Underwater salvage means fighting underwater

[Ankhwearer 19]

I am a solo player and am having a lot of trouble finding the right strategy to get loot back up from shipwrecks.

While sharks are annoying, if you have a ton of bows, you can just shoot at him until you die, get a new bow and some more arrows and repeat. Might take three lives, but you'll get him eventually. Strong Arm certainly helps. Although if there are a lot of sharks between you and the wreck, this is going to take a while. Melee is a maybe, if you are in armor (thus not deep sea diving, which removes your armor). But who wants to have to bring multiple suits of armor so you can re-equip and dive again and again?

But electric eels are just not beatable. They are fast faster than you in swimming and have a massive aggro range, so even luring them away from your ship the small distance you can make before they kill you doesn't help. Because you can't get them far enough away from your ship to not aggro on a deep sea diver. Arrows don't make much headway. You can't melee because they stun you. And they tend to come in packs of 2-4 eels.

At least you can outswim jelly fish and kill them with a bow. Assuming nothing else is lurking around.

My concern here is that the underwater spawns seem tuned for ARK, which has tames and mounts. And at least in ARK you have a more powerful (if very expensive) missile weapon to use underwater, the speargun. Even the crossbow would be better than the bow in Atlas. And tuned in both toughness, but also quantity. It is a bit overwhelming for a solo player to want to recover the blueprints from their wreck to have, between their schooner and the wreck (currently) 4 sharks, 3 eels, one sperm whale, and near the bottom an anglerfish I have to dodge by hiding inside the wreck. I've only made one success trip from the bottom to the surface, and that required a recovering mission to get that death cache before the timer ran out. Other attempts failed in to get those death caches all the way to the surface (damn eels).

If this is the case, I fear what will happen with these undersea trenches. If we can't fight a shark, how are we supposed to fight a giant crab? I don't have three Meglodons and some Ichys to keep it busy while i shoot at it with a speargun.

So, am I missing a strategy here? Am I supposed to max out melee or something to make these fights work? Because at level 52, I don't have many respecs left in this game, which is a problem for solo players.

[wildbill 142]

I've wondered this too. They are adding the submarine, not sure if that will help much, I think it has no weapons.

[Percieval 1,067]

1 hour ago, wildbill said:

I've wondered this too. They are adding the submarine, not sure if that will help much, I think it has no weapons.

I don't think sharks will attack a sub. At the start of the game I had troubles fighting off sharks but after that they just don't seem to aggro on me or something. I have not been killed by a shark in the last month. But the sub wil certainly help with salvaging sunken ships in deep waters. 

[EvilNecroid 20]

im a solo player and any ship that goes to the bottom stays on the bottom

[uli 59]

2 hours ago, wildbill said:

I've wondered this too. They are adding the submarine, not sure if that will help much, I think it has no weapons.

The Devs confirmed the submarine will be used for salvaging wrecks no weapons but has arms 

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

Well written post. Thoughtful feedback. Havent dealt with Atlas eels yet but have 4k hours in Ark. sounds like they are the same and given the lack of weapons and tames for dealing with them that is problematic.

[Olthoi 65]

Salvage is my favorite part of the game right now (also a solo player).  I made a ship designed for it.

I'm more worried about storms and SOTD than I am whats under the water.

There are a few mechanics they could tune.  I wish you could split stacks in the chest before bringing it over to your inventory for example.  A resource box with a stack of 5k of something you need to bring over to your inventory, you are immediately too encumbered to move. But you cant split it and put it back so you need to drop it.  And it times out before you can get back down so you lose it.  Nothing worse than getting excited about a 2k stack of Cobalt only to actually recover 250 of it.

For sharks and stuff, I think they need to go away after awhile too, lose interest.  I dont mind getting killed here and there salvaging  (it should be a dangerous), but I also dont want to spend 30 minutes killing a shark (that runs away each time you hit it) only to have another show up when I'm done.  The fun part is the salvage.

Olthoi

Edited February 6, 2019 by Olthoi

[boomervoncannon 1,541]

17 minutes ago, Olthoi said:

Salvage is my favorite part of the game right now (also a solo player).  I made a ship designed for it.

I'm more worried about storms and SOTD than I am whats under the water.

There are a few mechanics they could tune.  I wish you could split stacks in the chest before bringing it over to your inventory for example.  A resource box with a stack of 5k of something you need to bring over to your inventory, you are immediately too encumbered to move. But you cant split it and put it back so you need to drop it.  And it times out before you can get back down so you lose it.  Nothing worse than getting excited about a 2k stack of Cobalt only to actually recover 250 of it.

For sharks and stuff, I think they need to go away after awhile too, lose interest.  I dont mind getting killed here and there salvaging  (it should be a dangerous), but I also dont want to spend 30 minutes killing a shark (that runs away each time you hit it) only to have another show up when I'm done.  The fun part is the salvage.

Olthoi

Excellent point about why stack splitting outside your own inventory is needed.  Also good point about how underwater predators interact with divers, especially given the presently limited tools to fight back against them.

[Jean Lafitte 451]

A few weeks ago a schooner sunk in my (now our) harbor.  What should have been a 20 minute shallow-water salvage operation turned into a 2 hour nightmare of trying to corpse-flop sharks and mantas away from the wreckage.  Learning rather quickly that killing said sharks was not going to be a viable option as the bow does little damage, the technique I was forced to use was to strip naked, run down the beach, dive in, lure the sharks to that new location and try to drag them as far away from the wreck as possible before dying.

Corpse-flopping was never fun in WoW and it's not fun here.

[toph 0]

This is gonna sound weird, but a salvagers best friend is a bear, a bear can easily handle multiple sharks (can't swipe attack, gotta use the bite) a good level bear usually has good stamina, so all you gotta do is grab a bear, level it in a mix of oxygen and stamina, then drop a bit below the surface, just low enough to agro any sharks in the area. Kill the sharks, then you should be good to dive down without issue, if a shark spawns swim it up a bit, and go back down with a bear until the salvage is done. I would not recommend taking the bear to far down though as its easy to overestimate stamina while swimming and biting, the bear will drown if you aren't careful. 

[Armitige 5]

have you tried placing a few ballistae on your boat, manning them AI crew and setting them to attack wild creatures and put them on free fire. Lure the stuff to the surface and let your AI crew deal with them?

 

Having said that, I agree with the sentiment of this post. There need to be some means of dealing with underwater predators in a more effective manner, speargun that does bonus damage to underwater mobs, bang sticks that scare sharks away for extended periods of time. Even if they made the pike do more damage to underwater mobs, god knows it's useless on land, give it an actual purpose Grapeshot.

[Defixio 26]

i posted some where about it but i think we need a good undersea weapon set, and perhaps a defense. real divers use mail to help, though these sharks are the size of a school bus.

A good weapon for undersea fighting would be great.

 

I think chum barrels made of rotten meat would be excellent, you fling them off the boat some distance and all the creatures go attack it and not you.

 

i think a real diving bell woudl be amazing. you sit on it. it descends. it's immune to sharks. once you get near the wreck you swim out and loot. similarly a loot net/cage that you drop and yank up would be great.

[Pizik 43]

I have not leveled into the Taming tree much but isn't there a Sneak skill? Maybe that would help with avoiding the shark's aggro. 

I also had grand plans to be a solo salvage reclamation expert, designed and built a ship for the purpose then realized how hard it was to actually do a deep-water salvage and that it would probably be more efficient to just farm the materials on-shore myself. I was a little disappointed. 

 

Also, on the subject of the submarine, I really hate the steam-punk look of it. I would much rather it was more like the image below.


 

[Armitige 5]

1 minute ago, Pizik said:

I have not leveled into the Taming tree much but isn't there a Sneak skill? Maybe that would help with avoiding the shark's aggro. 
 

 

There is a sneak skill, but it doesn't really work on sharks and eels. The still seem to agro you from half the map away.

[Vaenix 131]

1 minute ago, Armitige said:

There is a sneak skill, but it doesn't really work on sharks and eels. The still seem to agro you from half the map away.

Yeah sneak skill definitely doesn't work on them you have to be crouched in "sneak" form for it to affect anything.  I haven't actually seen an Eel/Jellyfish in quite some time even when deep sea diving.

I recommend a bow and some throwing knives for diving or a spear and some throwing knives.  They seem to do quite well against them. 

If you are diving taking the water perks for advanced swim speed/insulation/oxygen consumption are a must though and I've always been able to outrun and kite around jellies/eels when I had at minimum "Improved" on those perks.

[Vurmis 24]

53 minutes ago, Vaenix said:

If you are diving taking the water perks for advanced swim speed/insulation/oxygen consumption are a must though and I've always been able to outrun and kite around jellies/eels when I had at minimum "Improved" on those perks.

I second swim speed and I would also recommend getting a Sea Gull and putting him on your shoulder for the swim/oxygen bonus he gives you (goes up as he levels). Speed is definitely an important part of your defensive kit in the water.