This suggestion obviously ties into the whole fleet system, so it won’t be immediately available, but you aren’t meant to be going to, for example, the Far Reaches, so early on anyways. Fleets should be a thing when Full Release comes out though since we have the level cap for it (hopefully). So this’ll be relevant for that, and the goal is to alleviate the worst part of Dark Sea travel. Sailing into it until you reach the layer where you’ll actually be trying to get loot.
Now for the explanation, upon being able to initiate a conquest, you can use your fleet to reach layers of the Dark Sea “faster” than you normally otherwise could. It’s essentially a one way fast travel, taking you to a point in the Dark Sea, where you are then on your own as your fleet explores without you to cover more ground for treasure.
Restrictions:
-
Fleet Strength -
You need a certain fleet strength to reach a certain layer of the Dark Sea. If your fleet is too weak, it can’t carry you very far. -
Ship Requirements -
If you lack certain requirements (shown to you), you are either: -
Not allowed to continue.
Happens when your fleet is far too weak -
Suffer damage as a cost to the fast travel.
Happens when your fleet is strong enough to take you there, but not protect you fully (aka you meet the minimum requirements) -
Fleet Stationed -
Fleet after escorting you enters a Conquest state where you can’t use them to go back if you return early. You must wait for your fleet to return before you can use them to fast travel to a point in the Dark Sea. So feel free to go in, get your loot, return, and take a nap or something because you shouldn’t be doing back to back explorations anyways for your irl sanity.
TLDR: Fleet must be available for the option to be available. -
Layer Cap -
The fleets will not go beyond the Far Reaches, meaning you’ll need to sail to the Insanity 4 area on your own. Makes sense lore wise, I don’t think your crew can handle going so far anyways, and Insanity 3 is probably pushing things. You shouldn’t be able to skip the entire Dark Sea for the best loot in insanity 4 anyways, and insanity 4 kills without warding iirc anyways.
I’m unsure of any other things to consider, this is an overall simple feature, but if having an optional singleplayer instance of the Dark Sea was to be done/added (this’ll be its own suggestion, not part of this one). Then this feature would automatically be a singleplayer instance, not a public fast travel one. If it was public then it’d pick a random point within the first 20% of a chosen layer in a public server to spawn you in. Preferably with a condition of being away from other players.
Admittedly this kinda lessens the hardships of the Dark Sea somewhat, but this requires you to actively build something up. Furthermore, you can’t use it all the time depending on how conquests work, since you may return before your fleet does. This is a feature for casual players covering Insanity 1, 2, and 3 (Far Reaches).