My Seamoth once vanished but was still showing up with a beacon. I’d gone underground where all the crabsnakes were, got out, swam around, and went back. It seemed like it was under the rock?
Turns out that’s a known (and very common) bug.
I found a cheat that lowers the sea floor by 50m and it reappeared! I got in, swam it back to base, saved and restarted the game. Everything went back to normal and I still had my pimped-out Seamoth. 
Balance - Okay, watched some videos. This is a lengthy game and I admit that I admit that I didn’t have the patience to watch from beginning to end, but I did get a general gist. As far as I can tell, the biggest danger isn’t so much getting whomped by a Level 5,000 terror torpedoing in out of nowhere but by trying to do just a bit too much, whereupon “a bit too much” quickly becomes “way too much”, followed quickly by “suicide”. The thing is, it takes work to make progress. Finding resources is work, processing resources is work, building bases is work, building vehicles is work, getting around is work, in all everything that needs to be accomplished in this game is lots and lots of work. And just one small mishap, just one bit of bad luck anywhere…getting lost away from the vehicle, getting attacked out of nowhere…can reset a lot of progress and create a major chokepoint.
So anyway, tried it again (in Freedom, of course), whereupon within the first five minutes, the following happened.
You mentioned Getting Over It. Yeah, I know about Bennett Foddy (website here). He’s…weird. His thing seems to be royally screwing with conventional game mechanics just for the hell of it, or because he wants to put his unique stamp on his work. There’s no telling what he’ll crank out next…maybe it’ll be nearly unplayable but still plenty of mindless goofy fun (Winner vs. Loser), maybe it’ll be an old-fashioned time waster (Fly Flicker), maybe it’ll be an irreverent take on an old concept (Speed Chess), maybe it’ll be an ya-got-it-or-ya-don’t crusher where 98% of players can’t make it two steps but an elite few figure it out and go the distance (QWOP). The thing is, he can get away with it because he’s not chasing mainstream recognition or expecting big money. The players who shell out $10 or whatever for Getting Over It know exactly what they’re doing and willingly placing their money and sanity in the hands of an extremely eccentric programmer who’s openly called for games to be more aggravating and frustrating. So no, I’m not paying for any of his stuff, but I don’t feel like I’ve dodged a bullet, as he always been up front about what he is, whereas for Subnautica…I can’t say the same.
I was willing to give this a second chance. Having done so, I am now officially at the absolute end of my patience. Look, I’m sorry, but I have a hundred games where I don’t have to constantly sweat suffocating or geting slaughtered by invisible foes. The only thing that could keep me going if I don’t have to worry about these things at all.
And on that note…
AngelSoft - I can’t enter cheat codes. I pressed L1, R1, X, and Square. In the main game, in the PDF menu, on the title screen, everywhere I possibly could. Nothing.
Have you actually gotten cheats to work? Am I doing something wrong? They haven’t been removed, have they? Because I tell you right now, this is the only thing that will possibly bring me back.
(P.S. I looked up maps on the Wiki, and I learned that there used to be in-game maps but the developers took them out. And now I’m pretty upset because if I’d known about this beforehand, I wouldn’t have wasted five cents on this game. This is EXACTLY what ruined Minecraft, the programmers getting locked into the degenerate mentality, taking out every single thing even remotely fun thing in the game in an effort to make it harder and harder and harder. I have the feeling that if WWF Royal Rumble was released today, the simple, intuitive grapple meter would’ve been yanked after one month, and by 3.0 every CPU opponent would move at triple speed and do 500% damage. :mad:)
You don’t like the game; that’s fair. You gave it a chance, and it’s not for you–also perfectly fair. Not everyone is going to like any particular game, or even genre of game, and that’s okay.
I am, however, going to take issue with the quoted bit: you’ve implied a couple of times now that there was some sort of bait-and-switch with Subnautica, and that is not fair. The game is exactly what it says on the tin: a survival game. The descriptions on the game’s Steam page says:
Peril. Outsmarting the wildlife. Trying to survive. It’s a survival game; there will be resource-gathering, crafting, and dangerous creatures. There will be hunger, thirst, and other survival requirements. The trailers show exploding ships and giant roaring monsters attacking minisubs.
The devs provided honest information about what kind of game it is. If you didn’t review the information, or disregarded it, I don’t see how that’s their fault. It’s unfair to lash out at them because you bought a game in a genre that doesn’t suit you.
Yup. For the life of me I can’t figure out what DKW is upset by, except that a lot of folks here find the game crazy fun, and he doesn’t.
I’m almost done with my second play-through. And I’m pretty convinced creatures mess with the Seamoth even when it’s abandoned. I parked mine in the bulb zone near an electric eel, while I searched for an extremely rare plant. Spent about an hour in the search before giving up and using the Wiki to find it. While I was swimming around, I left the Seamoth for about ten minutes, and when I came back, its health had gone from about 85% to about 25%. The only reason that’d happen that I can think of is that the electric eel was messing with it.
I dreamed about Subnautica last night. I’d done the last mission, and was leaving the planet–and that meant leaving the Prawn Suit. So I spent some time comforting the Prawn suit, saying my goodbyes. I reminded it how to get back to the base, and how to change its batteries. I told it how to make the modification that would let it recharge energy from thermal vents, and described the peaceful life it could have if it built this mod for itself and descended to the volcanic zone. And then, with a great deal of pathos, ascended to my rocket and the stars.
I think I like this game more than DKW does :).
Been there. Done that. In a Moon Pool.
I exited at the perfect moment to get crushed by the thing as the arms came down to grab it.
I once beached my Seamoth. There’s a reason they call it a “Sea” Moth. I couldn’t even free it with the repulsion cannon.
So I consoled the sand away.
I also once lost a beacon to the sand. I left it on top of the sand, but the game glitched at some point and buried it under the sand.
So I consoled the sand away for that as well.
I remember that search. I think I later discovered that there’s one in a very plot-convenient location, but not until I had found one the hard way and cultivated a garden of them, just in case. I put seeds for it in my time capsule with an oblique hint that gardening was rewarding.
As to the ampeels, I think they damage things just by being nearby. I released one that I hatched, and it zapped things it should not have been hostile to. I could be mistaken, though.
Okay, I concede that you probably like Subnautica more than I do. 
This happened to me too! It was on the FLoating Island, and I thought I was being really clever by bringing the Seamoth practically up on the beach. It’s like a real explorer would do, I thought!
I justified the resulting loss of the Seamoth by imagining the immense tide that had washed tons of sand over my vehicle, permanently burying it, and went off to build a replacement :).
I’d have accepted the loss, and I lost my first Seamoth to a Reaper and had to build a second, except for two reasons. One, I imagine I’d have this phantom Seamoth beacon taunting me forever (I know I could hide it from my HUD but it would still be there in my list of beacons, teasing me). And two, I had just given it all the upgrades I wanted, and upgrading a new one from scratch would be frustrating. So I used a cheat to make it reappear (which took a lot of time to get right) and all was well. 
I had an actual beacon get lost in a cave on the large island. I had put it in the cave complex, and at some point was never able to find it again. I don’t know if I’m just not seeing it, or if it glitched underground, but since the caves corkscrew around themselves and the beacons have a fairly low precision, I don’t think I’m ever going to find it. (They’re great for marking places to travel to–not so much for finding them once you’re there. With ships, the precision matters little because it’s hard to lose a ship. With the small hand-crafted beacons, you get close to them and the beacon marker disappears so pinpoint accuracy is out, particularly when it could be above or below you, and the things are small enough that they blend in with the scenery fairly well.)
So I turned the beacon off in the beacon manager, but it will always be in the list. Sitting there. Taunting me.
Note: Tried the game(which I got free back when it went free awhile ago) on my 2012 and the title screen came up, but it crashed.
Guess not.
Heh. Not surprising. If you ever get a machine worth playing it, it’s worth giving it another shot!
Finally finished my second play-through. Now waiting on tenterhooks for Below Zero (why isn’t it named SubZero?) to be far enough along to be worth getting–or to go on sale.
I decided to start up a hardcore game and work off of just the information available in-game. I’m just about to head to the Aurora. I’ll tell Sammy the Safety Reaper, “Hello!” as I fly by.
Tell him that I wished him a knife day.
Okay, just to clarify, I’m not “lashing out” at the devs, or Steam, or marketers or advertisers or whatever. I don’t have any issue with them. Their job is to sell the game, and as such you can’t take their words at 100% face value. I understand that. My issue is that this is an incredibly dangerous and forbidding-looking word that normally I don’t come within ten miles of, and I was convinced to drop $30 on it because it had a mode where it’s impossible to die. In my experience, when a game has any kind of mercy/relaxed/beginner mode or option, that means the programmers made a conscious choice to not be harsh, not be sadistic, not do that bad dungeon master sadistic-grin-after-rolling-for-a-saving-throw BS. Think Dance Dance Revolution and the entire Bemani line in general, most of the Lego games, the later Super Mario Bros. games, and to a lesser extent Time Crisis 4 (that one was by Namco, which used to be the gold standard for tear-your-spine-out-and-slash-your-throat-with-it gameplay).
And then I turn out that the purpose of Creative is…to make a whole bunch of stuff. That’s it. Throw together the wildest, most elaborate underground complex imaginable and…admire it. That’s all you can do in it. (And it’s not even as good as Minecraft’s due to building restrictions and the inability to terraform.)
So how about the next step up, Freedom? Constantly running out of air, can barely find anything, get attacked out of nowhere. Over and over, no respite. Where’s the scanner? Where are all the parts I need to salvage? If this game was truly beginner-friendly, for the next step up there’d be resources everywhere, it would take at least ten minutes to drown, enemies would be slow and do minimal damage, and there’d be an auto-healing of some kind (hey, if it’s good enough for Asssassin’s Creed…). If the easiest difficulty makes it impossible to get killed, the second-easiest difficulty should make it really, really hard to get killed. Instead I immediately get thrown headfirst into a literal death zone where I have to surface every 30 damn seconds and I don’t know where anything is and I can’t even see the piranha that just bit a chunk out of my calf. Nothing but setbacks and obstacles and complications and agony at every turn.
And I paid full price for it. I materially supported a methodology that I despise. It’s not the devs’ fault. Maybe it’s nobody’s fault but mine. Still hurts. A lot.
(Feel exactly the same way about Minecraft, so this isn’t anything new.)
Does anyone know how to get the cheat codes working on the PS4 version?
You didn’t like it. Got it.
Dude, maybe you just shouldn’t pay video games.
I was gonna say…I generally SUCK at video games, and Subnautica is no exception. Yet, I am having a pretty successful and enjoyable time, though I have decided to take a break now that things are getting a little less casual and more dangerous and stressful.
DKW It’s too bad that your experience with Subnautica isn’t what you expected. But please take my advice…my first couple starts didn’t go well, and looking back at my save files they are as short as 30 minutes and no longer than 90 minutes long. I was beginning to have the same thoughts you had, even though I got my copy for free. Thought that maybe this game just wasn’t up my alley. My third try, which was on survival, is now well over 30 hours.
When you give it another shot, what you MUST NOT do is cast about frantically trying to, for lack of a better phrase at the moment, find the game.
The game is there, and it will come to you.
If you got bit in the ass right away and ran out of air, that was the game telling you that at this point, you’re biting off too much. This game is absolutely brilliant in that respect. It forces you to slow down, explore, learn the game, and then widen your experience from there.
So my advice is, start a new game. Choose ‘Freedom’ if you want, hunger and thirst can be grindy if you don’t like that. Oxygen, though, is vital to the game experience. The oxygen you start with doesn’t seem like much, but it gives you plenty of time to swim around, enjoy the scenery, and gather enough resources to construct a better oxygen tank. And fins, so you can move faster and accomplish more. And while you’re at it, you’ll learn about the different biomes close to the pod and know where you can safely go, and where you need to be more careful. And a little about where to find what resources and add some info and blueprints to your data by scanning everything. And I mean everything. I hated that idea at first, but it’s actually pretty enjoyable even when scanning doesn’t add anything to your building options. Remember, the game is about being on an alien planet…if you try to role-play it, of course you’re going to want to learn everything you can about this place.
Also, I have no shame at admitting I checked out some non-spoilery non-cheatery beginner videos after my first couple tries. They didn’t give away much, and offered some good tips on the mechanics of the game and things you can do at the beginning to start off a little smoother. I recommend checking those out. Subnautica doesn’t take you by the hand and lead you around, but from I’ve seen one of the common complaints is that it leave a little too much unsaid. Things like how to use the fabricator, blueprints, etc. They’re not hard to figure out, but it seems like something you should know without question.
Do us a favor…start another game. Commit to a couple hours of taking your time and just experiencing the game. Try to role-play it; really put yourself in the mindset. Forget your first playthrough, and experience your emergence from the hatch as if you really did just eject from a doomed spaceship. Construct a few things that make your life in the water a bit easier.
In other words, I guess, chill out and stop trying to beat the game from the beginning. The way you post is not unfamiliar with my train of thought sometimes, and I feel ya. You’ll be amazed at how much the game has to offer in just the environs surrounding the pod once you give yourself a chance to become immersed (no pun intended) in the game.
I mean, maybe? But I’m detecting a pretty strong note of Not Ever Going To Like This Game. I’d consider it a favor if he just doesn’t post another 1,000 word essay on how betrayed he feels by it.
It’s okay if it’s not his thing. Fortnite isn’t mine. I don’t spend much time telling its fans how frustrating I find it.
Edit: I can’t resist saying, though, that the scanner room is a mid-to-late-game construction, and if it’s not offered early on, there’s a reason for that.
Oy vey. I can’t resist. I’ma take this bit by bit.
You’re going too deep for your equipment. Stick to the shallows.
There are limestone outcroppings everywhere in the shallows. Break 'em.
You’re going too deep. Stick to the shallows.
You’re going too deep. Stick to the shallows.
You build it, using the recipe you start the game with, and the stuff you find in the shallows
In the shallows. You can venture into the kelp forest if you’re feeling brave, and make some rubber, but don’t go deep.
There are.
What a strange complaint. Stick to the shallows.
Enemies are slow and do minimal damage in the shallows.
There is auto-healing. It’s slow. There’s also infinitely-regenerating medikits in your starting location.
It is really, really hard to get killed. In the shallows. Which is where you should stick, until you’ve explored it fully.
The shallows is a literal death zone in much the same way that your municipal swimming pool is a literal death zone.
Look around. Break limestone outcroppings.
There are no piranhas, or anything similar. Not in the shallows. The worst enemy you face in the shallows is farting manatees.
This is not true, in the shallows.