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subnauticmods ([personal profile] subnauticmods) wrote in [community profile] fishesoutofwater2016-04-14 11:53 pm
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TEST DIVE #2








≡U.R.S.U.L.A. NAVIGATION
TEST DIVE MEME


For information about the animals and locations, be sure to check out the BIOME and BASE pages!

A: There’s a Storm on the Horizon
A brainstorm. On advice about the ingenuity of multi person parties, and from admitted lack of understanding of many needs of organics, URSULA has selected you and a partner (or partners) to go to one of the observatories with food, beds, and recording devices to have a jam session for ideas about missions.

You are not to leave the room until you have some good ones. So get cracking! Start suggesting to one another what the base needs to do.

Or get horribly, horribly sidetracked and possibly a little crazy at being locked up together with the ocean staring at you. Judging.

B: The Abysmal Sea
You’re stranded.

One of the planet’s troublesome signal-interfering pulses has just made your communication devices 100% nonfunctional. No matter how you try to call URSULA for help, she isn’t able to respond. The database strapped to your wrist is just a useless chunk of metal now, leaving you without a useful library of knowledge to survive off. If you were driving any underwater vehicle prior to this point, it’s broken down. And unless you’re a mechanic, it’ll be pretty hard to get it jumpstarted again.

Don’t fret! The communication systems always come online eventually, so if you stay put, it’ll boot back up and give you directions straight back to base so you can finally get home. But can you really afford to stay put? The sunlight’s slowly streaming out of the sky, leaving the waters darker and darker with each passing second. Soon, you won’t be able to see five feet in front of you, and the only warning you’ll get of any approaching threat is through sound, if they even make any.

You have a few choices: take a daring risk and try swimming back to base, but on the off-chance you don’t remember the directions correctly from before you were cut off, you’re going to get even more lost, in the darkness of the night no less. Or, you could huddle in, with any friends if they were unfortunate enough to be with you, and start focusing on getting warm. Because spending the night out here in the vast oceans with the entire world against you is becoming a very, very real possibility.

C: It’s dangerous to go alone. Take them!
URSULA’s technology is breathtaking. With enough materials, she could make practically anything: weapons, vehicles, all those human comforts and entertainments she forgot to build... or perhaps she could expand the base to give everyone even more leg room. But there’s a catch: you need to get those materials to her in the first place, and scavenging can be a monumental task.

The planet Iniidae has a plethora of materials to provide, but you’ve got to go find them first. Some are easy enough to get, by plucking off the ground or breaking a rock. But some are a bit more challenging, such as Crash Powder, seeing that the Crash defending it will literally explode in your face if you get too close. And then there’s materials such as Blood Oil, only harvestable within the Blood Kelp Caves several hundred meters underwater in the pitch-black darkness… remember, you have to gather resources with your two bare hands. No such thing as driving around and conveniently collecting them within the somewhat-relative safety of an armored vehicle.

Since it’s so dangerous to go alone, URSULA will encourage you all to leave the base in pairs or groups if you’re going to try collecting some of the more precarious materials to harvest. She has heard that most lifeforms find being reconstituted from nanites traumatic, so try not to die in front of each other!

D: Almost, but not quite, Entirely Unlike Tea
The droids, URSULA promises, will do their best to make anything you want. Go on! Ask them anything! She’s excited. This seems like a great way to test out their capacities.

Of course, you need to be very careful what you wish for. Maybe you ask for Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and they do their best but only know so much, giving you a book with some… creative changes. Maybe you ask for a puzzle box, but you weren’t specific enough and things went awry.

Maybe you made the mistake of asking for tea..

No matter what, you were given something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike what you asked for. Now what do you do with it?

E: CREATURE FEATURES (possible body horror)
As more data is collected on the creatures of the deep, DNA can also be gathered to allow URSULA to research how to integrate it into her crew members in useful and hopefully unintrusive ways, unless of course permission is given first for more obvious or exhausting additions.

Well, that's the idea, anyway.

Unfortunately, something malfunctioned while URSULA was researching. Her incomplete serum was injected into you through your devices while you slept (or maybe you were knocked unconscious by the sudden change to your body). Now maybe you have the temperament of a Stalker or the thirst of a Bleeder or Gasopod pods on your back that trigger when you're startled. How this genetic malfunction works and what it is can be up to you but while URSULA assures you it's only temporary, you're stuck like this for now.

Have fun?

F: The Caverns of Dream
The ocean calls you. Of course, it's much easier to dismiss it as nightmares. You'll probably think that's all it is after you have them. Flashes of screaming sea creatures writhing in agony, pleading for help, but these creatures can't ask for help, can they? Something huge, beyond the scope of imagination, moves in the ocean of your dreams and calls out to you to go deeper into the darkness. It pleads and begs but not with a voice you can hear or words you can understand.

You wake up in a sweat with the unrelenting desire to take a swim, even though it's late and everyone is asleep. Or maybe someone else just had the same nightmare as you? Are you willing to take a swim and try to understand the dream?


BASED ON CODE BY TESSISAMESS AND SUPERSUITS


splinten: appl-juice42 @ tumblr (dude come get the ruler)

[personal profile] splinten 2016-04-27 06:07 pm (UTC)(link)
[He will answer the implicit question, but first, he does take a moment to be amused at the question. They really are not in a great place for drinkables. (Can kelp be squeezed to make a juice? Maybe it would actually be palatable. Fucking oceans.)]

Before we move on to what may or may not be an interesting cultural discussion, depending on how much you're willing to do it, I want to point out that the biggest problem we have with food here is the lack of spices. I haven't seen anything in URSULA's databases yet that could counter that, but let me know if you discover anything.

This jelly could theoretically work for some kind of glaze or something, but I cannot get it to melt. I'm imagining that our best chance at the moment is to chop it all up and mix it together as a stir fry. Even if that doesn't spread the taste of the jelly to the fish, spooning up the mix will get the flavors.

I'd normally just roast the entire thing on an open fire but I don't think URSULA would appreciate that inside the base.

[Explanation done, Dirk gets to work with the cubing for his attempt at a meal.]

Going back to the topic at hand, I can't say that my interest is anything other than academic. I'm not especially interested in politics in general, but cultures are a major interest of mine.

[He doesn't go into detail why. That he lived post-culture, floating in the refuse of a world long gone by.]
maserannas: (smile | leaders would be borne of you)

[personal profile] maserannas 2016-04-28 05:05 am (UTC)(link)
[ She breathes out in a soft snort, not even because of what he says. A small shake of her head accompanies a dismissive sort of motion. ]

Then you may be more interested in our stories than anything else. There's another young person on base who's been gathering stories, as a means of entertainment and informing. You may find talking to her enlightening, should she share what she's been collecting.

[ Ellana tries to imagine Mai deciding not to share, and can't see that she'd decline. It'd go against the very nature of why she's collecting stories in the first place. As for the other truth... ]

Open fires are certainly easier on the surface. Which we can get to, just not fully dry.

[ But enough with the technicalities! ]

There's bound to be plants or animals we can drum up to use as spices, once we understand how to use them. Understandably, we've been primarily focused on finding staples for food and supply generation, less the finer things that make life a little more tolerable. As for your suggestion, sounds like a fine one to me.

[ Assuming stirfry is slang for stirring and frying what one is eating, of course. ]