New Tall tale Suggestion: Deep Sea Exploration (Deeper water, deeper shipwrecks, underwater caves, and Merfolk City)

Forgot to mention, the Diving bell ONLY works if the ship is anchored, to prevent complications with running into rocks with it. While the diving bell is down, the anchor can't be raised, either, so Pirates will have to be careful about how deep they go when other pirates might come along and sink their ship, leaving them deep underwater with no air pocket.

Of course, this would require making the sea deeper. My idea is to make a separate, instanced "Deeps" area, almost a second sea beneath the existing one.

When the diving bell hits what would normally be the lowest point a swimmer could reach, it would load into this "Second Sea" at the coordinates it entered. Most of this Deeps area would be sea floor and the edges of various islands. Loot can spawn down in the Deeps, and there could be skeletons down here (Primarily the Coral and Plant skeletons (remodeled to look like seaweed covered instead of regular plants) Since only Diving bells could enter the Deeps, there would be no ship combat normally, except that some of the underwater caverns might have enough air at the top to actually float some ships. In fact, as part of the Merfolk search mission, the crew would discover just one such "Undersea lake" area, where they could use some instanced ships.

@redwoodtheelf I really hope they do something more with “the deep” for sure. Cool ideas man.

@enf0rcer said in New Tall tale Suggestion: Deep Sea Exploration (Deeper water, deeper shipwrecks, underwater caves, and Merfolk City):

@redwoodtheelf

Great post althou a few changes would have to be made as licensing juels vern material could prove costly and problematic. Also we don't need a machine or sub when we have magic. Nemo sub is quite cool but it does quite fit with the time period or astechic of SoT world.

Other those two things i don't see any issues i too wanted a diving bell and more under water content. I really want to go to karen lair and get all that treasure she owes me back.

You don't need to license Jules Verne's books, they're old enough to be in the public domain. As long as you don't adapt someone ELSE'S adaptation (Like making Nemo look like and sound like James Mason and using Disney's design for the Nautilus) You'll be fine. And the submarine is trapped in a small cavern (read the book "mysterious Island" - the idea is to make one of the islands in the Devils' Roar into that island, with the Nautilus trapped beneath it. So no usable submarines, only very limited vertical diving bell usable off the back of your ship, (and remember, it replaces a rowboat, so it's a tradeoff to put one on your ship at the ship customization chest.

And what happens when your ship sinks? I would design the diving bell so that if this happens, the cable to the surface detaches, and it still works to go up and down via a ballast system, but of course there's no ship to return to. The players could use it to return to the surface with their loot, and it would float, but if you leave it to get your ship, it would last for a while and then despawn, like a rowboat, leaving your loot floating.

@galactic-geek said in New Tall tale Suggestion: Deep Sea Exploration (Deeper water, deeper shipwrecks, underwater caves, and Merfolk City):

Merfolk lore is on it's way - should be here within the next year or so. Proof of this is provided right here on the forums in 1 of the developer Q&As.

As for submarines, diving bells and helmets, and Nemo, I dunno. It sounds great, but it may be too advanced for the current time period.

It's actually from the same time period. Jules Verne wrote way ahead of his time. And a diving bell isn't exactly "advanced" - Designs for it date back to the 4th century BC and Aristotle. And of course the helmet is purely cosmetic and gives no "Breathing underwater" bonus.

Maybe some special new kind of loot only available in the deep would be amazing. It would need to be valuable to be worth risking your ship for

The Diving Bells would also add some new dimensions to sneaking and PVP. Since they can only be entered from the water via a short ladder, it would add another way to hitch a ride on someone's ship, though you couldn't get on the ship itself from inside the bell. The bell has windows, so you could be spotted from outside, though it would protect you from attacks unless someone climbed up inside to swing a sword at you, or lined up a shot from under the water. The bell itself can be damaged by cannonfire or barrels, absorbing up to 4 holes from a barrel explosion, and requiring repairs before it can be used if damaged. This means that if a barrel explodes inside the bell, the ship itself would only take holes if more than 4 holes are applied to the bell, the extra holes being applied to the rear decks of the ship.

So hiding in the bell would let a pirate travel along with the ship, and if the ship drops anchor, the pirate inside could take the bell down to prevent the anchor from being raised, since the Capstan locks in place if the bell is down. The bell could be detached from the ship by a lever on the ship or a lever inside the bell (it can be reattached much like a rowboat later) which would allow the anchor to be raised again. If the diving bell is lost (either sunk or stolen) it can be recovered by going to a shipwright, removing the diving bell option from the ship and putting it back on.

If a ship has a diving bell down in the deeps, an attacker has some new options. They could either sink the ship and wait for the bell to come back up (But if they sink the ship, the enemy crew would know their ship was destroyed, since the bell would be detached) or wait for the bell to return before attacking, or (if they have their own diving bell) sink the ship and go down in their own bell to attack the crew and steal the loot.

Additional note: Loot dropped in the Deeps is waterlogged and sinks to the bottom instead of floating to the surface (but doesn't despawn immediately like loot that sinks in the upper islands areas) This means that you can only get loot from the deeps to the surface using a diving bell. The deeps would have its own versions of the various chests with the prefix "Waterlogged" in front (Waterlogged Captain's Chest, Waterlogged Seafarer's Chest, etc) with the special property that they sink slowly in water instead of floating on the surface. In the upper regions, they despawn if they hit the Deeps boundry, or 10 minutes after settling on the bottom in shallower areas.

@galactic-geek anyway you could get me a link to that Q&A my friend?