[SPOILERS] Question about Kharaa Bacterium

[Bassilth]

There was something in the game that bothered me greatly and no matter how much I tried to think about it... it simply made no sense.

We know that the Architects came to 4546B to find a cure to the Kharaa bacterium. Very powerful, advanced space-faring race. Al-An was/is a researcher, biologist, scientist, possibly aging many millennia, so acquired knowledge that far outweighs the knowledge of anyone else in the game. They studied the entirety of the flora and fauna of the planet but the only cure they could find was the Enzyme 42. They did find it in the adult Sea Emperor but it was a non-stable version and they needed the stable one. Despite having the blueprints for the enzyme... they clearly needed the stable version to make it work.

So how comes... that a human girl (Sam) who wasnt even a biologist... suddenly finds the cure by synthesizing the enzyme 42 found diluted in the water, and then using the natural flora found on the planet to recreate the antidote. She clearly found similarities between the enzyme and the flora. I mean... isnt this something an advanced race like the Architects would be able to do? Use the unstable enzyme produced by the old leviathan and make the necessary comparisons to current living organisms to reproduce it in a different form?

So what about this? How come a non-biologist human outdid the highly advanced Architects by literally fabricating an antidote from local flora?

[Ludivinia V.]

Originally posted by RCMidas:

Most of the problems here I would agree with. However, the leviathan is apparently not fully frozen internally, allowing the bacterium to survive saprophytically - very gradually consuming the dead remains - and also allowing, through painful headcanon, for an injection to work.

Given that we know Alterra was deliberately inducing mutations, and apparently so visibly that even a robotics specialist could spot the variation, I would assume the bacterium has a particularly effective horizontal gene transfer system in place. That is, any given mutation does not need to wait until the bacterium reproduces, but can be shared across living individuals simply through coming into contact with them.

So, we can assume that the cure in this case works by introducing a self-destructive, perhaps sterilising, mutagen into the bacterium. It mutates in such a way that it cannot reproduce, and passes that mutation onto others. The bacterium lives out its natural lifespan.

My major annoyance with the whole thing is that we've still not gotten an explanation as to how this region survived the bacterium without any enzyme 42 - if emperors were present in the location as part of the emergency research program, there is neither evidence nor mention of them anywhere to be found. It all happened long enough ago that, even given the longevity of the species itself, its biological byproducts such as the enzyme should not have lasted this long across the entire area.

That is quite a bit of headcannon and stated nowhere in the game. But fun to think about! Hmm. If I were trying to get this to work, I'd make some small changes:

- Have the bacteria simply go dormant when frozen, no need to feed off a carcass for millions of years.
- Some creatures on Earth have a sort of antifreeze in their blood, it's possible a leviathan would have something similar. Combine that with a primitive open circulatory system and the cure could be spread via diffusion, though that would take a very long time.
- Horizontal gene transfer is good! Couple that with an extremely short yet prolific lifespan, maybe dividing once a minute to rev the mutagenic properties. It's pushing physics into fantasy land but meh. If you've seen the movie Evolution, that gives you a good visual.
- This one is a big stretch, but maybe Khaara uses a T6SS system like Cholera. T6SS is kinda like a tiny harpoon used to destroy other cells. Enzyme 42 simply prevents that from being made & also breaks current harpoons. Then the incredible metabolic needs of Khaara means it starves to death in minutes.
- Lastly, the visual mutation. Continuing off the horizontal gene transfer and Cholera, it could have been something as simple as pili. Very obvious to see, like a tail on an oval. Khaara could use pili to quickly gather components for both gene transfer and collect new material for replication from lysed host cells. Perhaps Alterra was experimenting on how different types of known Earth pili would affect Khaara.

Yeah. That almost works.

As for this area of the game surviving. Hmm. Perhaps Enzyme 42 acts as a catalyst and is not consumed by the reaction with Khaara. If the Enzyme is relatively stable...it could survive being excreted. Excrement is then broken down and eaten by alien plankton equivalent. Ocean currents take plankton with Enzyme 42 to... Below Zero. That's how Maida gets here from the original game. Then it's a matter of bioaccululation as it travels up the food web.

Yay.

[Menzagitat]

Originally posted by Meana V.:

... Then the incredible metabolic needs of Khaara means it starves to death in minutes.

Wouldn't that prevent the bacteria to spread?

[Ludivinia V.]

Originally posted by Menzagitat:

Originally posted by Meana V.:

... Then the incredible metabolic needs of Khaara means it starves to death in minutes.

Wouldn't that prevent the bacteria to spread?

I took the liberty to assume that Khaara requires the harpoon system to lyse host cells and consume the spilled contents. If Khaara can't kill, it can't gather materials to replicate and just dies when it tries to split via binary fission. So yeah. It wouldn't spread anymore. Think of it like a fire. It can burn hot and fast with lots of material around but it can also burn itself out if nothing is there.

[Menzagitat]

Originally posted by Meana V.:

Originally posted by Menzagitat:

Wouldn't that prevent the bacteria to spread?

I took the liberty to assume that Khaara requires the harpoon system to lyse host cells and consume the spilled contents. If Khaara can't kill, it can't gather materials to replicate and just dies when it tries to split via binary fission. So yeah. It wouldn't spread anymore. Think of it like a fire. It can burn hot and fast with lots of material around but it can also burn itself out if nothing is there.

Maybe it mutated into this variant only in this particular leviathan, which was also eating everything around him until he died.

[PreLife]

....yeah this whole plotline is really weird and forces you to really stretch for it to make any sense. it feels like this was one of the three ‘main’ stories that are all happening simultaneously and none of them were given enough time to make sense or have satisfying conclusions. if i had a choice in the development id straight up remove the alien and margureit plots and focus on the inciting incident and the mystery of the alterra crew.

[Menzagitat]

Originally posted by PreLife:

.... if i had a choice in the development ...

I would also change the the way how the alien stays with the main character. Just uploading himself into another brain is such an old fashioned unrealistic concept...
The dialogues also do not fit to how scientists would think.
The story writer do not deserve his money he got for working on this game.

[Menzagitat]

Originally posted by PreLife:

.. id straight up remove the alien and margureit plots and focus on the inciting incident and the mystery of the alterra crew.

Could work even if their wish was to somehow discover the alien world and have a reason to make the 3rd game on that planet.
I hope they hire somebody else to write the story.

[PreLife]

Originally posted by Menzagitat:

Originally posted by PreLife:

.. id straight up remove the alien and margureit plots and focus on the inciting incident and the mystery of the alterra crew.

Could work even if their wish was to somehow discover the alien world and have a reason to make the 3rd game on that planet.
I hope they hire somebody else to write the story.

it doesn’t really have anything to do with the direction of the plot, it’s pacing and focus. the original subnautica also had three key mysteries, but they all directly influenced each other and the ‘spectacle’ was in the payoff. think of how the mystery of how the Aurora was shot down is solved in spectacular fashion with the sunbeam, or the reveal that you caught the infection to reveal why ships are being shot down. bz front loads the plot lines with spectacle, like the introduction to Alan and margureit and then they drag and fizzle out in text entries or dialogue. the problem isn’t with the story itself but instead the way it’s told. it doesn’t have any momentum and just slowly tapers out as the mysteries are solved.

[Aegis270]

Originally posted by PreLife:

Originally posted by Menzagitat:

Could work even if their wish was to somehow discover the alien world and have a reason to make the 3rd game on that planet.
I hope they hire somebody else to write the story.

it doesn’t really have anything to do with the direction of the plot, it’s pacing and focus. the original subnautica also had three key mysteries, but they all directly influenced each other and the ‘spectacle’ was in the payoff. think of how the mystery of how the Aurora was shot down is solved in spectacular fashion with the sunbeam, or the reveal that you caught the infection to reveal why ships are being shot down. bz front loads the plot lines with spectacle, like the introduction to Alan and margureit and then they drag and fizzle out in text entries or dialogue. the problem isn’t with the story itself but instead the way it’s told. it doesn’t have any momentum and just slowly tapers out as the mysteries are solved.

Don't forget the focus. The first game had a nice cohesive end goal at all times, get the hell off of the planet. Everything the player does is in service to that end goal, which keeps the player focused at all times. They always know what they need to do, even if they don't nessesarily know how to do it.

This game doesn't have that. You have 3 stories that are almost entirely disconnected from each other, that you can stumble into at any time. It does do a much better job of telling you explicitly what to do, but it's much harder to keep track of why you're doing it.

You'll be scanning processor parts in a sunken ship, and the only reason you have to do it is to build a part of a transmission tower so that another character will tell you something about your sister, even if you've already completed the sister's story. It's just such an unfocused mess.

[Rushi]

What I wanna know is how advanced researchers with much more knowledge even exist if apparently every precursors mind is connected. Like, wouldn't that make them all equally capable of researching if need be? What sets alan apart as an official researcher?

[Menzagitat]

Originally posted by PreLife:

.. id straight up remove the alien and margureit plots and focus on the inciting incident and the mystery of the alterra crew.

Originally posted by Aegis270:

It's just such an unfocused mess.

I bought the game in Dec 2019 but I avoided all spoilers until the game was released.
First I expected the action to happen on a different planet, to be different enough from the first one.
Writing interesting stories in the same environment can be difficult.
I was not interested to read about the crew and their social interaction.
But to keep it consistent should be easy. And it is not.

I read on the forum that the developers already removed story elements which were present in early access, causing this state. I wonder why? They got for sure feedback through the in-game report system. But that feedback doesn't seem to be publicly available as in case of the Subnautica game. Or I could not find it.
This is what I want to see for BZ:
https://subnautica.unknownworlds.com/feedback/emotion-charts
https://subnautica.unknownworlds.com/feedback/tickets

Another puzzle for me is why the ground team was loosing miners because the thumpers were draining the batteries too fast. Why were those so inefficient?
The mining facility also focused on normal materials but I have not seen much interest about the green crystals, which nobody seems to know how they work, but can be used to make more efficient batteries.
And there are no flying vehicles. And no weapons. Better let the miners die than defend them.

The thumpers and the huge worm are stolen from Dune and the container which share the content between multiple instances is the ender chest from Minecraft.
There is no much original thinking here.

[👁]

Originally posted by Bassilth:

So how comes... that a human girl (Sam) who wasnt even a biologist... suddenly finds the cure by synthesizing the enzyme 42 found diluted in the water

Because unlike the architects, she already had a complete working sample of the enzyme. The Architects didn't, they tried to force the sea emperor to reproduce on their schedule and failed. The Architects had previously driven the species near to extinction before the outbreak and tortured the one they had in captivity and just wanted to take it's offspring for their own selfish gain so it wasn't exactly cooperative, so they had to wait for thousands of years for an intact sample.

Originally posted by Bassilth:

She clearly found similarities between the enzyme and the flora. I mean... isnt this something an advanced race like the Architects would be able to do?

Once you know what to look for finding it is a lot easier, but without knowing what to look for, for every failed attempt the architects would have risked creating an antigen resistant strain.

[👁]

Originally posted by Menzagitat:

This is what I want to see for BZ:
https://subnautica.unknownworlds.com/feedback/emotion-charts
https://subnautica.unknownworlds.com/feedback/tickets

Some of the negative tickets are legit problems but what's with people posting angry tickets because they landed their prawnsuit in lava or just an angry emoji with a screenshot where nothing's discernibly wrong?

A lot of them are on Nintendo Switch so I imagine there's a story there, like, maybe the Switch lagged or buffered at a bad time, but we'll never know what most of them are about.

Originally posted by Menzagitat:

The thumpers and the huge worm are stolen from Dune

I had a scene right out of Tremors play out when multiple worms came at me.

Originally posted by Menzagitat:

and the container which share the content between multiple instances is the ender chest from Minecraft.

You know stuff like that existed in games before minecraft was ever a thing right?

[Just Chill]

Originally posted by 😈:

Tremors

Ah, Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon.
Cult classic.

Even though Michael Gross plays the secret hero of the whole franchise. ^^

[👁]

Originally posted by Just Chill:

Originally posted by 😈:

Tremors

Ah, Fred Ward and Kevin Bacon.
Cult classic.

Even though Michael Gross plays the secret hero of the whole franchise. ^^

And the way it blended genres, comedy, horror, action, so it was like Jaws on Land but so much more watchable.