This suggestion is to elaborate and compliment a feature related to this suggestion: Dark Sea Compass ship attachment
Another way to customize your ship, making it more personalized to your favorite activities rather than being fast or good for combat.
Utility Attachments
Utility Attachments are a new ship customization slot, starting at Brig with more being added the bigger our ships get, separate from regular ship attachments. The difference is that Utility attachments do not provide any type of combat service like the harpoon launcher or add ship stats like the rowboat launch. They serve purely as compliments for niche services that help the player in certain activities of the game.
Additionally, they will make ships look much more unique by adding specific structures to them, rather than a copy and paste in a specific spot such as the hunting attachments and rowboats.
Below I will list a couple Ideas as to what these could be to get an idea of how they work and their purpose:
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Dark Sea Compass - Helps personalize the Dark Sea experience. Check top for that separate suggestion. I imagine it as a large, player sized compass that attaches near the front of the ship.
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Potion Totems(LVL 1-5) - A new craftable ship attachment. By utilizing max brewing and the shipbuilder, players can obtain totems which give a specific positive potion effects when near the ship such as clear-sight or warding(not healing). These totems can be upgraded to achieve higher tiers. They would not contribute to the positive status effect cap.
When added, 4 would appear at different locations of the ship similar to regular ship attachments. -
The Bath - Instead of brigs having the bath be apart of their model, the bath would be an attachment automatically given to the player once they buy their Brig. This would make the bath be an infinite, free alternative to soap rather than soap being the alternative(which is used more by endgame players anyways).
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Skyship Docks - I know sky islands in the dark sea are a feature that is planned(At least last time I checked), so having a personal skyship dock being a Utility Attachment just makes sense to me. Since this is vetex’s idea, I’m just suggesting it would make sense as a utility attachment.
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Enchanted Lantern Oil - There would be two types “Radiating Lantern Oil” and “Concealing Lantern Oil”. These would cause barrels of oil appear around the ship, near lanterns.
Radiating would increase ship aggression(not in the dark sea). It would increase your aggro range and(if possible) make ships spawn faster and near you. Helpful for those trying to add fleet ships. These would make the lanterns brighter and slightly larger.
Concealing does the opposite: your ship has a smaller aggro range and enemy ships are(if possible) less likely to spawn around you, and notoriety ships spawn less frequently. The Lanterns become duller and disappear at shorter distances.
Purpose:
Having special attachments such as these (Specifically the dark sea compass since thats what inspired this suggestion) would allow players to have more choice over what they choose to do and really specialize in the things they enjoy. It also takes a step to make ships feel more like a home to players, something I know vetex wants to elaborate on in the future.
Additionally, I would just find it cool if you could look at someone’s ship, see the special structures/vanity added due to utility attachments, and get an idea of what their playstyle is like similar to how you can identify a fishing boat, cargo boat, etc, in real life.
And in the future, when ships have more utility attachment slots, that specialization and creation of an identity through your ship utility attachments would be come stronger and really add to the immersion that we players have “j*bs” within the universe and identities attached to it.