Subnautica Mesmer - Tumblr Posts

Y’all are sleeping on the best base guard dogs in existence on this great big blue marble

I am so glad someone asked! See, I got into a little bit of experimenting in the sparse reef with releasing tame wildlife, and here’s a few things I’ve noted about some common ideas for outdoor “base pets/guards” I’ve tried out.

Now I know for one that most captive raised predators are supposed to be at least neutral to the player upon release. Ideally you would want that dolphin sized carnivore outside your hatch to be focused on cleaning up the hostiles around your home instead of grabbing you every time you exited a hatch. In my experience, and this could be the result of bugs that have since been patched, crabsnakes and crabsquids have always been a little unpredictable when it comes to clearing this bar.

I’ve had both instantly attack me upon leaving my inventory, and crabsquids in particular are so tech/light hostile that they make pretty awful additions to the area no matter what, unless you love the occasional base-wide power blackout every time it decides to let off a pulse close enough to the hull. They didn’t even deserve to be in this consideration list. I have a small suspicion as well that crabsnake AI is a little finicky outside of their home range, because they don’t have designated cave shroom patrol routes like the wild ones. Amp eels are in a similar vein to gasopods, technically neutral, but not harmless due to natural defenses. In the eel’s case, an electrical shock, and in the gasopod’s, their acid pod droppings.

And speaking further about the latter, gasopods are broadly pretty useless, at least to me, outside of being nice to listen to. I don’t really invest at all into torpedos, but if you do, I guess free acid pods could be my trash and your treasure.

Sand sharks and bone sharks are on par with each other, being fairly territorial toward other lifeforms but also reliably chill around the player once released. The same, however, absolutely cannot be said for your vehicles. Bone sharks are still attracted to light sources and both still readily take a nibble on your unattended moth/prawn.

Stalkers now, stalkers actually have quite a bit going for them. Just like wild ones, they still love to play around with metal savage and will occasionally drop teeth. Anyone who has played far enough into the game can see why a safe and near-instant source of enameled glass is absolutely fantastic; big however, I actually cannot stand stalkers near my base. They are almost as annoying as crabsquids in their own respect, because they are even more hostile to your technology than anything else on the list. They are a nightmare around scanner rooms because they WILL steal your cameras as toys and run off with them. Not only are they just as aggressive towards smaller vehicles, but they like to test their teeth on your cyclops as well. Sure, they can’t actually put a dent in the hull, but they really like to endanger themselves while you’re piloting it. My tooth farm always stays a healthy distance away from where I park all my things for good reason.

Finally, there was one more con to all of these I didn’t even consider until I accidentally discovered this pro about the Mesmer-

It can take down much larger creatures than itself without enduring a single scratch, and it’s incredibly fun to watch in action.

Like all of the other predators, captive Mesmers are pretty happy to wander around where you release them and occasionally chase after small fish to eat. What I did not consider was that the player is not the only creature they are willing to use that fun gimmick of theirs on. I learned this one time when I released a mes near a base I had set up in the grassy plateau biome. Within a few in-game days, I noticed the former presence of *sand sharks* around my setup had gone practically silent. Curiously, I released a fresh one out of containment to see if it would try to attack the Mesmer still lingering around.

And to my amazement, rather than directly attack it the way Mesmers will small fish, it turned around and used its hypnotic ability on the sand shark… and it freaking worked. You could literally see the larger predator very slowly closing in on the creature until the Mesmer took a hefty bite and sent it fleeing. A couple loops of this cycle and the thing was dead in good time. I still have to test this out with some other fauna but I can say for sure that local sand sharks can be pretty much wiped out by a single individual. Incredibly effective invasive species lmao. Most of all I’m extremely curious to know if this works on Warpers, so in the future I might be testing out releasing some Kharra infected ones near a precursor base.

And in the name of sprinkling in a bit of personal bias, I just find Mesmers pretty neat to watch once they stop trying to kill you. My favorite one occasionally clips through the base and doesn’t seem to eventually wander off somewhere else the way bonesharks and stalkers tend to. But best of freaking all they leave your freaking stuff alone. Absolutely harmless toward your gear and your submersibles, which is more than even tiger plants (stupid base-flooding weeds) have going for them.

But yeah just my two and half cents on the matter!

Y’all are sleeping on the best base guard dogs in existence on this great big blue marble