very first thing I build, no temporary structure needed. Clearly not radioactive at the start, as you can see me farming the area in my speed start video. Perfect.
From checking out YouTube for recommended base locations and building tips, I’m not sure how many bases I’m actually going to be building. Might be only two or three total.
I had deliberately not looked at any base designs in any videos all this time. I just wanted to figure it out myself. Now that I’ve found (“created” might be more accurate, but it always feels more like found) the design I want, it was fun to start checking out what other people had going on. I have to say, I really don’t like the large and elaborate base designs I see in most videos. Like, really a lot don’t like them. To me it’s all about shortest distance / fewest steps, easy direct access from everywhere to everywhere, plus having as many convenient and scenic places to sit as possible. I also only want a fraction of the storage some of these guys are building. I thought I was excessive but it turns out I’m an extreme minimalist.
