Suggestions Thread!

[Drakkenlupen]

Have an idea? Interactions that don't exist but should? Feature requests? Any and all are welcome in this thread! We'd love to hear your suggestions, and I'll be forwarding anything suggested here to Heather!

[Pan-Pan]

If i were to suggest anything. Maybe something like,, Say. Extra equipment slots? the limit is 8 rn. Maybe an upgrade or an item that decreases damage but increases how many things you can have, or anything like 1 positive and 1 negative. Like the crown

[Kirby]

can you add fishing

[MadCrabPrime]

a macro upgrade that increases the amount of shop items when at the shop as 3 is fine until you unlock alot of items then it becomes more of a detriment.

Unless this is already macro upgrade and I have not unlocked then ignore this.

fish sometimes drop powerups the higher the ranking of the fish the more powerful.
Such as increasing fishing speed for a short time, reduce damage by a short time, increase damage stuff like that also screen hitters

[Rhea The Dog]

the biggest thing i can think of is seeing your current items while in the shop, either on the shop screen itself or the bounty screen

[thedonotknow]

I would pay excessive amounts of money to get an android build. If devs see this, PLEASE I NEED IT 😭

[muffinman]

First off, I love the game. Great addition to the genre! After playing way too much of it this past week my biggest gripe with it is that I need to focus my eyes exclusively on fishing while in a big fight. If I focus on my boat to dodge instead I'll miss more fishing minigames and my healing/income will go way down. I'm not sure about solutions since its definitely an engaging mechanic but it would be nice to be able to focus more on dodging attacks. Right now I feel like you just need to build the invincibility item + healing to take every hit and heal up while invincible.

[PixelDemise]

I have three suggestions that I think would really improve the game.

One is making the controls more universally one-handable. You can use WASD, arrow keys, or the mouse, but space bar is the only way to fish, and only the mouse can use the menus. Letting the other two controls navigate the menu, and having a fishing button for arrows/mouse, like the 0/Ins key and scroll wheel press to fish, and right ctrl/scroll to change baits, would make the game a lot nicher to play.

Second is, making the fishing bar easier to read. It's fairly small on screen, so you kind of have to focus on it pretty hard to keep fishing successfully. That already punishes the low HP boats, but once you add on other visual stuff like squid trails, projectiles, or the boat's own attacks, it becomes fairly hard to see unless you hyper focus on it, which unless you are using a super high durability ship, it's extremely hard to fish and fight at the same time. Perhaps change the colors so they are SUPER high contrast, like a neon color instead of black/white, or make the bar stretch across the bottom of the screen so it's super massive and hard to not see.

Someone in another discussion thread also suggested maybe adding in an auto-fishing item? Like, a purchasable item that takes up 1-2 slots, but automates the fishing mini-game. Upgrades could be something like, it triggers once every X seconds and it happens faster with upgrades?

And lastly, maybe give something even if you miss the fishing window? If you miss the fishing window, you don't get anything, but you can still keep holding the space bar down beyond that window. Maybe make it so if you miss the window and go past it, there's a 50% chance you'll get nothing, or you'll still fish, but fish up half as many and/or fish a lower bait tier?

Regardless though, the game has been a blast so far, and the free expansion news was really exciting. You've definitely earned my support with how high quality the game is.

[Cristovelli]

I accept that controller support is limited and mouse is required to navigate the menus, that's not a big problem, but can you please add a sensitivity adjustment for the left stick, or just reduce the sensitivity a bit? My pad is not poorly calibrated but getting a constant rotational drift to the left which makes long travel to different waters extremely difficult as getting the stick perfectly centered is a serious handicap.
Love the game otherwise!

[Odd]

Suggestion for Ghost Ship: Enemy entities being under other entities, like summons and projectiles, and not being able to see a majority of the screen when an altar prompt pops up make it difficult to do runs hitless. Careful play can keep this from being an issue, but it really slows down the momentum you can build when time is limited. Same with Leviathan fights, the red summons being under the Leviathan look aesthetically better, but without having a clear idea of where the summons are it can create issues when trying to find which summons still need to be killed.

[Drakkenlupen]

Originally posted by Rhea The Dog:

the biggest thing i can think of is seeing your current items while in the shop, either on the shop screen itself or the bounty screen

I'll pass this on! In the meantime: if you open the pause menu while at the shop you can see your items there!

[Redzy]

I'd really like to see the Ghost Ship have it's default item changed to an item that only it can start with, this item would give you immunity frames for however many you have if you were to be hit and survive (example: if you had Camo that would add to it's immunity frames) and then it would go on a cooldown for a few in-game hours, or perhaps even wouldn't reset til the next day? anyway i got this idea from The Binding of Isaac's character known as "The Lost", who can only take one hit of damage before he dies, but has an item that blocks a single hit for him per room, which allows him to be still really hard but not impossibly so. i really love the idea of a 1 HP ship but despite my countless attempts of Ghost Ship, i seem to just die after a few waves of beginner fish, and have never gotten to day 2. i can't even imagine how you'd survive the lightning fish in The Whorl. maybe i just suck, and that's okay, but i'd still love this idea to come true.

[TripledYou]

Honestly, just really needs like a shield item that lets you eat a hit without taking damage with a recharge that is reduced with upgrades or something. Dazzle camo feels way too essential for leviathan unless you take all the healing items. Ghost ship ESPECIALLY would benefit from it, because as is ghost ship is miserable due to how large projectiles are + enemy trails. The second you are locked in a tight space with ghost ship, you are cooked. Would also make cursed crown actually worth taking on leviathan runs as well.

[PixelDemise]

A few more suggestions I think would improve the QoL after playing for longer.

Adding a button in the day end screen to instantly skip the entire process, regardless of what sale speed you've set in the options. I've had some annoying stuttering with the Extreme speed selling skip, so I turned to down to Fast, and then got trapped in the sale screen for like a good 4-5 minutes after a Leviathan kill, because even with fast forward, there were SO many fish to sell it just took ages.

A button that is there, no matter what speed, to just skip it entirely would make the selling process a lot smoother I feel. Similarly, I think having the option to scroll through the list, or at the least have the specific base price range for each fish in the bestiary so I can see exactly what fish are best to go for if I am not in a good spot to hunt for bounty fish.

And sorta related, but having an Upgrade index would be nice, something to check through to see what each upgrade level does exactly, and what "classes" each weapon has. Like, seeing the exact spawning rate and duration of nets at level 3 compared to level 1, or since Nets are "summoned", are they considered summons for Chum? At the moment you can only see the effects of an upgrade in the shop when buying, so unless you memorize every upgrade for every weapon, it can be easy to forget what each one does.

Lastly, being able to save and quit while in the shop, and especially just being able to pause in the Leviathan fight. Saving and quitting in the shop would be really nice overall, sometimes I need to step away mid-run whether due to something coming up suddenly or I'm just suddenly not feeling like playing, so being able to quit without losing progress would be nice.

But pausing during the Leviathan is essentual I think. Even before anything else, not being able to halt the game in any way is annoying, and even other non-multiplayer games that don't really allow pausing(Fromsoft games as an obvious example) at least let you quit to the main menu if you need to step away. But more specifically, not being able to pause means you can't change any settings once the fight begins. So if you want to speed up the selling screen to avoid the super long process after the fight, if you forget to do that before midnight, you can't do anything about it.

Plus, since a lot of the main game is relatively low focus with the auto-fishing setting, I keep the volume low and watch streamers and shows that don't need a ton of focus on a second monitor, so once the boss starts, I can't up the music anymore to listen to the cool tunes. Or if a video ends, or has a long lull(like a streamer stepping away for 5+ minutes), it's risky to try and tab out to click to another.

Edit: A way to rewatch cutscenes would be nice too. Whether a full cutscene viewer in the menu, or having each Levithan kill replace its cutscenes with a skip button. The lines in those are really poetic and the whole cutscene is excellently done, so I'd love to rewatch them without having to wipe all my data and replay it.

[Cal]

New music would be so goooooooood, because :
1. I LOVE the music so much
2. It get kinda repetitive though

[Nex3]

After doing a bunch of Ghost Ship attempts and seeing Otter turn it gold, I've come to the considered conclusion that it's just too hard as-is. There are sort of three categories of reason why Ghost Ship runs are rough, even with all upgrades:

Category 1: Bugs/UX Issues

• The framerate issues are absolutely killer for Ghost Ship. Using Dr. Pigeonrat's strategy, on full buffs I can only summon two rounds of junk bait before the framerate tanks badly enough that it'll probably kill me. This means that my DPS in the Leviathan fight is severely limited, so tanky phantoms like the Mountainfish are extremely difficult to deal with even though with full Ichthyomancy+Chum I should be able to make short work of them.
  
  
• Like Otter said, not being able to see the phantoms in the Leviathan fight is a major issue when colliding with any of them is such a big deal. The same goes for projectiles like from handfish--putting these on the top layer and giving them 1-pixel outlines would help a lot.
  
  
• There's very minimal feedback about when and why you take damage if you have a revive. There's no sound effect, and when the screen is busy even on early days it's hard to tell what caused the problem. The sound effect would help a lot to even help make it clear that a hit happened if the player's eyes aren't on their ship, but having a medium-long-lived pop-up maybe in the upper right to indicate what did the final blow would help a lot with understanding what about the current strategy isn't working.
  
  
• Sometimes the "Revive" message doesn't even show up at all. For example:
  
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01FDREImmg4

Category 2: Randomness

Ghost Ship is unique among the vehicles in that some of its runs simply aren't viable without randomly meeting certain conditions.

• The right bounties. This is the least important axis of randomness, since you can in theory just get no junk bait bounties day 1, but because the economy snowball is so critical for Ghost Ship the pragmatic decision is just to reroll until you have at least a couple bounty fish in the Harbor or Whirl.
  
  
• The right phantoms. Durable phantoms with ranged attacks like Ghostly Grabber and Moonbeam Catfish represent essentially guaranteed damage in the Leviathan fight. Mountainfish is also in this category, although that might be less of an issue if the framerate issues are resolved. There's a bit of room to maneuver around the handfish hands, but the moonbeams are essentially unavoidable at the speed they come out without running into something else that'll kill you.
  
  
• The right equipment. This is the real killer. I think the run is close to impossible without having one of Ramming Speed or Greek Fire. Without the former, you can't actually move quickly enough to fish and move at the same time, or else you'll eventually hit the fish you just created. Without the latter, you can't sit in one place and summon or a Chaser Fish will eventually slip through whatever other damage sources you have and hit you.
  
  This is compounded by the fact that a bunch of the available equipment is essentially useless for Ghost Ship. Bailout, Dazzle Camo, Bear Hands, Icebreaker Hull, Life Vest, Life Preserver, and Ritual of Pain all do nothing if you're locked to only one hit point. No matter what your build is, these will all be things you have to reroll through to try to hit one of the viable starts.

Category 3: Design

If the bugs and UX issues were fixed and you got perfect RNG for a Ghost Ship run, it would be doable. It's already doable, it just takes a lot of luck to not get wrecked. But I still think this run ends up being a bit higher than it should be. I'd recommend the following changes, in addition to the bugs/ux issues above:

• Don't show useless equipment for Ghost Ship, similarly to how unbuyable equipment isn't shown once your eight slots are full.
  
  
• Give Ghost Ship a few more invulnerability frames on hit than it has now. Let it start at the equivalent of like level three Dazzle Camo. Each hit is such a big deal anyway, This brings it closer to each revive loss being a discrete mistake, rather than a single mistake costing multiple hits, which feels extra miserable when you already need to play so tight.
  
  
• Give Ghost Ship one extra ability that's splashy enough to mention in the description and that specifically helps it fight leviathan. I don't have a strong opinion about what this is... one possibility would be that you get a bonus shield before the boss fight, or that it gets an extra hit point before the final boss so the one-hit-ko protection helps it, but really anything to give it a little bump over the edge would help.

With these, I don't think you need to change the bounty or phantom randomness. Ghost Ship still ends up hard, but it feels less like you're pulling a slot machine handle to get a viable run and then another one to avoid getting wrecked by Leviathan phantoms.

All that said...

Ghost Ship runs are really fun. Meticulously planning exactly what you want to do and how you mitigate the obstacles is really compelling, and the fact that it's such a deeply different mode of thinking than the rest of the game is a treat. I think with a few adjustments, it would be one of my favorite parts of the game.