Ocean Monsters

[hstone32]

For the past few days, I've been thinking a lot about what the purpose of enemies in VS is. To make a long story short, I believe the purpose of enemies in this game is to keep up adrenaline levels. Every time a player leaves their house, they should be conditioned to be at high alert for potential threats. They will be listening for wolf howls in the forest, scanning the landscape for bears, checking behind their back for shivers, and of course, always be listening for that characteristic shriek of a bowtown readying an arrow. This ever present sense of danger is the salt to VSs gameplay loop in my opinion, and it makes things like building a house where the player may finally relax without fear of being attacked, all the more meaningful.

But there is one place where none of these threats are present: oceans. Considering that traversing the ocean has historically always been risky, it's feels strange to me that in VS, sailing the ocean is the safest place you could possibly be outside your home. As a matter of fact, the ocean is actually a safer place to be than your house, particularly during temporal storms.

Now in-line with the rest of VSs progression system, I think that the danger of any area should be alleviated by technological progression, but never entirely eliminated. In other words, I think the danger in the ocean should depend on how you choose to cross it:

• swimming: extremely dangerous. Not likely to survive unless you get very lucky.
• raft: Survivable, but you really got to be on your A-game. Should only be attempted for short distances
• sailboat: Only dangerous if you aren't paying attention.

Here's a couple of ideas I have for monsters that would fulfill that role:

• A shark-like enemy (or perhaps just an actual shark) that chases the player. If the player is in a raft or a sailboat, the enemy will ram against it, attempting to capsize. A sailboat is more than fast enough to outrun them, but a raft would require the player to skillfully juke its ramming attack.
• A large stationary enemy that is tall enough to be seen above the water. Fires ballista bolts at the player at a fairly large range. Tends to spawn in swarms.
• A barnacle-like enemy that hides just below the water's surface. If touched, it attaches itself to the player and does steady damage until dislodged. If the player is in a raft or a sailboat, it will attach to that instead, causing it to slow down. Will cause the raft or boat to sink if too many attach to it. Sailboats take a lot more barnacles to sink than a raft.

[Rainbow Fresh]

While I do agree that oceans are currently incredibly underdeveloped and that some form of notable, potentially even actively hostile life in it is sorely missing - generally just adding danger for the sake of it makes for a weak argument. The player "feeling adrenaline and being on high alert" isn't so much the core to VS's gameplay loop as it is a reasonable, natural consequence to how the world is built. Not to mention that you can easily turn many parts of that off - passive hostiles, no rift spawns, no temporal storms. Isn't the official Homo Sapiens gamemode completely without lore content and as such monsters? The tension exists because the elements that are reasonably in the game - wolves and bears inhabit the forests, monsters roam the resource-rich depths and, while enabled, the sky can decide to poop out 100 drifters at any point in time. On top of all the passive hazards like otherwise passive/fleeing animals deciding to defend themselves when approached, pits straight to bedrock opening up in the ground and kudos if you actually turn on cave-ins and soil instability. These mechanics by themselves serve a purpose (or atleast the potential of one, if further refined as a mechanic). Animals having more than "run away while in x distance to player" behavior makes for a better, more immersive experience. Having natural predators (who themselves hunt prey), too, makes for a more diverse, immersive world. The monsters are part of the lore content and it is explained why they are. Fix temporal storms and they could even potentially be considered a great feature. And, while natively optional due to highly debatable results, cave-ins/soil instability also makes sense; soil isn't the most robust building material and cave-ins are a genuine threat in mining. None of the features are (or atleast seem like they are) added because a dev thought "The world is too peaceful, time to dump more hazards everywhere".

So coming back to your suggestion: Effectively saying "The ocean is too boring and peaceful so we should add monsters that make ocean travel a pain" is the wrong approach. Sharks? Make sense. Not just sharks, more rich and diverse aquatic wildlife in general. We have physical fish and actual fishing already. How about more? Sharks as the wolves of the sea. Maybe puffer fish or other poisonous fish much like eating every mushroom is a risky move. Jellyfish that sting and poison if touched, to add that "swimming on foot is suicide" feeling. None of which are added because "oceans are too safe", but because "oceans are lacking any meaningful content to bring them up to speed with the land-based content".

Which shows specifically in the underwater bowtorns you suggested - why would they be there? Granted, I am not quite fully in the clear as to how the rot and the rust play together in the lore so I am not sure if the rust monsters are solely interdimensional beings or if they are primarily underground because all the people in their bunkers got infected and turned into them. If the latter though, where would the underwater monsters come from, if people sought shelter in the ground, not the sea? Gameplay-wise, what would there be that needs guarding by clearly artificial means (think guardians in Minecraft ocean monuments)? There would need to be some kind of incentive, some kind of resource to gain from the ocean that is worth defending? Caves crawl with high tier monsters because down there is where the good ore veins are. What is at the sea floor for big, boat-sinking ballista bowtorns to defend it?

And if the answer is solely "the right of easy travel" because, yes, if given the right world generation traveling via fully decked out sailboat is one of the nicest things possible - that however shows the greater problem with water in current VS itself though; there just isn't any to speak of. In the default world gen settings you'll barely find a big lake worth of ocean on your thousands of blocks travels. We have no rivers to effectively connect bodies of water and make boat travel long-term viable. Even if you do find an ocean, chances are you can rather easily just ride around it; certainly more easily than bringing all the materials to build a full sailboat all the way out here just to cross this one oversized pond. So before we can truly think about adding meaning to the seven seas, we would need seven seas to begin with.

[MKMoose]

11 hours ago, hstone32 said:

But there is one place where none of these threats are present: oceans. Considering that traversing the ocean has historically always been risky, it's feels strange to me that in VS, sailing the ocean is the safest place you could possibly be outside your home. As a matter of fact, the ocean is actually a safer place to be than your house, particularly during temporal storms.

It doesn't seem to me that threats in the ocean are really conducive to interesting gameplay. It would indeed be preferable to make swimming willy-nilly with no boat in the middle of an ocean more risky, but I see little current reason to extend the same to rafts and especially to sailboats. I especially wouldn't like to see threats which could destroy the sailboat - at most make it slower until repaired.

There is one other thing that oceans don't have aside from threats: value. Finding an ocean is largely worthless in VS for most purposes - maybe a bit less so now that fishing is in the game, but still. Oceans offer almost no unique resources of any kind, they don't really make travel any easier, arguably don't even look particularly good in terms of visuals, and just don't serve much purpose in the game.

A number of features which could readily be added to oceans are for example:

• seashells (in less pathetic quantities, possibly via panning improvements),
• sea salt,
• marine mammals (especially for hunting in cold climates, could include some threats),
• crustaceans and other miscellaneous animals (for seafood and pearls especially, could include some threats),
• whales (could be hunted, could serve as a threat in some capacity).

But you'll notice that none of them except whales actually require large ocean bodies, which would generally just end up boring even if a lot of ocean content is added.

One of the best things that I think could happen to oceans in VS would be to make them into more sprawling and interconnected water networks instead of simple blobs of water - rivers ought to help with this, but they're unlikely to be sufficient on their own. This ideally combined with increased raft and sailboat speed could make oceans into convenient travel networks, rather than the obstacles that they are now.

 

I have to say, though, having some ocean-specific enemies related to the Rust or Rot could be very interesting as a challenge of sorts. Maybe even a boss which would be best tackled in a sailboat. Would prefer them to be localized to unstable areas, though, not spawned anywhere throughout oceans.

Edited October 13 by MKMoose

[LadyWYT]

12 hours ago, hstone32 said:

A shark-like enemy (or perhaps just an actual shark) that chases the player. If the player is in a raft or a sailboat, the enemy will ram against it, attempting to capsize. A sailboat is more than fast enough to outrun them, but a raft would require the player to skillfully juke its ramming attack.

Way too stereotypical, and an unfair one to sharks. Can they be dangerous? Yes, but generally if they're attacking a person it's because the person looks like familiar prey(a seal), they're curious(sharks don't have hands to check things out), or the person is actively bleeding in the water. So the game could go with the standard trope of making sharks attack on sight, however, I think it would be a lot more interesting if they were more passive and only really inclined to attack if attacked/attack if the player is already injured(so don't go jump in the water trying to escape something else).

More interesting opponents could be jellyfish, snakes, and other extremely venomous sea creatures, since a sting/bite from one of these could easily be a death sentence if you're far from land and aren't carrying antidote. Humboldt squid are particularly notorious for being aggressive, and like to travel in groups, and of course there's also the classic "kraken" that is the giant squid. You've also got oddities from the extremely deep parts of the ocean--things like the magnapinna squid, barreleye, oarfish, and other oddities, that might not be aggressive themselves but would certainly be enough to spook the player.

12 hours ago, hstone32 said:

Every time a player leaves their house, they should be conditioned to be at high alert for potential threats.

I actually disagree. The player should be alert for danger when they leave the relative safety of their base, however, I don't think they need an adrenaline spike every single time. The ocean and other large bodies of water already have their own drawbacks, so they don't really need to be chock full of rotbeasts as well. They can be a safe haven from monsters, yes, however, consider that the player will need to first build a vessel big enough to properly live on(sailboat, and not just a common raft) in order to really take advantage of that safety. There's also not much to really see or do out on the water, because I mean...at the end of the day, it's a LOT of water and not much else, and going to get boring unless you just really love sailing. You also aren't going to be able to farm, raise livestock, or work metal while out on the water, and will need to eventually make landfall to resupply...which also means you're going to need to face the dangers lurking on land.

In short, the player might be overall safer out on the ocean, but it's going to be a pretty boring overall experience if that's all they do, and they're going to be locking themselves out of some critical supplies in the process. I could see it being a fun challenge once in a while, but I don't think most players will be running to the ocean to escapes the horrors on land.

[Sparticus247]

I'm less inclined to have random boat destroying or player killing monsters rubbing the seas that you have no way to predict. Or prepare for. 

On land to make a path to a trader safe is usually just laying down paths of some kind, and chopping away at the woods to make travel easy and repeatable. The same effort is replicated with the entire first year it takes to just build a boat, and sacrificing all the flacks and farm production towards that goal. 

The actual traveling itself also takes away from other activities you can do when compared to traveling on land. On land you may have a risk of running into wolves or bears, but those are great resources for bones, fat and pelts. Raccoons, foxes, and other animals while less threatening are fantastic resources. This doesn't even mention the scavenging opportunities with ruins, and forging activities with berries and finding crops. This is something you don't get on a boat on a long 20 minute journey. 

That nice trade-off with the boat though is that you get to new regions faster, so it's much easier to find your first soybeans, amaranth, rice, etc for the sunk cost trade-off of losing opportunities for other resources. 

What boats really excel at is convenient trade routes with coastal traders, but that's really the only true upside to them when compared to just land living. You can get just as much fish from a large lake as you can from an ocean in a normal playthrough.

I think it would be nice instead to have some more weather dangers from being wet, hot, and cold which would affect your sea voyages, and have barnacle buildup be a real problem that you can't ignore. It would also be nice to have wind direction effect sailing speeds, and maybe even require a triangular sail if you want to go against the wind. Besides those challenges, I think getting sea salt from the ocean water as salt resource would be a good addition as well to balance out challenges.

[DeanF]

On 10/13/2026 at 8:29 AM, LadyWYT said:

Way too stereotypical, and an unfair one to sharks.

The way that bears and wolves behave in the game is already unfair to bears and wolves.  What's the difference?  The game just needs an oceanic threat, and sharks are the obvious possibility.  A huge Humboldt squid would be pretty awesome, too, though. 

But I agree that players should be very safe in the sailboat.  Just not swimming (or rafting?) huge stretches of open water.  Rafts should generally be coastal craft, for instance.  The water-creature threat should increase with water depth, and again the sailboat should be impervious.

We should also be able to make a raft out of reeds (thule or papyrus), not just logs.
And I'll plug my own old proposal for an intermediate craft bewteen raft and sailboat:

 

 

Edited 2 minutes ago by DeanF