Getting the Seamoth opens up the midgame. Suddenly you no longer need to keep bouncing to the surface, which is huge for serious exploration. Almost every biome becomes accessible as you get the first two depth upgrades. Collecting food and water has become a routinized chore.

The mid to late game transition is a touch fuzzier, but I think it occurs when you either get the Seamoth 900m depth upgrade or build the Cyclops. Delving into Lost River and beyond involves a novel set of exploration challenges. By this point you also probably feel like you have a pretty good handle on the overall layout of the map, just need to fill in the remaining corners. Food and water are largely automated.

Endgame is the Lava Lakes and Primary Containment Facility. The map is explored, you have a clear and actionable win-state goal, and what's left is demonstrating mastery of details of the world.

@starkatt @starkatt Yeah, I really liked the tech-tree-gated style of progress. A lot like a Metroid game, but with less guidance for what's needed next and no map on where to find things.

I was immensely gratified at the end to find that I'd hoarded all the relevant elements to the end-game stuff over the course of the game, and thus built things very quickly.

@starkatt (pst that last one was unspoiler'd)

@Doephin fff, thanks.

@starkatt Actual response: you got it fairly well, visiting and clearing the Auroa is fairly significant too.

I'm curious how many players actually use the air pipes. They're useful but only in very small niches (you can't get somewhere with the Seamoth or don't have it yet) and they're resource intensive.

@Doephin I tried using the air pipes to get me to the jellyshroom cave but they just don't get far enough.

@starkatt @Doephin I tried connecting the airpipes from the surface down to my habitat, because I thought that's how it was supposed to work. It didn't. I ignored them afterwards. :-)

@starkatt You can chain them infinitely as far as I could tell but you need looots of materials.

Re Endgame- that idea could be interesting. It'd also fit a little better...it is slightly odd that the darkest most opressive biomes are open water. The caves lost river and lava are so we'll lit.

@Doephin What I'd really like metrics on is average number of beacons deployed by each player. I feel like I'm using a shitload but have no idea if it's actually typical or not.

@starkatt Lack of map = alot of beacons I think. I had like a dozen, not counting the parked cameras I used for the same purpose.

@Doephin heh, I completely ignored the cameras. I'm at like 13 or 14 beacons deployed. Have started recycling ones that are no longer needed instead of making new ones, so I've actually probably marked at least 20 locations.

@Doephin also I haven't talked about this before but "no map" is actually kind of refreshing, even if it took me a while to appreciate.

@starkatt Same, that's probably pretty common especially early on

@Doephin @starkatt Heh, I'm atypical, I used beacons initially for interesting wrecks but later just used them for the entrances to the major underground spaces. Much of the rest I just kinda figured out by memory.

@starkatt @emanate Soreth had a laugh at one of the beacons in my first game: "You died here" (trying to explore a wreck at 500m too early, I got out but was too busy dodging a warper to get up in time)

@starkatt @Doephin So I used like... four, maybe five beacons total and swapped them between locations as things became irrelevant. I tended to remember where areas were based off of the pod location broadcasts, though, so I used them a lot.

@Soreth @starkatt @Doephin Ooh yeah, I used the escape pods pretty often as reference, which was probably intentional in their placement. It was nice to have that incentive to go deeper, too, with the Degassi waypoints.