Sponge diving rework

[vatas]

How it works currently:
1) Sail around until you find a sponge.
2) toggle on swimming and equip a diver's weight that takes both hands.
3) Carefully position your boat or ship near the sponge, but not too close that it blocks you from grabbing the sponge (since the game engine doesn't, at least currently, actually have the ability to consider you being "under" the boat.)
4) Exit the craft.
5) Right-click sponge from minimap like regular forageable.
6) Get back to the craft when you have the sponge.

Main problem with stages 4-6 is that you are risking permanent death to gain a relatively mediocre curio (even when dried on herbalist table.)

While risk of permanently dying is part of the game, in this case it's especially outrageous as your character's life is now entirely in the hands of factors beyond your control: powergrid, digital communication infrastructure between you and the physical server hardware, and the server itself. If any of these fail, game goes "no refunds" and lets your character do nothing as it drowns.

Outside of hacky solutions like "disconnected player in deep water tries to swim to any nearby boat/ship" I think best way is to significantly rework "dive into water foraging."

1) Have "diving kit" installed/equipped on the ship or rowboat.
2) Sail around until you find a "diving location."
3) Perform the dive as single action where server makes your character dive and return to the craft, only way character dies is if they get KO or so something/somebody destroys the boat/ship.

This system would probably still make people not dive sponges on characters they absolutely do not want to die, as Jorb seems to consider entering Deep Water as statement of "I consent to my character being easily killed."

(Diving kit made of molded lead weight, X amount of rope and Seaman's knife.)

[vatas]

Pre-emptively adressing potential criticism:
1) You can maybe solve the powergrid issue by buying a "Uninterruptible Power Supply Unit" but this sounds excessive to more safely interact with a relatively minor game system.
2) In certain regions, there might be difference between reliability, whether you are customer of "cheap but shady" or "more expensive but professional" ISP. However both companies are equally affected if a critical cable gets cut.

[gravesmerch]

if your client can zoom in then it's easier to park the boat really close

sponge could be used in wounds somehow, or if bathtub is added then you have soap and sponge already

[Audiosmurf]

There should be a life preserver that prevents stamina drain while swimming but not moving

[r0ck4ev3r]

+1

If we had some medical use for sponges, that could help off set we low value of the curio;

[Halbertz]

diver's weight

Another piece of wonderful content - smelting this thing for 12 hours to dive and find out that the game already has an analogue of tar baby (you, the player).