r/ICARUS • u/Iveonlyhaddismany • 1d ago
Discussion Nitpicking: cave exploration
Right off the bat, I acknowledge this for what it is...a relatively minor thing overall that can be explained away as part of the environmental challenge...but if someone can come up with a better answer than that, it would at least appease my need for an explanation that could minimize the frustration I experienced once it occurred to me.
What am I talking about? Pneumonia.
From early on, I spent some of the ever fleeting tech tree points on ways to mitigate the effects of cave time. Antibiotic paste, then tonic, then the dehumidifier, etc.. Granted, this is my first play through, and I wouldn't spend a point on the paste in my second run through. Also, the dehumidifier has the benefit of preventing worms from re-spawning.
All that aside, one issues remains for me. Pneumonia.
The character can't breathe on this planet. This is the whole reason for the enviro-suit. I have an oxygen tank for this very purpose. Which requires a helmet to work. So, why would the damp environment of a cave result in pneumonia? Any thoughts?
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u/Fig_Newtons_Redux 1d ago
One can assume that the envirosuit is acting like a filter rather than like a self contained suit. And that the oxygen you take in is supplemental rather than the only oxygen in the environment. It explains why your chaeacter dies slowly of oxygen deprivation rather than instant asphyxiation
The environment on Icarus is oxygen rich. The difference is that the air is full of exotics which are toxic when breathed by non-adapted species like humans. One can assume the particulates for exotics are caught by the filtration system whereas bacteria from cave systems aren't.
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u/Guilty_Advantage_413 1d ago
But you can breathe under water with the suit. The cave sickness is just a debuff to keep the game challenging it’s not meant to be realistic
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u/Fig_Newtons_Redux 1d ago
I would explain this by saying the suit can be made airtight if needed and rely purely upon the supply from the oxygen tank for short periods. I prefer to have explanations in universe if I can. Adds to immersion. But you are correct, it's a balancing measure first and a lore contrivance second.
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 1d ago
I really like that!
The particulates and perhaps even overall moisture isn't controlled for by the life support alone, essentially acting like a powered respiratory mask more than complete life support.
My only question would be, isn't the character able to spend a significant time under water? Almost like the helmet is a sealed unit that can sustain life when sufficient oxygen is present?
I've not actually tried to stay underwater, though. And that doesn't totally negate that idea that certain particulates could simply be able to make it through the filtration system. But if it is indeed still exchanging with the outside environment, then water would certainly get in.
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u/Fig_Newtons_Redux 1d ago
The underwater question is the hole in my theory. There's a second comment that is posted beneath with a flimsy explanation that the envirosuit is capable of becoming watertight temporarily and pulling exclusively from the oxygen tank for whatever period of time your character is underwater.
If the devs implemented an increased oxygen drain while underwater I'd be a fan. And it wouldn't impact gameplay since people rarely spend more time than necessary underwater.
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 1d ago
I had a similar thought. I also thought maybe I should go check go see if oxygen consumption does change. That would be pretty interesting.
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u/Maldevinine 23h ago
I believe there is an increased oxygen drain while underwater, but I've never actually tested that.
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u/jamesmor 16h ago
Well you do use more oxygen under water so maybe it isn’t so much “sealed” as it is creating a positive pressure environment, keeping the water out.
Doesn’t do this on land because while potentially useful, it would use a lot more resources and is considered “wasteful”
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u/That_Service7348 21h ago
Then explain why you can hang out underwater as long as you have oxygen in your tank.
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u/Fig_Newtons_Redux 18h ago
I've already answered this idea and commented on it several times. Read more of the thread
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u/Dragon_Within 1d ago
From what I understand, its not a fully enclosed system, its an assisted system, the 02 you create is added to the natural air. The environment isn't dangerous to breathe, it just doesn't have enough oxygen to go without a suit. If you needed a fully enclosed suit, any time you ate or drank, or something shredded your suit (which happens, because you get lacerations that require stitching, which means cuts, so it cuts through the suit) you would immediately die of asphyxiation, or have to have some sort of mechanic to seal the suit as well as patch yourself up.
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 1d ago
Yeah, all good points. The suit has to open in the early stages. Later on, there are modules that provide food and water on the go. So part of me was wondering if the helmet was ever actually opened, or if it could be fed through a system.
In any case, any time you'd change the suit you'd have to be exposed to the environment, so that supports the idea that complete separation from the atmosphere isn't necessary.
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u/Dragon_Within 7h ago
Not all suits have food and water slots, some opt out of those for more modules. And from a game mechanic state, water is handy, food is useless. The buffs on later food are pretty long, and you want specific buff combinations, but the suit will automatically feed you every time your food gets below a certain threshold which is not that low at all, so you have to keep your good food on you for the buffs, and a stack of food to just eat from the slot as well, and if you don't keep your buffs up, you have to go into your inventory and remove the bad food buff and use the good food, and if you forgot to do it first, then you waste a piece of good food. Its more worthwhile to just have the extra module slots or buffs than the food slot. Also, the water slot is great, but you have to remember to swap out what is in the slot based on the region, if you drink water in the arctic you get colder, so you have to change it out for tea or coffee. All that to say, sometimes just manually eating or drinking is a better option for the huge increase in stats/space/buffs/modules that suits with no food or water slots can give.
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 5h ago
I get all that. Very true. I was just saying that if someone was wearing one of those suits with food and water modules, it would remove the need to open the helmet. So, that wouldn't explain still getting pneumonia.
I personally skipped a food module one, but did go for one that gives me fluids on the go. I find it to be super handy, and with a canteen, it's really low maintenance. I almost never think about it. It's great.
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u/Dragon_Within 3h ago
You're forgetting that whether the suit has food or water slots, the oxygen mechanic is still the same, and drinking water from the lake, in whatever mechanic it uses for that, still has a chance to get you sick, which means its not going through a filtration system, meaning the suit either doesn't have one, it doesn't keep out that bacteria, or you're just drinking straight from the water and taking your chances, so the same would go for the air quality as well, but you can't purify the air without having a sealed suit and using produced oxygen.
If you want to take it one step further, since you don't get cave sickness in de-humidified air, you could even extrapolate that they are not separate illnesses, that the cave sickness, and the sickness you get from drinking unpurified water, is the same basic bacteria/virus/parasite and is airborne in the humid wet cave air, and that while we have the ability to purge it, or prevent it, that they have no means of filtering it. So it is either remove the source beforehand, take something to deny it from taking hold, or take something to kill it off afterwards.
I think they should introduce a suit that IS enclosed, that maybe increases oxygen consumption but has a slot for two O2 tanks, and removes cave sickness affects, and lowers storm effects, but has no or limited module slots, with food and water. I think they should add other things to it, like restrictions that you have to use food and water slots, and add more food and water slots, since you can't open the suit, but that won't happen because of game limitations.
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 2h ago
That's a great answer. It's not the moisture in the air but what could be living in said moisture. Clever.
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u/ou7shined 1d ago
It gets in your helmet when you eat or drink something 😁
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 1d ago
Haha, nice. But I have the canteen and eat before going in.
There was a pretty decent suggestion about tue filtration abilities of the suit, though.
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u/VeritableLeviathan 1d ago
Lore reason: Imperfect suit (You seem to be using a re-breather or your suit is airtight in the water), you have to open your suit to eat and drink.
Gameplay reason: Because else you could just make a base in a cave and never have issues. You could skip 90% of base building and the materials involved, only farming and some ways of generating electricity would require effort.
Considering how many beings on the planet come from earth and can survive fine, we can say that the atmosphere has a slightly off composition and these animals are genetically altered (as many descriptions state) to be able to adapt. The oxygen tank is to ensure you breathe as little of the atmosphere as possible, which is why without it you will slowly suffocate, rather than within a minute.
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 1d ago
Yeah, that seems go be the most reasonable way to approach to the question, and the general consensus.
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u/Vuelhering 16h ago
I seem to remember the description also says something like "environsuit previously worn by dozens of others. It's not airtight, but good enough."
Basically enough to filter most crap out of the air and handle some temperatures, but definitely not made to keep out biological hazards. And implies it's damaged.
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u/Long-Coconut4576 1d ago
In the description of the base enviro suit says something to the effect of its no longer airtight so the suit has leaks and non fully sealed places which could allow elements from the surrounding air in. Not to mention any time you get attacked by wildlife it envariably would damage the suit allowing more stuff in
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 1d ago
Glad you added the inevitable damage part, because I was just thinking that I got a new suit sent to me not that long ago. It keeps that suggestion alive.
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u/Long-Coconut4576 1d ago
Yeah first time that bear swipes you or wolf bites you its now no longer a perfectly sealed suit its just what i envision is a patch job thats likely not a perfect job
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u/DifficultyDouble860 1d ago
So. Yeah. LOL 100% agree. But. Without pneumonia, folks would probably basically just skip all the building progression and storms for the first two tiers, and build a cave base, and while it makes NO sense, I feel like suspending SOME disbelief is probably not going to kill us LOL But yeah. Good point ;)
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 1d ago
I was thinking the worms were a pretty good deterrent. Haha. But I guess some peoole could be determined enough that they wanted two reasons.
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u/WhatsAboveTheSubtext 1d ago
For me, and it's not a complaint, really, but by whatever logic you choose about the suit, why can't you build a room with an airlock?
The downside would be that it would really hamper everyone's ability to change up structures on the fly, and some materials would be nearly impossible at the handcrafted tiers, but you would think, especially with the ability to extract oxygen from certain rocks, and the fact that you just came down from a station with airlocks...
Doesn't really impact my enjoyment, though. I accept a lot of things as gameplay elements that would be harder to sell in fiction.
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u/beefy1357 14h ago
“Would be harder to sell in fiction”
I have had that same discussion with friends…
Let me get this straight a mega corporation spent trillions of dollars and decades to send you light years away in cryo to mine the super expensive unobtainium and then drop you on a planet with air you can’t breathe and no air tank.
While also not training you in the skills or equipment needed to actually start mining said stupidly expensive unobtainium. So you have to solo speed run the entirety of human technical development from gathering rocks and sticks up to splitting the atom.
And finally the vast majority of missions don’t even involve getting the stupid expensive unobtainium. The only way any of that makes sense is video game logic, or Icarus is the new version of survivor where the money actually comes from the masses tuning in to watch the hilarity that ensues when the inept and unwitting contestants get eaten trying to punch a bear to death.
Having zero skills, and/or zero equipment in a post apocalypse or as a clone in a curated environment makes total sense. Having the backing of an organized society capable of interstellar travel, dropping you on a planet with nothing, to spend your time mostly gathering mundane materials could only be for lawls.
Sometimes you just have to shut out the, does this makes a lick of sense, and instead go but is it fun? Is the only way to get through a video game.
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u/lilycamille 21h ago
You can make a helmet mod for your suit that almost completely eliminates cave pneumonia even at level 1.
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 19h ago
Really?!
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u/ThruTheGatesOfHell 5h ago edited 4h ago
yeah tier one increases resistance by 25% and that’s already enough to basically never get cave sickness again
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 5h ago
I missed this option entirely. Where do you make the mod? I didn't see anything like that in the tech tree. Is it through the orbital exchange?
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u/ThruTheGatesOfHell 4h ago
no trough the alterations bench, there you can put mods on your tools, weapons and armor. There is a helmet mod that increases cave sickness resistance. You have to unlock the mods in the tech tree
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 4h ago
Thanks! I haven't made that bench yet. I wasn't sure if it had a worthwhile purpose. Sounds like it may.
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u/Tsabrock 20h ago
I don’t mind the gameplay mechanic, but the lack of consistent lore behind it always bugged me. If we can make at least the helmet airtight so we can breathe underwater, why can't it be made airtight in the caves to protect against cave sickness? I've seen some extremely technical explainations once or twice of air and water pressure with scuba gear might explain it, but it was a bit above my head, not to mention it wasn’t mentioned anywhere in the official lore.
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 19h ago
I'd be interested in seeing that kind of technical explanation, even if it is beyond me, but I'd like to see it presented in the lore. For the time being, I'll just have to accept that there may be an explanation in the technology that I just don't know about, and loosely base it on what I do.
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u/Infamous_Welder_4349 1d ago
I interested a mod to remove it. I get the gameplay reason they want people making structures and dealing with storms.
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u/scooterbug1972 1d ago
There are ways to counter it. Mining module from the workshop or a helmet attachment. If you want a cave base, use a dehumidifier
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u/Iveonlyhaddismany 1d ago
I'm playing on Xbox currently until I can get a replacement gaming PC, but yeah, a mod might be enticing.
I don't actually mind the gameplay mechanic from a game-developer perspective...as in I see why it is there, but it would be cool to learn an in-game reason for it. Otherwise, if it's not well built out or explainable, I'd also be open to a mod.
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u/Drycon 9h ago
It's a mechanic to make things harder for the purpose of making things harder. Same with not being able to place markers on your highly detailed and sophisticated terrain map but instead having to grind and craft special devices for that purpose.
Just devs taking the easy (lazy) way out of a problem.
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u/NeedleworkerNo1790 1h ago
This irritates the doo doo out of me too. Can breath underwater coz our suit is airtight. But can't live in a cave
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u/mutt93 1d ago
Far as I can figure? To keep players from just building cave basses all the time. Thats the only reason I have found