Marine Essentials

Project ID: 1256116

This mod introduces various new early-mid game structures and items to improve the aquatic aspects and resource hunting. Marine Essentials drew heavy inspiration from ARK Evo's Safe Waters 2. This mod adds the following items&structures:

Coastal Workbench: custom crafting station with oceanic flair, to craft all the newly introduced items. Engram Level: 31, 14 points.

Carion Lure: custom aquatic creature lure, with savage appearance emitting a sonar like tone in addition to spiked carions, to attract potential aquatic Prey to its position.

Basic Swimming Glasses: "light" version of the scuba gear glasses. Same functionality(clear sight), but can't be connected to a scuba suit. Lower armor&durability. Unlocks level 31, 9 points.

Basic Swimming Flippers: "light" version of the scuba gear flippers. Same functionality but only half as effective(faster swim, slower walking). Also has lower armor&durability. Unlocks level 31, 8 points.

Pulse Beacon Repulsor: an one time use electronic repulsor, deterring most aquatic and amphibic creatures, but is specially attractive for creatures that are affine to electricity. Unlocks level 52, 12 points.

Lazarus Candy: "light" version of the Lazarus Chowder, with 50% less effectivity(oxygen, stamina), but has significantly higher spoiling duration. Unlocked by default, no engram needed.

Refer to the image section for accurate display of resource prerequisites.

Is it multi platform?

Yes, it is. Multi platform uploads will happen on a less frequent base though.

What assets did you use?

All props were vanilla integrated inside the dev kit and customized were needed. Texture customization happened using Gimp. Most icons are custom made to prevent updates messing up icon pathes.

Can we customize the mod with .ini setting?

Yes. You can set up the distance the Carion Lure is attracting "natural" Prey, you can set up the interval(in seconds, default: 900.0) when to spawn in "unnatural" Prey, aka creatures that do not exist in the world already. You can set up the maximum amount of artificially created Prey(default: 10) and you can set up an initial delay of when the Carion Lure is supposed to spawn in Prey.

[MarineEssentials]
FishAttractRadius=25000.000000
SpawnIntervalPrey=900.000000
MaxSpawnedPrey=10
InitialSpawnDelay=1800.0000

Any console commands and engrams?

Find the mod folder(refer to project id) and find a file labeled "manifest". You will find everything you need inside. Alternatively you can use any of the Admin-Mods available on the Curseforge.

How exactly do we use those things?

Coastal Workbench: available to be crafted in player inventory up on engram unlocked. Supposed to build all custom items shipped with the mod. Can be placed near anywhere.

Carion Lure: supposed to be placed in water only. You must face the surface of the water to let it snap. From there everything is happening automatically, if you had find the right spot. It will send out a continous ping to attract potential prey to its location. But beware, this lure doesn't only attract Prey.

Potential Prey is: Ammonite, Angler Fish, Archelon, Basilosaurus, Cnidaria, Electrophorus, Eurypterid, Hesperornis, Kairuku, Karkinos, Trilobite

How responsive the various creatures act to your lure depends on their current AI focus, the weather, their level and, most importantly, if you have choosen a good spot. If you get no response(specially in single player) make sure to deactivate hibernation and/or increase the attractor range(25000.000 units by default).

If there is no natural Prey attracted, after a customized amount of time the Carion Lure will start to gradually spawn in creatures. The list does not spawn in Archelon, Basilosaurus, or Karkinos, but regular "Fish" and other marine creatures that consider you "Prey". I'm not going to ruin the surprise.

Make sure not to go full yolo for the interval/delay and keep those creature quantities rationally low. The current default checks every 15 minutes, after a 30 minute init delay and starts off with a 5% chance to spawn something. After 24 hours this chance is raised to 25%, after 36 hours to 75% etc.. The Carion Lure can potentially crash your server in less than 3 seconds if you use a 1 second interval and raise the quantitie to "I love Crashes!". My recommendation is to adapt the frequencies to your day time duration(4,5 hours for me = 16.200 seconds), for higher "immersion". Remember that the spawn will happen gradually more often the longer the Carion Lure stays placed. You've been warned!

You can not use the Carion Lure in shallow water or swamps, to prevent spawning in Megalodons and similar size creatures. This would be for teh lulz only so long.

Lazaurs Candy: basically an exact copy of the Lazarus Chowder, but only half as effective and significantly higher spoiling time. Also, no water needed to craft.

Basic Swimming Gear: Basic Swimming Glasses and Flippers. Nerfed versions of the original Scuba Gear. The Glasses can NOT be connected to a Scuba Suit for extra air, and the Flippers are only half as effective, have virtually no armor protection, and significantly reduced sustainability, while their crafting prerequisites are virtually the same as the original gear, for balance reasons.

Pulse Beacon Repulsor: it's basically working the same way as the Carion Lure, only it has a slightly different sonar frequency to actually repell most aquatic creatures. But beware, some of those creatures are attracted to it, given the device is using high frequent electricity to work.

How well the repellant effect works depends on the distance to the creature(don't get too close), their current AI driven "hunger"(aka aggression for food) variable, their level and how well their AI responds to your repelling efforts. Thing of it like a Fighter Jet ejecting Chaff. It will work most of the times, but sometimes...you're just out of luck. So stay vigilant you will!?

Any future plans?

Well yeah, I think so. There were a lot of things on my table that I had planned, but wasn't capable of implementing due to time/skill/sanity reasons. Here's a "To-Do"-list:

custom appearance for the swimming gear and more customized features
fine tuning the Carion Lure and add/remove prey from the list
more repelling and "Lazarusing" variant items
under water light devices with potential repell/attratc functions as well
a dedicated unbreakable underwater "bone spear"
add gorish FX to the Carion Lure
Chumming Lure as item to specially attract Sharks