How do you actually acquire sweet weed and underwater ingredients?

[Awesome]

As the title says I have found the location of quite a few underwater ingredients but I have been unable to get them. I've tried shooting them, bombing them, stopping above them and docking. Nothing i have done has worked and I now have a contract for sweet weed so any help would be appreciated.

[oldblackcat]

apparently do bomb the ocean, seaweed can be barely seen around island as i heard on the discord

[Tobus]

I've found it's very finicky to get the bombs to actually hit the underwater ingredients, my strategy so far has been to land on the water and park myself directly overtop of an ingredient and bombing the centre of it works 9/10 times

[Fae]

the bomb reticle should show up if your high enough and then its simply a press of a button to release the bomb on the part you see. pro tip its easier to see it during the day on the coast lines.

[lifetapstudios]

Bombing with the heavy plane is a lot more effective, although unfortunately it is a bit too expensive to acquire in the early game.

[lifetapstudios]

There is also an ornament that you can buy that will will highlight the location of water ingredients that can help.

[Awesome]

Thank you all for the help. My problem was simply that it requires 2 hits from my bomb to give materials. So when i would bomb a patch and nothing happened I figured that wasn't the way to gather it

[Rags]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3173894809
You have to purchase and equip the Highlighter.
Once you do that, there will be highlighted markers on the water where you can harvest them. The most efficient way to collect is to float, not fly and use your Water Bombs.

[TheBarbaryGhost]

The best way I found to do it, is get the ornament that shows where the ingredients are on screen, then land your plan on the water and turn the engine just high enough to fill the water reserves while you are moving around. Then just spam the bombs as you glide over each ingredient spawn point. You'll just keep getting more water, so you can mash it like crazy if you want.

[Rags]

Originally posted by Awesome:

Thank you all for the help. My problem was simply that it requires 2 hits from my bomb to give materials. So when i would bomb a patch and nothing happened I figured that wasn't the way to gather it

You can purchase Upgrades in the Hanger. The tab is at the bottom of the list on the right when you are at the Catalog screen.

[Cannon Fodder]

just be careful with floating, ive totalled my plane that way from the shockwaves from spamming bombs LOL

[Enorats]

The best way I've found is to use the heavy plane, then fly a couple hundred meters up. Underwater seaweed in the shallows is much easier to see at a higher altitude. Find some sea weed underwater near an island and line up with it so you'll pass over it. Give yourself plenty of straight line distance before you pass over it.

Then, press F3 to go to the belly camera (this does not seem to work on the light plane). This puts you into a sort of bombing mode, where your plane mostly maintains its altitude and you can move the mouse left/right to turn a bit.

A circle will appear below you (which you can sometimes see in the regular flight camera too). That circle is where your bomb will land. Turn left and right to put the bombs over the weeds, and right click to drop. You can press R repeatedly to slow yourself down or speed up, which can allow you to drop lots of bombs over the same area in a single pass.

The heavy plane's bomb also seems to have a much higher radius bomb. The light one seems unable to even harvest a lot of the underwater stuff, as the bomb seems to explode on the surface and not even reach the plant. Equipment upgrades can made the radius even bigger on the heavy plane, but that same equipment also makes ingredients sometimes explode if you don't gather them immediately.. which you won't be, as you'll be saturating an area with bombs at high altitude before turning around and swooping down low to pick up the results later.