You’re missing some doors you can get through, either with the laser cutter or the repair tool.
You never have to build a staircase with boxes in the prawn bay. I’ve seen it done on a let’s play, and when the guy finally got up there he found the door didn’t open.
I tried to avoid spoiling this, but it’s a pretty common disappointment on reddit.
Yeah so it appears I came in the back way, starting with the lab and black box room. (This what I meant by “I set up a pathfinder line in the underwater part at the beginning.”) So when I got to the prawn bay the only place open to me was the living quarters. The locker room was inaccessible since you have to repair the lock from the other side.
In fairness to me, the upstairs door looks fully open-able and it really seemed like this was the only way forward. (In fact there were no ways forward.) I dragged one crate over and jumped on it to see what it looked like up there, and this is the door I could see:
Looks like a legit openable door to me. I made a staircase with 2 large crates as the base, one small crate next to them to jump up on, then THREE small crates stacked on top of the two large crates, one stack two crates tall with a single crate next to it. So it was 1 step small, 2 step large, 3 step small on top of the large, 4 step 2 smalls on top of a large. With a propulsion cannon. Do you have any idea how difficult that was? Still wasn’t tall enough, if you can believe it. That’s when I posted here in frustration.
After reading that I was doing that for nothing I googled a walkthrough, following this one to be sure I didn’t miss any pda’s or anything of consequence. Having 8/9 pieces of the cyclops already, and only missing a single engine piece, when the guide says you get your “first three cyclops pieces, a completed engine” in the cargo bay I got super excitede. But of course for me there wasn’t a single cyclops piece in the cargo bay that I could find. Then again, as stated and now demonstrated, I suck hard at exploring so maybe there were pieces all over the place and I just couldn’t find them.
I did get the full prawn suit, which is nice. Excited to try that out. (Even though I had already been to the prawn bay and “fully explored” it I had only scanned 1 prawn suit piece. Had to have the walkthrough lead me by the hand to realize the other pieces were hanging around.) Also fixed the radiation so now I can make a stillsuit and use the rebreather I made forever ago but rarely got to use.
I guess the only thing left to do story-wise is to wait for the radio call with the captain’s door code. I could go randomly searching for a way to get underneath the safe shallows to the proposed degasi habitat, but I don’t see that happening. More likely I’ll google how to get there.
If you got the beacon for the proposed habitat location, it’s really not hard to find the entrance to the cave.
I’m 99% sure you can get through this door from either side. Checking, but will be a bit because I don’t have a save with the Aurora exploded but not unexplored.
It turns out that I did not have 2/3 engine pieces. In fact I had none, which I discovered when I found two engine pieces on the ground right next to each other and scanned them. Now I have 2/3 engine pieces. heh. I do still have a generic “Cyclops” entry in my blueprint log that says 0/1, while until scanning those two pieces I didn’t have any engine entry in the blueprint log at all. That mystery is solved at least: No doubt the generic Cyclops entry will either show 1/1 or just disappear once I get the final engine piece.
So now I’m even more annoyed that the promised engine pieces in the cargo bay came up bust for me. I’m even considering going back to check again.
Other than the Cyclops, there isn’t really anything else for me to do in the game. I’ve got a prawn suit sitting below my starter base, hundreds of meters away from any large resource deposit to mine. No interest in walking it all that distance and then back, so without a Cyclops to transport it the prawn suit’s a dead end. I played with some grav traps, which seem nice for scanning small fauna without having to chase them down. The stillsuit annoyed the piss out of me within about an hour or so (and the repeated joke every time you log on wearing it grew old fast, though it made me laugh the first time) so I put that in a locker and am now just running around naked, I guess.
The only unresolved anything is the proposed Degasi habitat, but again I have no interest or inclination to go randomly wandering around deeper water looking for a cave entrance. I can barely muster the motivation to look for the last Cyclops engine fragment.
The Cyclops fragments were kind of fun by the way…as I finished scanning the first one I heard a reaper roar right behind me. Quickly I scanned the second and jumped back in the seamoth and took off following the classic comedy bit “side to side!” – bobbing and weaving left and right and up and down as it bore down on me. At one point I did see one of its arms or whatever swipe right in front of my windshield so I know he was right behind me, plus I could see its shadow, but I got the feeling it was just toying with me like a cat. Still got my heart racing!
I’ve been finding creative mode much more interesting. Have a new base design I’m excited about, so putting together a proof of concept has been fun.
Oh by the way, in terms of aligning a moonpool, I don’t think you even need the foundation. I think whatever piece you lay first, that will determine the absolute direction of your base, which in turn dictates the direction foundations and moonpools will face. Specifically, your vehicle will exit a moonpool perpendicular to the way you were facing when you placed the first piece, right to left from your perspective. Doesn’t matter where on the map you are, or what style piece you’re placing, only what direction you’re facing when you place the first piece. That’s my hypothesis, anyway.
ETA: I was actually thinking about that side to side comedy bit in real time as I was running from the reaper, but when making this post I seem unable to dig up a concrete cite. I thought it was from Zombieland, but Google returns nothing. And besides, who would be shooting at you in Zombieland that you would need need to run away from zigzag style? Maybe Michael Cera from Superbad? I honestly can’t remember where this bit was from. Anyone else know what I’m talking about?
Interesting date on getting the moonpool orientation correct, thanks. Certainly the foundation piece method is just a subset of that, with the advantage that you can see the direction once you place it down.
I’m 99.99% sure there are no Cyclops pieces inside the Aurora, you need to search elsewhere.
And unfortunately you’re missing about 80% of the game by not going deeper. Of course, the object of any game is to have fun, not go down the garden path, but I really, really, really encourage you to carefully read some of the early lifepod entries again, get in your seamoth, and find that proposed Degasi base.
Pretty common for there to be no Cyclops engine fragments in the Aurora. They can be found in random spawns in the dead zone astern of the Aurora and around the island with the alien cannon installation. Both locations are totally safe and absolutely not the homes of enormous predators, honest.
“Only thing unresolved is the Degassi base” is kind of like saying “I’ve completed Skyrim except for going to to meet the old shouty guys at the top of the mountain.” Based on what you’ve said about what you’ve done, there are two significant human-made bases and three or four significant alien bases you haven’t seen. You’ve done almost none of the story. To complete the game, you have to build the escape rocket and actually leave the planet.
I believe it also determines the orientation of bio and nuclear reactors. Occasionally it seems to determine what direction you face when you enter a hatch, but not always. Sometimes (usually?) when you go through a hatch it leaves you facing whatever direction you were facing when you entered it. Other times (no idea when) a hatch will forcibly orient me in a single direction. I’m betting that’s also related to the absolute direction, but I’m not sure when or why it happens. I had built like three complete bases close to each other one time and it broke hatch orientation for me, forcibly orienting me straight into a wall every time I went through a hatch.
Ha!
If anything I’ll probably just Google it. I googled engine fragment locations and also LifePod 7’s location and both seemed to be around 0, -1000 so I headed out there to kill two birds with one stone. Success, except apparently I needed three pieces instead of just one last one. At least I found two, so that was progress, but those sharks keep beating the crap out of my seamoth. Keep having to run away and repair it. I should put in that self-defense thingy except I don’t really want to mess with reapers grabbing my seamoth. I want to try and get a good screenshot.
Hey, do picture frames not work in the game proper? They work great in creative mode but the live game doesn’t seem to let me scan the blueprints for a picture frame at all. I’ve got pictures I would like to put on the walls but no joy.
You can definitely add picture frames in the survival game - I’ve got a lovely picture of a reaper eating my seamoth over my bed. But you may not be able to scan them - some things you can only get the blueprints for from a data box.
Okay that makes sense. Google identifies large wrecks where you can acquire a picture frame, and I found an actual picture frame on the wall in one of those large wrecks but I couldn’t scan it. (Same place I found the bed.)
Missing a databox is totally something I would do.
So let me tell you about the joy of trying to use an Xbox controller with Subnautica. First, the triggers are backwards. When the game says LT it responds to RT. So right off the bat I ended up having to download an Xbox controller config app to swap my triggers. So now that all works great, no harm no foul.
There are three buttons that interact with the world, and I have them mapped as follows:
LT: fire or use equipped weapon or item
RT: break mineral outcrop, pick something up
A: select menu option (eg: while using a fabricator)
I would like to point out that the “select menu option” feature of button A is not configurable in options. There is no way to customize how the controller interacts with game menu systems.
But since I’m almost never in a fabricator or mod station menu, I mapped the A button to jump just like every other game.
To work the scanner room interface, I point at the item I want to scan for and press LT (fire weapon). Works fine, if a little out of place in a game where other devices have real menu systems.
Cut to the Aurora, where the door code interface is essentially identical to the scanner interface. Not only does LT not do anything for the door codes like it works on the scanner room, RT doesn’t do anything either. It’s the A button – the “you’re not in the game world you’re in a game menu” select button. But the A button makes me jump, overriding the door code and thus rendering them unusable with the controller.
I can of course just point at the door code number pad and click with a mouse and it works fine, and so that’s what I do, but that’s almost* the only time I touch the mouse when I’m playing the game. Why doesn’t it use the same interfaces as the scanner room? It is literally the same interface, namely, NO interface.
Not to mention the horrible situation of when you need quick access to more than five items. (*For this I have to use a mouse.)
Honestly they really kind of screwed the pooch on pretty much all of the UI. The game is just so goddamn good it renders all of that irrelevant, but I had to vent.
FWIW, I also have an Xbox controller on PC, and I just swapped the trigger functions in the game option screen to what makes sense. It does mean the on-screen hints are backwards as well, but it only took a few attempts before I muscle-memoried my way past them.
And this mod allows you to increase the number of quick slots, up to 12. I settled on 8 as a good number. There are a lot of good mods there - better scanner blips makes the scanner about 50 times more useful, and the Map is kind of a cheat, but it’s a “fog of war” map, so it doesn’t fill in until you’ve actually been to a place.
I happily agree the UI is kind of janky - why should I have to assign an object to the quick slot when all I want to do is use it one time where I am right now? You use the Mobile Vehicle Bay 3 or 4 times during the game (unless you have bad luck with your craft), and each time you’ve got to add it to your quick slots, deploy it, close it, then put back what you had in that quick slot to begin with.
I was super psyched when I flipped the triggers so that the on-screen display matched the button I was actually supposed to press. I recommend it highly. It’s the default/official Microsoft toolkit for Xbox controllers, and I recall it being pretty easy. Though in fairness, when I’m done with subnautica I’m going to have to relearn how to do that so I can undo it.
Finally got the Cyclops last night. Took me a minute to realize that I couldn’t build structures on it, but I could treat it like an interior room. Good enough! Pretty excited to figure out how I want to lay out the perfect Cyclops interior. Also, I do not feel safer in the Cyclops at all. It feels like a giant, lumbering, fragile neon sign shouting “Come eat me!” Also, the answer to my earlier question was immediately obvious: Seamoth goes in the base moonpool, prawn suit goes in the cyclops, a place for both and both in their place.
Turns out I’m pretty happy with my starter base location. It happens to be almost directly above a jellyroll cave entrance. Not the one by that life pod where there’s a PDA inside the jellyroll cave, which is where I assume I’m supposed to start looking for the proposed Degasi habitat. I figure there’s a decent chance they’re all connected anyway so I can try just starting from the entrance right beneath my base. My ideal starting location was always at the drop-off to the grassy plateau toward the Aurora, almost entirely for the view, and this latest restart (which I’m now over 24 hours into) happened to spawn my escape pod right next to that. Perfect! (Specifically, in the video I posted, the 4-minute night farm at the end is right at the same jellyroll cave entrance where my base is now.)
Since I can’t build a water filtration machine on the Cyclops I think I’ll wear the stillsuit there and only there. I don’t like when I’m out doing stuff and the stillsuit water makes me hungry. Feels counterproductive. But I can grow food on the cyclops so the stillsuit should be fine.
Oh yeah, and I’m rethinking my perfect base design for the dumbest reason ever. The plan includes an alien containment for raising peepers for food. It also includes a ground floor for a power source; a bio or nuclear reactor. So then I started researching the best material to fuel a bioreactor and it turns out peepers are high on the list. But I don’t want to put peepers in a bioreactor. They have personality. They play with me when I’m swimming around. In fact, now that I think about it, I don’t really want to eat them either. I feel bad. This is even dumber than it sounds because I am totally a meat-eater in real life. I don’t care how cute they are; tasty is tasty. But I guess since I’m not physically tasting peepers, there’s nothing to outweigh the feeling bad part.
And then when my containment was full of peepers in creative mode (where you can’t eat so it was either throw them in the trash, feed them to the bioreactor, or let them go) I let them all go and they were kind of f***** up. Their behavior seemed more listless and less intelligent. Certainly less playful. Hours later in the same game I have a whole shitload of peepers by my base and they all seem kind of inbred and stupid. Me no likey.
I do need to cure something for long trips, but I’ll just find an alternate. I’m thinking Reginalds, but I don’t know. As for bioreactor fuel, I happily settled on mushrooms. I have a garden full of eight acid and 16 deep shrooms just to have on hand for crafting. You get 18 mushrooms harvesting and replanting a full growbed, 16 to fill the reactor. At 210 each that’s 3360 energy total. Not as good as occulus but still very good.
Technically gel sacks are slightly better than mushrooms (245 vs 210) but they’re slightly more labor intensive to harvest and also they’re kind of cute. Both are far superior to any 2x2 food, being the equivalent of 840 and 980 for four slots respectively. The best 2x2 food is only 420 I think. Then again it’s probably way easier to just put two Bulbo trees in plant pots right next to the reactor and be done with it. You’d have to refill it twice as often, but I bet it’d be less than half the work.
Not really. I never cured anything except for a couple of experiments with it. I built tons of wall storage in the cyclops bilge, filled one or two of them with fresh (uncooked) fish and water, and supplemented during my travels by fishing.
Yeah, the cyclops doesn’t make you safe. If you’re not interested in having the pants scared off of you by deep-sea monstrosities, that’s like the one reason I wouldn’t recommend this game. If you can deal with that, though, I recommend exploring anyway, and vibing on how vulnerable you feel in the seamoth/prawn suit as you go to the bizare, magical, nighmarish locales.
There’s the famous “Serpentine!” from The In-Laws:
I generally really hate underwater games. Any that have an underwater sequence I get the hell to dry land as soon as I can. This one has been calling to me though with all the love it gets from other people.
Again it’s really not the monsters. I dig being scared by those; it’s like a horror movie, and I love horror movies.
It’s the depth itself that scares me. I just feel revulsion, like a claustrophobic person contemplating being buried alive in a coffin. I’m not actually claustrophobic, and I’ve never been particularly afraid of the ocean. I played in the ocean every summer as a kid on family vacations for crying out loud.
But man, when the floor drops out and I can’t see it anymore because it’s just too deep it’s like my stomach flips. It’s excruciating.
I said upthread that even if it was just a dev version with no monsters or objects or anything, literally just landscape, I would still be just as freaked out. Well it turns out there’s a section of the map that’s largely empty, and holy s*** that freaked me out even worse!
I think the jellyroll cave should be okay because at least there’s probably walls around. It doesn’t feel like I’m evaporating into the void like in the open deep. shudder
FWIW, I used to be an active scuba diver. When I get low on air in the game, I definitely feel short of breath and anxious. I even hold my breath when he gets below 15 seconds of air, especially when I know I’ve screwed up and he’s not making to the surface or an air supply in time.
I feel you. Deep water where I can’t see the bottom always creeped me out a bit, but when I was playing Fallout 4, any part of the game that required me to go underwater just royally freaked me out. And that was when I knew, for a fact, that there’s nothing dangerous in the water. Just trying to move underwater made my palms sweaty an upped my heart rate.
I still got pretty far in subnautica, but eventually bailed around the time I got the cyclops, and had to start heading into the real deeps.