What changes did they make?
Plot, lifeforms, and biomes are new of course. New ways to grow/make food.
There’s a lot more above-ground stuff, including vehicles, and some game mechanics related to that. And I don’t want to spoil anything but there’s a new type of submarine vehicle that’s pretty configurable.
I’d probably advise waiting still, since they are still working on gameplay elements. I had to spend a lot of time scouring the map for plot-related bits without any hint at all of what I was looking for. The original Subnautica didn’t hold your hand too much but it at least gave you vague directions on what to look for. I’m sure they’ll balance this out a bit by the time they release.
Below Zero is fun currently but I find the voices…meh but I’m not sure text based would have been possible with as much interaction goes on in the game.
I do wish there was a better waypoint flagging system as there are more datapad delivered locations.
I’ve started playing Subnautica for real and I’m way into it. It’s just ridiculously fun. I’m pretty sure I’m playing it wrong, though.
In the other thread I accidentally spoiled myself about the Sunbeam, but I stopped reading after that post to avoid further spoilers. The furthest I’ve gotten in the story is the Sunbeam countdown starting. That was the second game after I restarted the first one to do better. Once the countdown appeared, not having figured out how to build a base yet and running into major storage issues, I restarted again.
So now I’ve really gotten into build order and efficient opening, to just a ridiculous extent. I’ve restarted another five or six times to really maximize it. The Aurora blowing up delineates the end of my “opening book,” which should be me standing on top of the escape pod watching the explosion, then going down the stairs and fabricating a radiation suit, the end/beginning.
One of my favorite games all time is starcraft, and I remember spending countless hours thinking up and testing out build orders back in the day. I played DDO for several years but I vastly preferred designing characters to actually playing them. I spent a bunch of hours crafting a comprehensive walkthrough of the Ur-Quan Masters, hitting every single story point and timing the war just perfectly all with the minimum possible time spent. I replay it every year or two, it’s maybe 5 or 6 hours total.
So now in Subnautica I’m coming up with more and more ridiculously elaborate setups by the time the Aurora explodes. In one iteration I had my base all set up, but still hadn’t found blueprints for either the scanner room or the Seamoth.
Once I realized that the map doesn’t change – you just spawn in different places – it really sped up my resource gathering in the opening. For the first few iterations I thought it was randomly generated terrain, heh. At this point I know the Safe Shallows like the back of my hand.
My current game/opening is a little over an hour in, the Aurora has not exploded yet, and I have:
- Seaglide, scanner, knife, flashlight, repair tool, habitat builder
- Mobile vehicle builder, Seamoth
- foundation, 2 X pieces, 1 Glass I piece, 2 windows, 3 hatches, scanner room, two freestanding storage lockers.
In the bank I have sufficient gold, silver and lead to also build a fabricator, radio and med kit dispenser for the base (as well as a radiation suit when that becomes available) but I’m way low on both copper and titanium. And quartz but that’s everywhere.
Also the third mission in my little build order could really use refactoring. So that’s next on my agenda.
Knowing myself, I will not progress beyond the Aurora exploding until I have crafted and achieved the perfect opening.
In a truly perfect opening I would have both a battery charger and a power cell charger in my base. I’m fairly confident I can get any arbitrary amount of resources needed. I just need the plans. I have never seen them anywhere in any iteration and it feels like I looked everywhere for that stupid scanner room blueprint.
Oh I should mention I’m a huge save scummer. And it’s easy enough to make copies of the save games so that I can save each mission to a different save game slot so I can easily go back to wherever. And of course I start a mission by exploring until I find the blueprints I need and then reloading and then just going straight there. Literally most efficient possible. Unfortunately it just took me I think five full days from sun up to sundown (so 75 minutes in real time?) to find the 3rd scanner room blueprints. Didn’t find any battery or power cell chargers in that time either, sadly.
So far I have Mission 1 getting knife, oxygen tank, and fins. Mission 2 gets the sea glide. Mission 3 gets both the mobile vehicle builder and the Seamoth. Then mission 4 builds the base.
Right now my mission 4 is a mess and requires repeated trips out and back gathering resources because I can’t fit it all at once. Creating an un-deconstructable floating locker is a no-go. So now I’m thinking I’m going to go back and add in some extra metal salvage in the earlier missions, as much as possible, to drop off by the base. I’m already doing that to collect those teeth, just turns out I needed like 4-6 more.
As for the setting and atmosphere, simply outstanding. My earlier openings involved swimming way out to those giant floating island creatures to farm copper before I realized the giant coral tube is good for six or seven copper easily. Every time I would swim out to the deep water to those creatures, as the bottom of the ocean floor fell away so too would my stomach. An authentic visceral reaction; that’s quite impressive for a video game.
I never realized before but this game is telling me that I may be afraid of the dark. I very much stop all activities at night, though I’m aware that I will have to learn to deal with the dark as the game progresses.
In an early iteration as I was exploring further than I had before, the sun started to go down just as I found a wreck and I really wanted to see what there was to scan. So I’m 100 m down, feeling exposed and vulnerable and afraid of the increasing darkness, when all of a sudden I heard the scariest roar I’ve ever heard in my entire life pretty close by and very loud. Took me a couple seconds to recover, then I said f*** it I just have to scan this one thing and then it was so much louder and so much closer the second time it roared RUNNNNN!!! I never saw anything, I just bolted as fast as I could diagonally up, straight for home. Just full panic, like in real life I was f****** panicked. In my head I even had the thought I can just reload, this isn’t real, but I couldn’t disengage from the emotional experience to stop playing. I was compelled to make it all the way back to my escape pod, climb inside, calm down for a few seconds, and then I reloaded.
I have since run across that creature a second time, this time as I was farming outside my seamoth around 150 m deep. A giant millipede dragon thing grabbed the seamoth in its mouth and started swimming away with it. This m***********; I gave chase and jumped in while it was still in his mouth. He let go, then clamped on again and destroyed the Seamoth in one chomp, with me in it. Too funny, so good.
Oh man, I’m giggling as I read your writeup, reliving those moments vicariously.
The way you’re playing, going for the perfect setup? It’s, uh, not how I played, but I can totally see the fun in it. I just dicked around forever until I found stuff. My only worry for you is if the mechanics of the game will wear thin through the constant restarting, to the point that you’ll get tired of it and never experience the midgame or endgame, both of which are fabulous. (I personally finish few games these days, getting tired of the mechanics before the game end, but that may not be you).
I think it’s more focused on the building. I don’t yet have any context or concept of where my second base should be built. If my home base is finished to my satisfaction when they Aurora explodes, I will literally have nothing to do except follow the story.
At that point I anticipate reverting to just a free follow-the-story experience, exploring as I feel like it and not really worrying about efficiency. Days can go by in-game, barring unforeseen story events, no worries. For example, I plan to read the PDA stuff in the glass viewing chamber in my base as I wait more radio calls.
Once I come to the point where I say I need to build a second base and it needs to go here and it needs to have these things, I will likely save there and then build that base similarly efficiently, then go back to story.
I don’t think I would restart from the beginning at that point, but I can’t 100% say that for sure. But I’m excited to get there. Maybe excited isn’t the right word. To be perfectly honest I’m apprehensive about going deeper…
EDIT: It’s taking self control for me to not spend the better part of a week writing a recipe program for Subnautica. What I want is I can choose the top level items I want to craft, then the program would tell me all the base materials I need, plus all the intermediate items I need to craft, in menu order. It feels like I could write that in a few hours, but I just know it would end up being more like a few days. I’m trying to make Excel work for me in the meantime but it’s rough going.
It’s the two tiers of ingredients that messes with my head. And the whole fabricator interface is clunky. Plus the storage issues.
That’s really, really not how I play the game, but of course the beauty of games like Subnautica is that you can play them however you like.
And I’m almost afraid to tell you this, but the speedrun record in glitchless hardcore category is 1:06:48, so your build order probably isn’t quite optimized yet. The record with glitches is 33:33, which has the game completed well ahead of the Aurora exploding. Glitchless runners will never get their times down to before the Aurora exploding because there are things needed to complete the game that can’t be accessed prior to the explosion without exploiting some collision glitches to get places the game doesn’t intend for you to be allowed.
Don’t be! After that one scare you had, the game’s mood is really light. Think My Little Pony crossed with Bob Ross. Nothing to be afraid of.
I will say that I feel much safer in the seamoth than I did just floating around. I’m kind of bummed. (I first experienced the seamoth yesterday; I think I started playing two weeks ago?)
Love hearing that speed runs are a thing. I think that settles it, once the Aurora explodes I’ll stop worrying about efficiency, then when I’m done with the game I may go back and see how efficiently I can do the whole game. Glitchless, 100%.
I will not advance past the Aurora until I get this opening down, though.
ETA: I forgot to list the compass in my opening, and also missed the second mission making the scanner, repair tool, and flashlight.
Yeah the game is like a really scary-looking dog that wants you to rub its tummy. You figure out after awhile that although things aren’t harmless, most of the threats in the game look a lot scarier than they actually are. A tiny bit of caution and paying attention to your needs (water, food, air, etc.) are basically all you need to be in relative safety.
I have to ask: what does “build order” mean?
The order you build things. ie: Knife, O2 Tank and Fins get built first.
It’s more of a real-time strategy concept, like in starcraft. Always build workers nonstop, of course. Build a house with the 8th worker. The 10th worker builds the barracks. Stuff like that.
Ah, I get it.
I just build stuff when I need it, or if I happen to find all the right ingredients. Your way is probably more efficient.
After posting here yesterday, I very quickly got to the Aurora explosion. Technically I was still out in the water farming the last couple copper I needed, but close enough.
So then I started just playing. I built a chair, sat down and started reading through my PDA. I still have only gotten to blueprints on the PDA because I keep running across “I have those blueprints? I can make that now?! Enough reading, it’s crafting time!” Then I check wiki for where to get the ingredients I’ve never seen or even heard of before (diamond? lithium? rubies?!) then go make it happen. Then back to reading, lather, rinse, repeat. The last thing I made were oxygen tank upgrades. I think I’m at like 225 seconds now, plus a rebreather.
Also, of course, during the first hour I didn’t scan a single thing. I now have both chargers (battery and power cell) so I am now ready to move on. But I can’t upgrade my seamoth without a moonpool, and you can’t build a moonpool in the shallows. It occurs to me just now typing this that the super deep mission (1250 I think?) I had previously dismissed out of hand is a prime candidate for building a support base near the surface right above it.
My game is no longer only an hour in; I’m now over 9 hours. Whole days go by reading the PDA in a chair. I’ve used the laser to cut into 3 or 4 large wrecks. I’ve even started scanning some fish and plants so I’ll have some fun PDA reading if I ever get past the blueprints tab.
The most tiresome part of playing “real time” instead of uber-efficient is farming food and water. At 1-hour in, I hadn’t yet cooked a fish. Those protein bars you start with are filling! At some point I will need to look into growing food.
Oh yeah, and I’m sick with bacteria but haven’t the faintest clue of what to do about it. I’ll just play until it gets bad and then look it up on wiki, unless the radio/story helps in the meantime.
Super excited to go build up a forward base. Up until I started writing this post it hadn’t occurred to me that I finally had a clear reason to build a second base in this spot and with these things. So much to do!
In general, I’d mildly recommend playing without the Wiki until it’s really important. If there’s a resource you need for a recipe, but you don’t have it, and there are areas you can explore but haven’t yet, it’s probably more fun to explore. That way you’ll be like, HELL YEAH HERE ARE THE RUBIES I CAN MAKE THAT THING NOW, which was always fun.
But if you’ve explored like crazy and still can’t find the rubies or nickel or whatever, then the Wiki is a timesaver.
Same goes for the sickness: it’ll probably be more fun to discover its effects organically.
But that’s all just me–obviously YMMV.
I’m really bad at exploring. It’s just a personal failing. You know how measuring coastline distance isn’t repeatable because of its fractal nature? You can arbitrarily increase the detail you measure, increasing its distance as much as you please? I could spend years measuring the coastline of a small local pond and end up with 1000 miles as my answer.
All that to say, if left to my own devices of just randomly wandering around and exploring, I don’t think I would ever leave the safe shallows. Certainly not before I got frustrated by all the fishing.
Agreed with you about wiki by the way. I’m perfectly content to look up blueprint and resource locations and go straight there. But I pretty studiously avoid story spoilers. In fact, some of the materials I’ve looked up start out with “go out here to the floating islands” and then I just close it and give up because that sounds like a story spoiler to me, counting whatever resource that was as unavailable until the story leads me there.
Something funky happened with the Sunbeam explosion, btw, and I haven’t decided yet if it was a feature or a bug. I went up close to the building and some weird s*** started happening. Ghostly sounds, ethereal images, and there was a stand I could place a tablet into. Heading back home I thought about what tablet that might be, but then when I got home all my devices had doubled. I had two scanners, two repair tools, two everything except the sea glide. All the dupes had 100% batteries. I kind of think that was just a glitch, but there definitely was some weird s*** going on up there.
The doubling is definitely a glitch.
Re: exploring. The lifepods you get messages from are not placed randomly. They are positioned so as to lead you to pretty nearly every biome of note in the game. In fact, if at any point you are stuck on how to progress, revisiting each of them and doing a quick survey of their surrounding areas for caves etc will probably get you going again.
I learned to build and place beacons. They were a necessity for me. I’d never find my way around underwater without them.
Yes–building tons of beacons, and then turning them on and off, really helped me. Also, a trick that verges on exploit: you can mark an area as explored by using the building tool to barely start a building in the location, creating a glowing outline of a building there. I used that trick both to make paths to tricky-to-find locations, and to indicate more broadly where I’d already explored.