Diving for Treasure. (primitive society style)

[Cogliostro]

Suggestion for a buildable object for ship decks, called the "diving ladder".

You use it to dive into the sea, wearing zero equipment and clothing. It has a single project "Search for treasure", which takes 1 hour (can only be used once a day?).

You have a chance to produce: amphoras, various amounts of gems, random coins, gold, perhaps old weapons. Behind the scenes, all of these are randomly generated, not objects anyone dropped.

The following quirks balance the "free stuff" aspect of the suggestion:

- when you dive there is a chance to suffer damage as the outcome instead of bringing up "treasure".
- the game keeps track of how many dives a character performed in total in their life.
- the more dives, the higher the chances of finding good treasure (experience)
- but also, the more dives, the higher the damage you potentially suffer.

Each diver, whether a young newspawn, or an experienced one, takes the gamble. Failures end up causing damage to the character. At first, minor 20-30% damage, but it grows as the number of dives performed grows. At a certain point, though the treasure could be very good, you could also easily die from the damage you suffer, so the player no longer goes for the gamble.

Or on the other hand, still goes for it, in his foolhardy bravery!

The credit for this idea goes to Gen, I only modified it slightly with my special touch to be more evil and addictive. Those who never heard of it, there are such real-world people in so called "developing countries" who stake their lives on exactly this kind of gamble. They train and dive very deep without equipment, for profit (usually pearls). The pressure differential causes inevitable damage to the body, which is accumulative. Few of these glamourous divers survive to see the ripe age of 35.

[*Wiro]

Oh and who made these things you say? >_> No. Oh and, no. Also, no.

[Cogliostro]

They are made by the same person who makes all the rest of the stuff in Cantr appear from completing a gathering or building project.

Deploy your imagination, come on. Past civilizations, sunken ships, and the gifts of mother nature (pearls, gems) furnish a vast space of possibilities.

I realize full well this suggestion is completely different than anything else so far implemented in Cantr. The treasure is a secondary thing, this is basically a trial run for many possible future features that rely on "innate qualities" that inhere in the characters themselves and not their inventories. Don't be too quick to throw out the baby with the bathwater!

Imagine the excitement of such diving trips, or the sheer evil of someone who forces others to dive for his benefit, while keeping them locked in ship cabins most of the rest of the time. Risking the lives of others for fun and profit, who wouldn't want to!

[*Wiro]

No.

[SekoETC]

Seriously, nothing in Cantr exists unless it was built by characters played by actual human players. Isn't it enough that you can happen upon an abandoned ship in the middle of the sea and loot it? It happened to one of my characters lately. Implementing items that are created at random goes against the spirit of everything you see being built by actual characters. There were no ancient societies. It's physically impossible to drop anything overboard or for ships to sink. Thus there's nothing underwater. Except fish... Now pearls and coral would make sense, but it would require creating underground locations that have these things as harvestable resources, and people could only stay down there for less than an hour without breathing gear or they'd die. Not sure how long Cantrians can hold their breath or if they even breathe, but it sounds complicated.

[Cogliostro]

Hey, I agree with that principle in general. Nothing should exist unless it was procured by actual characters. Makes sense to me.

But we get hematite and coal this way (without going down into any underground locations), so why not gems, corals, and on rare occasions "antique" weapons or something? A character dives and perhaps even risks his life to get it, and he gets it.

I know what my mistake was, I wrote the word "treasure" in the title, calling the project "Searching for treasure." This brings to mind the wrong idea, that you "magically" get stuff out of nothing.

Really though, nothing in the suggestion says that should be the case. What I'm far more interested in is the response of the player base to such ideas in general, ones that depend on something that inheres or accumulates in a character him or herself instead of anywhere else. Why aren't we doing this kind of stuff, I want to ask you? Isn't it only because we never did before?

If so, shouldn't we consider it very seriously, because of how much FUN it would be to have features like that?

[SekoETC]

I would rather implement a way for ships to sink, then we could have real wrecks to explore. And implement a means to throw stuff overboard. Some things could float. Resources could be given a defined density, and if it's lighter than water, it creates buoyancy while if it's more dense than water, it makes it sink. Then calculate the sum of effects the resources used to make an item have to define whether it sinks or floats. And using a ladder to reach the bottom would naturally only work in shallow waters, which would require defining depth zones in the seas. Overall it would be a huge project and I would save it for another game. Most people have gotten used to water being solid in Cantr and changing that would be too difficult.

[Cogliostro]

Hmm, but wait. I wasn't suggesting anything about going into the water as a new location or stuff like that. The ladder is just a "keystone" object, which you use to begin a "Diving" project.

It's not really a ladder to the bottom of the sea (no one uses that in real life either). It's just an ordinary small metal ladder, the whole significance of which is that we have the possibility to do these Diving projects with it.

Sometimes oldschool Cantrians truly amaze me with the amount of self-imposed anal restrictions on what should and could be imagined, and what is coded. Meanwhile the line is very blurry of course, and the distinction completely arbitrary, we should really only look at whether the resulting activities would be fun ones for players, or not!

[SekoETC]

It would make all the undersea resources potentially found in any part of the sea, like some sort of lottery or Russian roulette. While currently there's no randomness in finding resources, they either exist in a location or they don't. Having a machine that outputs random stuff or death is too far from how things work currently.

[Cogliostro]

Yes! Quite a far cry from how things are is currently. That's not always a bad thing, though, especially if we aren't exactly happy with how things are currently.

Would you have fun diving for treasure regularly with at least one character of yours?

[Doug R.]

This suggestion does not fit in with the spirit of the game, and, in my opinion, is silly. I'd like to see you dive down to the bottom of the ocean naked and come up with anything other than...wait, you'd just drown. Nevermind.

[SekoETC]

Yeah, I'd rather implement the possibility to drown yourself without treasure.

[Caesar]

Yeah, I'd rather implement the possibility to drown yourself without treasure.

Finally! A good way to kill yourself!

[Cogliostro]

Unbelievable, isn't it? Yet it's true, there are such people (pearldivers) and they do this on a daily basis, as their main livelyhood. Being poor, they have no equipment whatsoever, and rely on their incredible natural ability to retain air in their lung. It's a tragic thing really.

Say what you want about my stubborness, but I think you rejected this one way too soon also. What if, for example, only natural resources were available to the divers: pearls, gems, coral. So no coins or old weapons of any kind would ever be produced. I know there is nothing of this kind in Cantr as yet; a project that is a gamble, either you gain some stuff or have damage dealt. The point of new ideas is to expand on what is there, though. I didn't come up with it just because it's a cute idea, but because in my opinion Cantr in general suffers from a grand lack of natural chaos, and that contributes very much to the feeling of predictability and boredom.

In a parallel world where this suggestion has actually been accepted and implemented, I betcha it's already become one of the most popular newspawn occupations, and little industries sprung up around a few of the longboats belonging to bands of these risk-takers...