[SN2] Outpost Design For Watching Something Happen...
Hi all!
I'm keeping this post title vague because this is a base design I came up with for a somewhat late-game (relative to the first early-access release) Subnautica 2 feature from the "second" area, and I don't want to spoil anyone...so if you if you don't want to know about a new base feature discovered near the "end" of the "part 1", please stop reading after this.
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This is my design for an "outpost" room for watching metal farms while within a "base", along with lockers to contain "seed" metals to start the metal farming process in each one. I have also tested and confirmed that that sitting in a chair within a base completely stops your food and water meters from "going down" as long as you remain seated. With that, I wanted to combine these two things to allow a player to sit and watch the metal farms collect the metals and/or watch the timers up close, without having to worry about oxygen, or food and water depleting. You could probably go AFK here as well and let them "work", as long as your base's power situation is stable, and you'll never lose oxygen, food, or water as long as you're seated here.
Sitting down, looking out the window to monitor the timers and progress
Outside view of the outpost viewing room for watching the farms
I also added lockers in this room, they contain 3x "seed" metals of every kind available, and labeled them in groups of how long it takes to complete each "cycle" (2 minutes for "common" metals, 10 minutes for "uncommon", and 20 minutes for "rare", based on the Subnautica 2 wiki's listing: https://wiki.subnautica.com/sn2/Metal_Farm )
All 3 lockers containing \"seed\" metals based on harvest times
I power this small outpost room by connecting it to my other base's main building using the power transmitters; and a key part of this is that you MUST keep it far enough out of range of the a "main" base that has the fabricators/replicators and other storage, so that building something there won't ever pull materials out of these "seed" lockers. This is critical, because if a fabricator takes all of your "seed" metals out of a locker here, you may have to go gather another one to replace it, etc...
To me, this seems like an optimal and efficient design (although a bigger building and more lockers might allow for more farms and thus more "seed" metals, etc...but this is the basic idea for a "small" farm with three metal farms)
I hope this helps! Please comment here if you have any questions, I think I now understand the farming process a lot more now, and it's amazing! (Oh, and don't remove the seed metal from a farm before harvesting its previous output! I lost a 20 minute farm process when I did that. Lesson learned!)