Garbage Cleanup Suggestion

[Roland]

If the devs aren't interested in this suggestion perhaps it will be food for thought at least for a future mod.

I think the scything of garbage is fine. It definitely gives the scythe a bigger role in this game than in past farming games. However, there is just too much of the same thing repeated way way too much. It makes it hard to have fun with it on a first playthrough and it completely kills the desire to replay the game from the start. Hence my suggested changes:

1) Change the orbs from being something found under the ocean to something crafted by the player or by the lab. Orbs for the bronze depths can be crafted from bronze kelp essence, any ocean scavenge-able, and bronze ore. Orbs for silver, gold, and osmium depths would follow suit. Once crafted you could place an orb in a monument to activate it.

2) Clearing garbage with the scythe would only be required in order to clear the way for the light path to get to the underground beacon and raise it up to do its power blast. In addition to clearing away the sludge and dark roots, the beacon would clear away all remaining garbage in its influence area.

These two changes would significantly reduce the amount of required garbage that must be cleared with the scythe or vortex bombs. I say required because the player would still have the choice of clearing it all themselves first before activating a monument with an orb if they wanted all the loot or they could just clear the minimum amount needed to raise a beacon and let it clear out the trash for them in the area.

For me, it is less fun to scythe the trash just to clear each area looking for the orb. In areas where I clear out most of the trash before finding it and the light path to the beacon is already cleared due to pretty much all the garbage being gone anyway, I find it less enjoyable than when I chance to find the beacon right away and I start scything just the garbage blocking the light path. I think an emphasis on clearing the light path over finding the orb would go a long way to making the overall task less monotonous, less tedious, and less soul crushing when thinking about possibly restarting a new world to try different choices.

Again, my changes would still allow players to play just like they do now cleaning all the garbage themselves but it would also give another option. And the caves would still be there for looting purposes.

What do you think? And before anyone tells me the devs don't read these posts, I'm at least hopefully someone with modding talent reads this and likes the idea.