So, the purple tablets. Where the hell are they?

[AdventureLandXL]

ive looked in every biome listed to supposedly have the rare purple tablet fragments, like the arctic spires, but i havent found anything. Why? and where the hell are they? ive looked and done research on literally every single tutorial to find them... still nothing. i need help.

[kengulnar73]

Retcon'd out. Alan is your universal garage door opener now.

[AdventureLandXL]

ah ok. thats stoopid kinda

[kengulnar73]

Originally posted by thechillcornerofficialyt:

ah ok. thats stoopid kinda

there is a lot of that in this game, lol

[AdventureLandXL]

Originally posted by kengulnar73:

Originally posted by thechillcornerofficialyt:

ah ok. thats stoopid kinda

there is a lot of that in this game, lol

U right

[Matt]

Originally posted by thechillcornerofficialyt:

ah ok. thats stoopid kinda

It was to prevent players from soft-locking the game. Subnautica Below Zero does not have an Ion Cube Fabricator like the one in the Primary Containment Facility all the way back at The Crater (Subnautica's Playable Area). So if you used all of your Ion Cubes before reaching the Arctic Spires Cache you wouldn't be able to get in and scan the Skeleton (Now Tissues), thus preventing the player from actually being able to complete the game (If the old story was still implemented.)

[dragonbornzyra]

Originally posted by Slicey:

Originally posted by thechillcornerofficialyt:

ah ok. thats stoopid kinda

It was to prevent players from soft-locking the game. Subnautica Below Zero does not have an Ion Cube Fabricator like the one in the Primary Containment Facility all the way back at The Crater (Subnautica's Playable Area). So if you used all of your Ion Cubes before reaching the Arctic Spires Cache you wouldn't be able to get in and scan the Skeleton (Now Tissues), thus preventing the player from actually being able to complete the game (If the old story was still implemented.)

Any Subnautica player would not use up all of their Ion Cubes, especially without having found and scanned Blueprints for the Tablets. Technically, it's possible to soft lock yourself in Subnautica, but you'd have to pretty much do it on purpose.

And any new player that was never aware of this feature before, might soft lock themselves.

And I'd say learn from that mistake and not make it again.

Instead, a fun and rewarding aspect of the game was removed, just to tailor to an extremely, stastistically improbable group of hypothetical players that might encounter adervsity and have to start over.

The quality of the game was dropped, as was the standard, to make it more "accessable"

Rather than asking the player to "try again" they just nerfed the game.

Whatever happened to players pressing Continue? Try again? To start over? Why do alot of gamers these days see any obstacle or adversity in their game as a sign of "bad design" Why do they shy away from challenges and feel frustration when their first attempts at something aren't met with success?

I'm sincerely asking, I don't know. I'm curious to know.

[dupa]

Originally posted by Slicey:

Subnautica Below Zero does not have an Ion Cube Fabricator like the one in the Primary Containment Facility all the way back at The Crater (Subnautica's Playable Area).

It actually has one in one of the caves in the Ice Worm area.

[dragonbornzyra]

Originally posted by dupa:

Originally posted by Slicey:

Subnautica Below Zero does not have an Ion Cube Fabricator like the one in the Primary Containment Facility all the way back at The Crater (Subnautica's Playable Area).

It actually has one in one of the caves in the Ice Worm area.

There are Two lone Cubes in a Pengling hole, and 4 drillable Ion Cube deposits. 1 in the cache with AL-AN's body part, and 3 in another room with a pointless barrier. But as far as I know, those don't replenish or respawn, there isn't a Fabricator that produces inifinite Cubes like in Subnautica.

Also @ Slicey, I don't buy the removal of Purple Tablets as a way to prevent players from Softlocking their game. Know why? The Recyclotron exists. If players are finding Ion Cubes before going to the Arctic Spires, then that means they're finding Alien Artifacts and earning Precursor Bounties.

Which means they will get the Recylotron.

Which means if they foolishly waste all of their Ion Cubes, they can recycle them back.

Or deconstruct the Recyclotron itself to get its Ion Cube back.

Ion Cube x1 + Diamond x2

Guess what's in the Arctic Spires if you take the "right" path at the entrance instead of "straight" or the "left" path? Several drillable Diamond nodes. Not only that, there are 2 Ion Cubes to be found in the Arctic Spires, PAST the point where the player should have found the first Purple Tablet Fragment.

So that means AFTER finding Tablet fragments and learning they will need Ion Cubes, even if they wasted all of the ones in game and just threw them over the World's Edge into the void, they can STILL find another two Ion Cubes in the Arctic Spires with a Spy Pengling. I don't buy your softlock defense.

Same reason I say they didn't remove the Stasis Rifle because it was over powered. They made zero attempts to rebalance it and I came up with SEVERAL plausable and valid ways to balance it.

You can make excuses for the game, but those excuses don't make sense. Much like how much of the game itself doesn't make sense.

They removed a fun part of the game to prevent softlock, when softlock isn't an issue due to the very nature of Ion Cubes being found before the Arctic Spires.

So much of the game play, the story, the lore, so much....is contradictory to itself and its own rules it sets out.

[Matt]

Originally posted by dupa:

Originally posted by Slicey:

Subnautica Below Zero does not have an Ion Cube Fabricator like the one in the Primary Containment Facility all the way back at The Crater (Subnautica's Playable Area).

It actually has one in one of the caves in the Ice Worm area.

Those are drillable nodes of Ion Cubes in the Arctic Spires, not Ion Cube Fabricators.

[AdventureLandXL]

just chill out and play the game. no need to argue about stupid updates.

[dupa]

Originally posted by Slicey:

Originally posted by dupa:

It actually has one in one of the caves in the Ice Worm area.

Those are drillable nodes of Ion Cubes in the Arctic Spires, not Ion Cube Fabricators.

Then what are Ion Cube Fabricators? I was sure that these drillable deposits were meant by it.

[dragonbornzyra]

Originally posted by dupa:

Originally posted by Slicey:

Those are drillable nodes of Ion Cubes in the Arctic Spires, not Ion Cube Fabricators.

Then what are Ion Cube Fabricators? I was sure that these drillable deposits were meant by it.

In Subnautica, there are Ion Cube deposits that we can drill for Ion Cubes, they run out, and are gone forever. One example of this is in the Alien Thermal Plant, inside the facility is an Ion Cube deposit that we can drill, and once we harvest all the Cubes, it's "gone" and that's the end of that.

Then we have the Ion Cube Fabricator, in the Primary Alien Containment Facility. It's in the large central "Hub" room with all the Architecht Artifacts, the pathways that lead to the Master Arches, and the path that leads to the Sea Emporer's aquarium. The center of this room houses a pedestal, where a device will periodically Fabricate an Ion Cube node that can be drilled for three Ion Cubes. Once the Pedestal is "empty" and a cooldown timer expires, a new node will be Fabricated.

Thus, an infinite source of Ion Cubes.

There is no such Fabricator in Below Zero.

But that is a non issue due to the Recyclotron and the way the Ion Cubes are tied to the Alien Artifacts and Bounty side quest.

Additionally, without Tablets, that's one less recipe to even need Ion Cubes for.

Ion Cubes are merely used to make Ion Batteries and Powercells, which are so efficient the need to make a surplus of Ion batts/cells is redundant and not needed at all. Even if we were to make several Recyclotrons across multiple bases we'd have more Ion Cubes left to spare, for many Tether Tool uses, three times as before with Cubes now providing 3 uses of the Tether Tool per cube as opposed to one cube = one teleport.

Your instincts will be to gather and hoarde all the Ion Cubes "just in case' But you'll find out there is very little need for Ion Cubes outside of recreational enjoyment.

[dupa]

Huh.. I didn't know there's two types of those. For some reason I was sure that they all regenerate.

[dragonbornzyra]

Originally posted by dupa:

Huh.. I didn't know there's two types of those. For some reason I was sure that they all regenerate.

Each time the game "updates" and a new patch hits live Stable branch, the game's cells batch folder gets wiped. So we still have our save, the vehicles and bases still exist, but the game around us changes.

So each update, those Ion Nodes you drilled and cleared would "respawn" but it was due to the update, and all other resources, outcrops, and other things collected would respawn, as would any killed leviathans, supply crates would close up and have items in them again, fragments would respawn, ect.

That may explain the mandala effect you experienced and why it felt like they "respawned"

I had to think for a second about this to try to come up wtih a possible explanation, I hope you find this satisfactory.

[AdventureLandXL]

chill out brainiacs, lets start playing, shall we?