Diving Deeper

Have you ever dived into a wreck and been overwhelmed by scannables you unlocked months ago? Do you want the hundreds of mobile vehicle bay and Seaglide fragments to mean more than a lousy two titanium? Are you interested in being forced to search low and lower for fragments of the most basic tools and even further down for the cool ones? Well look no further!

With this mod, you will treasure every scannable you find, and that's because you'll need every fragment you find if you want to unlock anything. That's not to say you'll need to find EVERY Seaglide fragment before you can unlock it, but it'll sure feel like it. The amount of scannables needed to unlock almost every blueprint has been at least doubled in this mod.


Some History

If you're reading this right now and thinking, "wow this sounds like it would make the game really hard", you are quite correct. This mod was inspired by the Realistic Recipes and Increased Difficulty mod by Ellinger74, who sought to make the game's recipes more realistic and in the process made the game really f****** hard (compared to vanilla at least). Doubling down on this theme, Ellinger74 also increased the amount of scannables needed to unlock blueprints as an optional feature.

If you're now wondering why I'm not just recommending Ellinger74's amazing mod to you, it's because the mod relies on the unsupported first version of Custom Craft, which can have serious conflicts with other mods. If Ellinger74's mod is the only mod you're interested in running then I highly recommend it. However, if you're running other mods that use Custom Craft 2, then you'll have to look to Quintuple5's port of the mod to a version that runs on Custom Craft 2, which you can find here. However, Custom Craft 2 was created to work through SMPHelper V2, which currently doesn't support scannable modification as far as I'm aware. As a result, the changes to the blueprint unlock requirements couldn't be ported to the new version.


What This Mod Does

This mod adds blueprint scannable unlock requirement modification back in as a standalone feature. I consider it essential for anyone looking to use Realistic Recipes and Increased Difficulty for Custom Craft 2 as it was originally imagined, and for anyone looking to make Subnautica the challenging game it was always meant to be. Further, it allows you to easily customize how many fragments are needed for each blueprint unlock through a simple txt file, the default values of which are pulled directly from Ellinger74's vision of blueprint realism.

If you disagree with Ellinger74's figures and consider yourself a masochist, feel free to go as high as 30 scannables required for your Seaglide or whatever tool you feel like torturing yourself to get (any higher than 30 and Subnautica will stage an intervention). And if you enjoy beating the game with little to no challenge (a subtler form of masochism), you can also set the values as low as 1. Setting them to zero is also theoretically possible but I've never tested it, so it could crash the game, permanently lock some blueprints, send the Earth hurtling into the Sun, or all three. So please don't unless you're really into masochism.

I would personally recommend the values Ellinger47 came up with. I find them to be balanced and fair, requiring significantly more exploration to unlock everything but not to the point where it becomes tedious and annoying. In fact, I would go as far as to say it's how the game should originally have played, with several big tech milestones getting pushed back to much later in the game for a normal playthrough, where they actually serve as a reward for hard (but fun) work instead of making everything ridiculously fast and easy in the midgame and beyond.

Some examples:

• The Seaglide takes 6 scannables, forcing you to really explore the Shallows and Kelp Forests on-fin before you can unlock it, pushing it into the early-midgame.
• The Beacon takes 6 scannables, making it a lot tougher to get and forcing you to really figure out your way around the map without them.
• The Mobile Vehicle Bay and Seamoth also take 6 scannables each to unlock, moving all your powered vehicles into the late-midgame.
  
  ****** Minor Spoilers Ahead *******
• Every section of the Cyclops blueprint requires 6 scannables, making it a true late to endgame reward instead of an easy way to push yourself beyond the midgame.
• The PRAWN Suit takes 6 scannables, which means exploring the exploded Aurora is no longer good enough to unlock it. To the players now worried that this makes it impossible to obtain: there are many other full PRAWN Suit fragments in various deep-sea wrecks, you'll just have to get to the late-game now before you can scan them, which is where the PRAWN Suit should have been all along.
  

        ****** End Minor Spoilers ******

I'm currently running this mod alongside a boatload of other mods with no conflicts, so this mod should run conflict-free with every other mod out there. The only exception might be the original Custom Craft since the code I wrote to implement this mod was based on how they originally implemented it. Conflicts could also arise from other mods attempting to modify existing scannable values. Post if you have some conflict, I'll try to fix it but be aware this is my first attempt at a mod and I can't promise I'll be around to maintain it past release.

Custom scannables are also theoretically handled. I don't know about any mod that adds any new scannables to the game world, but if one arises editing its values through this mod should be as simple as adding the line customItemID:[frag count] to the txt file for each custom scannable added.


Installation

• Download and install QMods.
• Download the archive
• Extract the FragmentCountChanger folder to your QMods folder. If your QMods folder doesn't exist yet, run the game to the title screen and then quit after installing QMods.
  

Other Difficulty Mods

For those of you who are on this page because you're trying to make the Dark Souls version of Subnautica, I'm linking the following mods for your convenience. I'm using all of them in my current build for a hardcore-mode playthrough, and after three attempts I have yet to even make a Mobile Vehicle Bay before falling victim to the creatures and crushing depths of Planet 4546B.

Custom Craft 2 - Realistic Recipes and Increased Difficulty - makes every recipe realistic and much more challenging
Refillable Oxygen Tanks - turns the oxygen in your scuba tank from an inconvenience to an essential resource to manage
Radiation Challenge -  in a nutshell radiation is eventually EVERYWHERE and turns unfiltered air toxic, amazing synergy with R.O.T.

Check out their mod pages for more details, I highly recommend all of them.

If anyone's curious about the source code for this mod, you can find it here.


All credit to Ellinger74 and Quintuple5 for the inspiration, check out their mods from the links in the history section.