I still haven’t grasped the concept of depth in this game. It seemingly lets you dive way deeper than it should in just a suit. Like, way deeper than it would ever occur to me to even try. Not to mention it’s like the bends doesn’t even exist in this universe.
For example, having to park my sub at 195 m lest it be crushed by pressure, to then get out and scuba dive another 50 m deeper to find the distress beacon is just patently ridiculous on its face. What other clearly fatal in real life activities should I be naturally doing? Should I swim directly into those little erupting volcano things?
That’s my only legit complaint so far. I surely don’t mind the inventory bug in my favor, heh. Even gives me a reason to build and use a trash can, after removing the batteries of course.
Yeah, the only effect you suffer from diving to extreme depths is the increased oxygen use (i.e., reduced swim time). No bends, nitrogen narcosis, etc.
Hot things will damage you, though there are times where you might need to get past a volcano thing and make a dash when it’s not erupting. There are often valuable resources nearby.
So yesterday the story finally brought me to the floating island, where I found a strange alien tablet that looks like it might fit in that tower that shot down the Sunbeam. But I almost don’t care at all about that, at least not yet.
Because I also found multi-purpose and observation room blueprints…score! So I grabbed a couple seeds and took off back home, dumped everything from my inventory into storage lockers, ate and drank and then saved. So once I reload I’m ready to rebuild my base.
After about a half hour of futzing around, I said screw this and started a new creative mode game so I can just design the base without worrying about inventory and finding materials and all that nonsense. So now I’m about 7 hours into Barbie’s Dream House designing the perfect base and just loving it to death, lol.
For the base(s) where you park your cyclops, do you typically build two moonpools since you have both a seamoth and a cyclops to park? (I don’t have a Cyclops yet but would like to plan ahead just in case.)
I usually just parked my cyclops 20-50 meters above my base. I mean the ones that didn’t get eaten anyway. And once you build one, you’ll instantly realize the folly in asking about a moonpool for it.
A docking system would be cool, though. Something like: pull up to your base, it grabs the Cyclops and aligns it, then extends a tunnel to connect the two. Doors open and you can walk between the two freely.
Okay wait, a sign costs two coppers? Can I hack or mod that in some way to change it to one titanium or free?
My base design involves like a dozen signs; copper wire is way too expensive for what essentially could be achieved with a sharpie. In this small matter I’m happy to cheat if it’s possible.
I have it on epic games if that matters.
EDIT: Never mind, found it. There are mods but it looks like it’s much easier to just open up the developer console and spawn however many copper wire I need for however many signs. Sounds easy enough, and I don’t think it should mess with my game at all.
The moonpool is super frustrating. If any structure is within connection distance, it orients to a single absolute direction. I happen to want the opposite direction, which isn’t possible if I’m adding it on to an existing base. (I want to get out of the seamoth on the side where the rest of the base connects.)
I can achieve this in creative mode by placing the moonpool first, where you can rotate it to whatever degree you’re facing. But it means in the live game, I won’t be able to retrofit my starter base to include a moonpool in my preferred orientation unless I deconstruct the entire base first.
Makes sense to me. Think of all the time you’ll save by not having to walk around the Seamoth to the other side each time!
I do this kind of thing a lot, spend 30 minutes researching and designing a spreadsheet that’ll save me five minutes of manually assembling a set of data. It’s just kind of funny.
Played around with a minimalist base for beneath the escape pod: One single X piece, hatch on top, three sides have four wall lockers each, the final side (the side you face after entering the hatch) gets a window, chair, fabricator and radio. (Not sure if you start with a chair blueprint.)
The problem is you have to first make a habitat builder, which costs 1 gold, 2 silver and 3 coppers all by itself. Copper isn’t a worry, but so far I’ve only found 1 each gold, silver and lead in the safe shallows. I’m hoping there’s a second treasure room somewhere.
Back to the mini base, not counting the habitat builder, total cost is 32 titanium, 1 copper, 3 quartz and 1 gold for the fabricator. That’s like 10 minutes in if I can find a second gold and silver in the shallows. That would help tremendously with storage issues. It’s also cheap enough that I should be able to just leave it forever without having to tear it down once I get the blueprints from the floating island.
By contrast, if I were using large lockers like I would prefer, I could only fit 6 lockers (288 total storage compared to 360 with the 12 smalls) but each one costs an extra 1 quartz (no problem) but also 2 coppers if you want a label. 12 coppers is ridiculous just for labels. Wall lockers get labels for free, so wall lockers it is.
I brought back fruit from the floating island that I successfully planted, but it was already going bad by the time I planted it and I don’t think I dawdled. So while my kick-ass kitchen room plan will solve the food issue when I’m in the base, any extended trip will still require cured peepers. Do I have that right? Because it feels like a bummer…
How long is the story by the way? I ended up going back to Control a couple weeks after a bug erased like 6 hours of progress. Once I recovered that lost progress, turns out I was only like 4 hours from the end of the game. It was fun but very short. So with Subnautica I’m worried that once I’ve plugged the tablet into that socket it’ll be almost over. Or is that still the beginning?
Entering the alien facility by the Sunbeam landing position is the beginning of the story, not the end. It’s not a terribly long story, but it also doesn’t really hold your hand. You need to follow breadcrumbs. Based on the way you’ve played so far, and the areas of interest you haven’t mentioned, I’d guess you have a lot of gameplay remaining.
Also, there are two solutions for food on long expeditions aside from cured peepers. They don’t involve different foodstuffs than you already have, but rather different ways of producing them.
This is becoming a real concern, but not because I’ll get lost in the weeds chasing a pointless effort until I eventually get bored and quit before finishing the story. It feels more like I’m focused on the opening because I’m too scared to go to the deeper waters. Because I really am.
I’m also a little spoiled at this point. I accidentally saw the name of the tower that blows up the Sunbeam (doh!) when trying to find out if that island has any plants worth growing. (I started exploring the island but there’s just so many spiders…*shudder*) Some stupid plant article named the damn tower. Grrr.
Also creative mode shows what looks like the ultimate ending device to build in the mobile vehicle bay build menu. Why doesn’t creative mode just start you with a friggin’ seamoth? Stupid spoiler… Ah well, spoilers don’t ruin it for me, but I do avoid them where reasonable. Those two names with zero elaboration is the entire extent of my spoilage.
I still currently have never built a cyclops, prawn suit, or even entered the Aurora. I only once caught the briefest glimpse of a cyclops in a video for farming something, which I immediately closed. Seeing the cyclops before I build one would be a much bigger spoiler to me than a spoiled story point, I think. I definitely look forward to making one.
So I’ve restarted and played three normal games, where after getting my starter base all tricked out I go explore and scan and read the PDA and stuff. I never went deeper than around 200m in any of them mainly because the seamoth was stuck at 200m. It took me until like last week to discover (after googling in frustration) that the vehicle upgrade bay fabricator is on the friggin’ wall. I would never have found that, ever. I kept going to the useless console and being like “Nope, no upgrades available to me yet…” So aggravating. Armed with that knowledge I restarted again – almost immediately – this time intending to get the most out of the Lifepod 19 mission.
During one of those three runs, I did at one point wander around Lifepod 19 (I think; maybe 17) and entered what appeared to be some kind of alien containment in the side of a cliff. There was a graphical glitch where an electric shark thingy had clipped in, which I tried to just ignore until…it bit me! Motherf… I’ve also not yet built an alien containment, so I’m looking forward to figuring out how that all works.
Modern technology has made it remarkably easy to record game video and upload it to youtube. Raw game recording is built directly into Windows 10 – and is integrated seemlessly with the xbox controller, also natively supported – and then youtube has no issue with uploading those gigantic raw video captures directly. Thanks to the roomy 2 TB data drive on my shiny new computer, the 1.4 GB raw video file I ended up with uploaded to youtube just fine. Took maybe 15-20 minutes all told to upload and then for youtube to process it, but otherwise nothing to it. Back in my DDO days (on my old computer) I had to use a cracked version of fraps to capture video, then had to compress the raw video with like xvid or x.264 or whatever and trying to balance between quality and size so youtube would take it. Not anymore; just upload multiple gigs, sure!
Here’s my latest “opening”, from starting a new game until the morning of day 2 when I climb inside a seamoth. I have enough material that I could have also made a habitat builder except that my fabricator is constantly at zero energy. A habitat builder costs like 25 energy on its own: Copper Wire, Computer Chip, Wiring Kit, Battery, and then the builder itself. I’m particularly happy with the night farming run here. (Video description has links to chapters.)
(I wanted to be able to watch my run on my phone while smoking on the couch, far from the computer.)
So I think I’m going to restart to go habitat builder first even though it will surely push the seamoth later. I love the idea of seamoth on day 2. (I think the aurora explodes on day 3 or 4.) I’m not sure how much faster I could climb aboard a seamoth than this run. Certainly not materially faster without a second fabricator to abuse, at least.
At the end of this video as I get in the seamoth, the Lifepod 19 radio call is a little over 1 minute away. (80 seconds just now checking, but maybe +/- some random amount.) I could probably grab 2 peepers, two salt, two giant coral and cure both fish and make 4 waters for the trip, and be idly standing next to the radio when the call comes in, ready to go.
The Lifepod 19 mission gets me almost everything I need to build my perfect starter base:
There’s a large wreck immediately above Lifepod 19 you see on approach with both moonpool fragments, plus some other niceties. (Floodlight, etc…)
On the walls and floor around Lifepod 19 are as many rubies, diamonds and lithium as you can carry.
Also on the floor are a gel sack and eye stalk. The eye stalk isn’t necessarily worth getting here, but of course I plan to.
The PDA on site directs you to the floating island, which is only 400m from there compared to over a km back home then another 1km+ back out to the island. Naturally it makes sense to continue on directly to the island instead of going home and back out again.
So in addition to the moonpool, you also come back with everything from the island. Namely the multipurpose room, observatory, plant pots / growbeds and every dry-land seed you want. Plus the aerogel crafting ingredient and one of the hatchery ingredients. At this point, the only thing holding me back is resources. (And fabricator energy!) I think my total titanium needed is triple digits. That’s the equivalent of 25 metal salvage, ie 125 energy. Yikes.
I forgot to mention that alien containment thing I found in the side of the cliff had a breathable oxygen atmosphere. So of course that’s why I thought that predator swimming around in the air was a clipping glitch. Until it bit me…
Also one arbitrary thing I’m contemplating: Lifepod 17 is pretty much on the way to Lifepod 19, so I could potentially just swing by 17 on the way to 19 and then the floating island. And then if I did that, just slightly out of the way between 17 and 19 is the blood kelp trench, where I could easily fit in a blood oil and a deep shroom on my way.
That would mean I would return from the floating island with one plantable seed each for the bulbo tree, lantern fruit, Chinese potato, marblemelon, gel sack, blood oil, and eye stalk. That sounds appealing but a tight squeeze, because I will also be carrying my entire starter base’s supply of lithium, diamonds, and rubies.
Then the next mission after that is Lifepod 12 “on the sea floor” or whatever. It’s in blue bulb territory so I’ll bring one of those back to plant. And just east of that is a large wreck with blueprints for a water filtration machine, bed, and picture frame, all of which I’m definitely including in my base.
But then that’s it. I’ll have all the blueprints I need, then it becomes a race against the clock to collect enough metal scrap and farm the giant coral. (I have all 3 giant coral to farm, you know those Safe Shallows giant coral tubes with a million quartz?) It then becomes a question of how quickly can I place objects with the builder tool?
Confused by why energy is an issue. If you’re running out, put another solar panel or three up?
(I haven’t watched your video yet, which might resolve my confusion)
You’re playing so very differently from me. I’ve played through the entire game enough times that I know where everything is to be found and such, so if I’m replaying for the sake of playing through (as opposed to just futzing about with base building or whatever) I try to put myself in the character’s shoes and pursue what he’d see as his most pressing need based on the information available. So I build out the basic toolset and put up a really rudimentary base, because storage. I do usually choose the base location based on knowledge the character doesn’t have yet, but otherwise I just respond to the radio messages as they arrive. I don’t play to any deadlines. The Aurora blows up when it blows up. I add to the base as I organically find new base components, as the game leads me around to new biomes via the radio messages.
