I’ll go against the grain and say not to use it. Part of the game is exploration without handholding. I found it to be a nice contrast vs. games like Fallout where there is always a map marker to guide you to exactly where you need to go.
The world in Subnautica is fully hand-crafted and every biome is unique. Over time, you get to learn them, just like how in real life you mostly manage without a map and go by landmarks or the general feel of an area.
But if your spatial awareness is weak then the map may make the game more fun.
My spatial awareness isn’t very strong, and for the most part I got around that by making way too many beacons and scattering them around like breadcrumbs. But still when I realized I was missing a crucial item, I couldn’t tell exactly where I’d been. A fog-of-war feature would’ve been amazing in this case.
If the map starts with a fog-of-war up. so you don’t see a biome on the map until you see it through exploration, I think that’d keep the explorer’s delight alive.
I am terrible with spatial awareness. I am surprised the game has no map in it(is that really true?). I would prefer a map in any kind of exploration or open-world type game. Fog of War is definitely best, it should just kind of open up as you find stuff.
Really truly no map. However:
-You get verbal (voice and written) clues about locations to explore.
-You occasionally get locations marked on your view: “Krusty Krab, 300 meters”. That makes the locations really easy to find.
-You can manufacture beacons and leave them at important locations, making it easy to find the locations again. These will give you a customizable location on your grid: “Base 762 meters,” when you’ve swum away from your base and turned around to look at it.
-You can get sneaky with triangulation or even setting up beacon grids.
-Importantly, all those locations that you find/create? You can turn them on or off individually.
It’s easier to find your way around than you’d think, especially if you craft beacons. But it’s still hard to tell where you’ve already been sometimes.
Beacons are definitely a part of the game, and essential for finding your way back to a highly specific location–no shame in that. And it’s certainly true that at times I did have to re-search areas where I wasn’t sure I’d been yet, and a fog of war might have helped that.
Just offering my opinion, at any rate. I don’t begrudge anyone for using map mods or anything else. Games should be fun. Just suggesting that people may be doing themselves a disservice by immediately loading up on helpers.
Being able to devise a way to have a sustainable source of food and water was a huge victory for me in the game and so satisfying. I won’t say that you’re making a mistake by avoiding that obstacle but know that you are potentially missing out on an important part of the experience, at least early on. It’s not too difficult to find food and water sources even early in the game; much of it is literally swimming around everywhere you go, or found all over the sea bed. You just have to devote a little time now and then to scavenge it.
Now for me it did become a non-factor relatively early in the game for me. It didn’t take all that long for me to have more than enough food and water production to ensure I’d never run out and don’t have to go seeking it. So this is mostly an early game experience. It shouldn’t ruin the whole game. But I think figuring it out gave me the confidence to persevere through the rest of the game.
The lack of maps is an issue for me. I have a terrible sense of direction in real life and that apparently is compounded underwater. Like others I made liberal use of beacons to remind me where things were. I never installed a map mod but when I got hopelessly lost I’d go to web sites with maps and work out where I was and where I needed to go. That was my compromise.
Yeah, food/water isn’t really a struggle. It’s a bit of management, and I think it comes down to whether the slurp of water and crunch of fried fish is enough fun for you to counterbalance the need to keep those parts of your inventory stocked.
I enjoyed that part of the game, enjoyed watching my food and water meters get full after I’d done some crafting. But others won’t, and I totally get that.
Personally, I find scrounging for food and water tedious. I played the game without them, and I don’t feel like I missed anything. Less eating = more time for exploring.
The trick, such as it is, for eating was to have the Thermal Knife. Even in deep dark places you can find a few fish to zap and eat. Since they’re cooked you gain a little water as well.
That and I once spent 5 minutes trying to get enough water into me from kelp so I could make it back to my original base to drink real water. Lots of fun
I tested the game on my new PC and it did look like it was playing. I climbed out of the sub/pod and headed towards my ship, which started a radiation warning. That’s about it, other than going in the water briefly to look around.
The best part is when a beacon clips through a glitch in the scenery and gets trapped permanently inside a multiple level cave on an island.
Considering the beacons only give linear distance and not X,Y,Z coordinates to them, it can be very frustrating to find what it was you placed that beacon for in the first place when it has multiple Z possibilities and then you eventually realize that this beacon has somehow clipped into nowhere.
Just like the beacon that clipped into a beach. But that one was high enough up and obvious (since it only had one realistic Z location) that a little console command to remove some of the beach allowed recovery of it.
I installed it and loaded up the game. Yes, it is Fog-of-War style. It only showed a little tiny area by my crashed lander, which is all I’ve seen in the game.
It’s under the beacon tab of my PDA device. Neat.
I don’t like to go too nuts with mods(makes games unstable). This may be my only one unless I see something better later.
A mod to increase the number of quick slots is a great quality of life enhancement later in the game when you are carrying more than 5 tools around and have to go into inventory to change your quick slots around every time you want to use one that isn’t currently in one. That’s the only mod I’ve ever felt a need for myself.
I don’t think of myself as prone to jump scares but there were a couple of legit ‘check your pants’ moments. And more than a little PTSD when exploring certain areas. Totally worth the price, looking forward to the DLC.
