Sunless Sea and Fallen London

[Tenenza]

So I recently tried this game called Sunless Sea, a victorian survival horror sea exploration game thing. It's kinda like someone made a game to simulate all those victorian era stories about the sea and africa and how freaky and supernatural things were outside of the good old UK. Only, it's also in a gaint cavern underground, with a rich and unique setting as well. Exploring and uncovering the details and secrets of the setting is actually one of the most fun parts of the game, and is also the most rewarding way to the play the game as well, which is neat. Sunless Sea also turned out to be a spin-off of another web-based waity game called Fallen London, which has the same setting which is cool. Yes.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Meh. Victorian London was a pretty crappy time/place to live in. Not especially interesting to someone like me. Putting it underground and making it more steampunk-y doesn't really do that much for it either.

[Loow]

I've been considering picking up Sunless Sea for some time. It looks interesting and fixes the one problem I had with Fallen London. Energy Bars.

Maybe sailing around an underwater ocean will be more exciting than waiting ten minutes to click a button to get the next scrap of lore.

[nbielinski]

As a person who played for quite a few hours on this game I can tell you that rightfully. I have no pants on head wearing, steam ship driving, cannibalistic crew eating clue what in the hell is going on. It seems to have a problem with you GETTING anywhere, I mean sure if you whore yourself out for long enough you get a bigger ship and such and if you're lucky you can trade crew members for.. stories I assume. I don't know, I like the roguelike prospector because through trade and piracy I was able to make a decent living and buy an earth like planet to retire on. In sunless sea all my money just got me 5 extra minutes of survival before I went adrift in the sea and ate my crew.

[jackfractal]

Sunless Sea is awesome. Weird and twisted and covered in salt, but awesome.

I've played quite a bit of it and it takes some getting used too. Unlike other games of a similar type, attempting to find ways of consistently making money the same way won't work. The dev team purposefully blocks those up as they're discovered.

The idea is to always be on the move, and to balance pushing ahead against running out of supplies.

A couple of little snippets of advice:

 

2. Try to find the Salt Lions early. Shipping their salt back to London is a good way to earn some easy cash, but this revenue stream does run out eventually, so it's mostly worthwhile to hit the Lions on your way back to London after exploring.
4. Hit as many ports as you can every time you go out, and turn those reports back into the admiralty. This should almost entirely refresh your fuel and supplies when you get back to London provided that you've kept a brisk pace.
   
6. Don't turn in Strategic Information if you can help it, combine two of them to make a piece of Vital Intelligence. You make more money that way, and you increase the London Supremacy rating. Not usually a bad thing.
   
8. Run dark. Don't use your running lights that often. Doing so doubles your fuel use. Only turn your lights on if your Terror is becoming a problem.
   
10. Work for the dead. Another way of earning early cash is to visit the Curator in Venderbight. They pay large sums of money for strangely colored items.
    
12. Don't worry about getting another ship. You can easily win the game in the starter ship. This part of the game is enormously silly and unbalanced. Think of the other ships like different builds in an MMO, not as upgrades, despite their ridiculously inflated price-tags.
    
14. When you're starting out, run your ship with a minimal amount of crew. More crew means more mouths to feed. You want to stay a little above the half-way mark so you can afford to lose one or two to random events, but don't pack your ship full or you risk starvation.
    
16. If you find the island with the Guinea-pigs, help the Guinea-pigs, not the rats. The reward you get is far better.
    
18. It's almost never worth it to fight sea monsters. Almost. There are a few exceptions.

 

Hope that helps. Good zailing.

[Tenenza]

As a person who played for quite a few hours on this game I can tell you that rightfully. I have no pants on head wearing, steam ship driving, cannibalistic crew eating clue what in the hell is going on. It seems to have a problem with you GETTING anywhere, I mean sure if you whore yourself out for long enough you get a bigger ship and such and if you're lucky you can trade crew members for.. stories I assume. I don't know, I like the roguelike prospector because through trade and piracy I was able to make a decent living and buy an earth like planet to retire on. In sunless sea all my money just got me 5 extra minutes of survival before I went adrift in the sea and ate my crew.

 

The early game is hell.

Brutal, murdery hell.

Late game can also be hell, depending on what choices you make (Do not try to do a FrostFound run unless you are prepared, or for that matter, actually fight Mt.Nomad.)

But there are lots of little things that can help ease you out of that hell.

Hunter's Keep is good for free early game supplies, and can be quite rewarding if you have the necessary veils or get lucky.

There are a few characters in london that give good quests with decent payouts, although they're mostly there to give you just that little more incentive to go explore more unfound islands or revisit old ones.

The salt lions give good money early game, as Jackfractal said, and keep an eye out for visage.

And if you're still having trouble, try taking one of the legacies that lets you keep 25% of your last captain's money.

[canon35]

Never really heard of this game. Is it like FTL?

[Tenenza]

Never really heard of this game. Is it like FTL?

It's much more open world then FTL, with more focus on making decisions and choices then combat. Also, it encourages you to take your time exploring since you gain much greater rewards for exploring far off distant lands then just trading between islands (which is barely profitable if not at a flat out loss most of the times).

It's an interesting game, if you can survive the very harsh learning curve.