Ok so I've been brainstorming a bit and I think I might of found a solution to save our beloved creature.
So I've always been fascinated by symbiotic relation ships in the wild, and so far subnautica has only one creature, the reefback. So my idea to fix this is to turn the rock puncher into a bone puncher. Obviously in the lost river there are plenty of spooky scarey skeletons, with skeletons there aren usually skulls to accompany them. Where I'm going with this is for the rock puncher to have the ability to use skulls or other parts of bone as tools or boxing gloves. It would make sense seeing as the rock puncher can't deform the terrain but could damage parts of he environment, it could also show the player that some of the creatures in the world are smart enough to make tools. This is a symbiotic relationship as the more the rockpuncher kills, the more the bones there would be to punch things with.
The way I see it damage-wise would be if the rock puncher were to pick up a rib or another type of long bone, it could be thrown as a spear or boomerang, if the player was in a prawn suit the rock puncher would addon his samurai armour and use the bone as a sword or pike. The rock puncher could also use spine eel / river prowler skulls as boxing gloves that do much more damage then his standard punch or kick.
this way we have a unique enemy in the lost river, and we kept a animal from going extinct via chopping block.
So I've always been fascinated by symbiotic relation ships in the wild, and so far subnautica has only one creature, the reefback. So my idea to fix this is to turn the rock puncher into a bone puncher. Obviously in the lost river there are plenty of spooky scarey skeletons, with skeletons there aren usually skulls to accompany them. Where I'm going with this is for the rock puncher to have the ability to use skulls or other parts of bone as tools or boxing gloves. It would make sense seeing as the rock puncher can't deform the terrain but could damage parts of he environment, it could also show the player that some of the creatures in the world are smart enough to make tools. This is a symbiotic relationship as the more the rockpuncher kills, the more the bones there would be to punch things with.
The way I see it damage-wise would be if the rock puncher were to pick up a rib or another type of long bone, it could be thrown as a spear or boomerang, if the player was in a prawn suit the rock puncher would addon his samurai armour and use the bone as a sword or pike. The rock puncher could also use spine eel / river prowler skulls as boxing gloves that do much more damage then his standard punch or kick.
this way we have a unique enemy in the lost river, and we kept a animal from going extinct via chopping block.