Hello, delicious zailors!

We present a further look into the depths of the Unterzee! Zubmariner will be the first major piece of DLC for Sunless Sea. Equip a zubmersible add-on to your ship of choice, and explore the profound darkness beneath the Sunless Sea.

Unterzee living

We’re continuing work on concepts for cities and terrain on the Zee floor.

Dahut is a brightly coloured pastoral wonderland, populated by Drownies.

An exploration into the possibilities of Under-Unterzee housing.

Unknown Depths

Diving beneath the surface will never be safe, and you will never be certain what you will find down there. However, the rewards could be great…

One of the core concepts in Sunless Sea is venturing into unfamiliar waters. Closer to home, the locations are more fixed. Further out, you can’t be sure if that island you stopped off at to pick up much-needed supplies will be there. And out in the wilds, you can never be sure what you are going to find.

In Zubmariner far more of the layout will be unknown to you.

To achieve this, we’re using procedural generation to populate the areas beneath the surface. Whenever you start a captain with a new map, the game will furnish the seabed with random rocks, coral outcroppings, fissures and debris. Each area of the Unterzee will have unique types of terrain that can appear within it, and the density of the terrain will vary from location to location.

We’re working on tools to help tweak these density values and ensure the right amount of coverage for all the different areas of the game. This will be coupled with a method for ensuring that terrain isn’t accidentally placed too close together, so we can be certain that players (and predators) can navigate down in the depths. You might end up with a nice, clear path to your destination, or have to tackle a network of subsurface obstacles.

In addition to the terrain, there will also be randomized enemies to fight, threats to avoid and treasures to retrieve down on the ocean floor. We’re implementing new spawning methods to ensure we have toothsome opportunities waiting for you each time you dive. A Favorable current might speed you on your way or the skeletal remains of an extinct species may have been exposed, ready for you to examine it and bring your findings back to London.

Journeying on the surface is a fairly consistent experience once you have learned the routes between ports, but there’s never any certainty in what you will encounter on the Unterzee floor.