Swimming in this game...

[KippenKaasBaas]

You're playing as a tree chopping, boss fighting, house building, super-viking. And yet after 5 seconds of swimming you literally DIE from exhaustion. Why? I could swim further than this super-viking when I was 5 years old.

I think almost every new player got a nasty surprise when first trying to swim.
SURPRISE YOU'RE DEAD

As soon as you jump into anything bigger than the kiddy pool your stamina starts going down faster than the stockmarket in 1987.
And after your stamina is gone your character just decides to slit his wrists and feed the sharks. Remember when you went swimming as a kid? And got exhausted and just died?
Am I a viking or an anchor?

Please change this.



BTW, no hate. I love this game. Just not all aspects of it.

[Cougarific]

Yes you're chopping trees and getting better at chopping trees. Fighting bosses and getting better at fighting, Running and jumping all over the place so you're getting better at running and jumping.

How much time have you spent swimming?

I strip down and do 4-6 laps up and down the coast in front of my mead hall on sunny mornings to improve my swimming skill. I can now swim further, faster.

Embrace the immersion.

[Wridian]

I didn't die the first time I tried swimming, but I was definitely surprised by how fast that stamina went down. The designers definitely want boats to be mandatory to cross water, that's for sure.

[BobthenotsoGreat]

Don't think you can do it in 5 seconds. If you enter the water with no stamina it takes around 10. If you are still on the no skill loss timer, can you check?

[KippenKaasBaas]

Originally posted by Cougarific:

Yes you're chopping trees and getting better at chopping trees. Fighting bosses and getting better at fighting, Running and jumping all over the place so you're getting better at running and jumping.

How much time have you spent swimming?

I strip down and do 4-6 laps up and down the coast in front of my mead hall on sunny mornings to improve my swimming skill. I can now swim further, faster.

Embrace the immersion.

I definitely like the fact you get better at what you do. I like the immersion in that.
It's just that when you first launch the game, you can jump, run, build and chop wood perfectly well. Sure you get even better as you go, but mister super-viking is a lot more athletic than I am in real life, that's for sure.
So because of that, the fact that mister super-viking can swim about as good as a mobster with a block of concrete on his ankles is a very nasty surprise to any new player.


Btw, thanks for teaching me Subnautica back in the day.

[sq33k]

Honestly, if you jump into an ocean as your first trek in swimming, you're doing something wrong. I, personally, have never died to swimming. (I'm in the Plains with fully decked out padded armor currently.) EVERY action in the game takes stamina except basic walking/jogging. Why would anyone think swimming would be different?

(Also, if you really want a way to survive, log out and log back in again and your stamina is refreshed. Yup, it's cheesing the system, but if swimming is really that big of a problem...)

[Varagonax]

Originally posted by Cougarific:

Yes you're chopping trees and getting better at chopping trees. Fighting bosses and getting better at fighting, Running and jumping all over the place so you're getting better at running and jumping.

How much time have you spent swimming?

I strip down and do 4-6 laps up and down the coast in front of my mead hall on sunny mornings to improve my swimming skill. I can now swim further, faster.

Embrace the immersion.

I wanna do that but whenever I remember too, Im in the middle of the black forest without food frantically searching for blueberries.

[Bobucles]

Stamina potions recharge the swim gauge. There's a big cooldown so make the most of it with strong food buffs like carrot stew or lox meat

[Kyru]

I like to imagine it as you're someone who's never swam before. The first 10 skill levels of swimming are you "learning to swim". Once you get to level 10 swimming, you can swim pretty far. I'm up to swim 25 now and I feel it's pretty decent.

It would be nice to be able to swim further at the start, but you also have to consider that there's plenty of people (athletic and not) who go their whole lives without learning to swim. So your character being pretty garbage at swimming first few attempts makes a bit of sense.

[ska.one]

Yeah, I almost died the first time I "went swimming" (i.e. got sick of sitting on an immobile raft the first time I tried it out). Saved by food management and a lucky breaking of some rough seas, I decided swimming to get up to level 10 was worth it for the few minutes it took.

Swimming is still a bad idea for me, but leveling it up enough to avoid panic is worthwhile. Especially when I do something stupid like go for a full ass sprint in swamps and try to jump across a large pool of water only to land in the deep end with next to no stamina.

[GlassDeviant]

Once you get good at swimming and have good food it's no big deal, although I wouldn't recommend setting off to swim across the ocean or anything. There are ways to level it, even afk ways.

[Weaver]

You're a dude brought back from the dead with no memory of even basic things, hence having to relearn how to make even basic weapons and tools. Your body isn't your original one and is a weak frail shadow of what you were in life. This means you begin with no memory of how to swim. Then you jump into water after sprinting yourself breathless in full armor and gear and expect what exactly to happen?
And with your stamina gone you can still swim, you just start drowning and losing health.
Spend some time swimming around. I made sure to do so when I built my first raft in case something went wrong and I had to swim for it. Like a lot of this game, preparation and thinking forward is the key. Rushing headlong into unknown situations always goes badly.

[KippenKaasBaas]

Whenever you have some minor critique on a game there's always people who take it a bit to seriously and respond with the most braindead arguments.

Originally posted by sq33k:

EVERY action in the game takes stamina except basic walking/jogging. Why would anyone think swimming would be different?

I don't know why anyone would think swimming doesn't take stamina. I certainly never thought that. That was never my point and I never said anything close to that.
Sure swimming should take stamina. Obviously. But I don't agree with how much stamina it costs, and how quickly you die when it runs out. It feels out of place and many new players don't see it coming.

Originally posted by Weaver:

Then you jump into water after sprinting yourself breathless in full armor and gear and expect what exactly to happen?

If you jump into the water completely naked, with full stamina, and an empty inventory you're gonna get the exact same results. Armor does not affect swimming in this game. And I don't think anyone is gonna try to swim with an empty stamina bar.

Originally posted by Weaver:

And with your stamina gone you can still swim, you just start drowning and losing health.

Again... my problem is not with WHAT happens. My problem is with HOW FAST it happens.

The only thing I'm saying is that the average human has no problem with swimming for a few minutes. Even if you're super fat and completely out of shape 5 minutes of swimming wouldn't kill you. In fact most humans could stay alive in water for 24 hours+ if their life depended on it.

Also comparing it with running doesn't make sense. In this game if you run out of stamina when you're running, you just move a little slower.
If you run out of stamina while swimming... you die.

So why make stamina drain while swimming so incredibly fast?

[stylish gibbon]

I noticed the same thing, the player character is surprisingly inept at swimming compared to every other activity. Here are the two possibilities, we can acknowledge that is is poor balancing on the devs part OR assume that the water is freezing cold, in which case it would be a perfectly realistic representation of what it's like for a human being to swim in such conditions, viking or not.

I think we would need a clarification from the devs to know for sure which one it is. Personally I'm fine with the current swimming balance of the game, and prefer the freezing water interpretation myself, although some kind of in-game indication or bit of lore addressing this would be nice.

[Diemex]

Well to be fair the game is not supposed to be ultra accurate... like you're walking around 50 logs 20 drumsticks a buncha rocks and tools and wearing armor. Then you try swimming with all that crap lol... but I get it... if you strip down its the same deal. Just up your swimming skill 13 means you're flailing your arms screaming "I'm drowning odin save me". Try getting 50 swim skill and you'll probably be able to swim across that pond/river no problem....... with 50 logs in your pocket.

[lPaladinl]

Does leveling swimming even raise swim speed? It doesn't state that it does in the tooltip.