Subnautica

The Game Room
423

But overall, I loved this game, it was great. I missed the rescue ship bit, I saw the countdown but it really was too early for me to consider looking for such things, and had to see what happened on youtube. No biggie, really.

I just need to leave it long enough to come back to it and do it all over again with food and water in it. Struck me as annoying, like encumbrance in RPGs, or very limited storage space in games where you collect stuff. Not enjoyable. I suppose I missed farming and reason for fish tanks and such things.

Still, after all that it was one of the games which helped relieve the sort of limited life of a late pandemic, and goes in with Metro: Exodus, Assassins Creed: Odyssey, Control, Rage 2, Borderlands 3 and RDR2 as games which made me felt as if I’d travelled somewhere in the last 15 months.

424

Two things that would’ve made the scanner room far, far more user-friendly:

  1. An upgrade that lets you know how far away a resource is, similar to the homing beacons; and
  2. An upgrade that lets you “home in” on a specific instance of a resource, either changing its circle color, or fading the other circles out. That way, if I see 20 circles indicating titanium, it’d be a lot easier to pursue one of them at a time.

As it was, the scanner room was rarely something I’d turn on, because it cluttered the screen so badly and was hard to use.

425

Hehe, I loved scanner rooms with four range upgrades! I even built them all across the map to get total coverage.

426

I get super annoyed when the scanner room shows me a circle, and then as I’m heading to it the circle disappears.

It’s a fragment. Stalkers don’t carry off seaglide fragments from boxes. There is no reason the circle should have disappeared.

Or then I’ll try it and it won’t show a single fragment anywhere in scanner range. Maxed with four speed upgrades and I wait for like minutes so it’s definitely had time, but the dozen or so fragments within 150m of my scanner room? Apparently none of them exist.

But then I try it after loading again and it works. Very hit or miss.

427

This mod makes the scanner blips work a lot better. The circle size decreases with increasing range, and gives you an exact range figure below the circle when you’re within 100m. And you can toggle it on/off, so you don’t have to remove the chip and waste an inventory slot if you’re done prospecting but don’t want to return to the base immediately.

428

One of my biggest gripes about Subnautica is the lack of “Save As.” I do it manually, which just annoys me more that the feature is missing.

In gaming in general, every time I start navel gazing or do something stupid or accidentally getting killed, it feels to me like the playthrough is a little bit ruined. If there were a normal Save As feature, I’d just save as a new game slot, keep going, and then after several more times of messing up, I’d restore back to before I started messing up and try again.

In my previous playthrough that got to like 40 hours, at least 10 of those hours were spent designing, building, and fully testing a single-room charging station designed to charge 8 power cells and 8 batteries at once while running two water machines. Depleting 8 power cells with a cyclops? Piece of cake. Set it and forget it. Depleting 8 batteries, on the other hand, was kind of a pain in the ass. (Grav traps didn’t work; in hindsight I should have tried light sticks. I mainly just spent it seaglide mineral farming.)

Immediately after finishing that test – 10 solar panels around 20m deep and a bioreactor is good enough – I thought to myself “This playthrough is utterly ruined at this point.” Thus my latest restart this past weekend.

I just now figured out I think an elegant solution to a major stumbling block in the early goings of my game. Very excited. If it holds up, I have mapped out until just after dawn of day 2. Progress! Not sure if everything in the plan for day 2 can happen before the sun sets, but I’m starting to think it’s possible.

429

Pretty much any game except those with checkpoints needs a rolling three quicksaves (on an F5 on pc), and perhaps explicit named saves. It’s the only complaint I had of the developer which I had felt strongly to provide feedback on… I assume it was one of those explicit design choices they strongly believed in.

That was over the fact the game hard locked regularly and I lost a lot of time on those when I’d forgotten to save, but weirdly I never hated redoing the bits I forgot to save, but rebuilding that minisub again realllllly pissed me off.

430

Yeah it’s pretty clearly a design choice, and I think it’s a poor one. At least there’s a manual workaround, if clunky. (Make a copy of the save game folder.)

Ha! That seems like a legitimate feedback. My only feedback so far underscores how weird I am: “The alternate use for a bed should be as a three-sided bench.”

I mean, they have a whole button on my controller devoted to “Alternate Use” that barely does anything anywhere in the game. Would make beds a whole lot more useful.

(Apologies if I already posted this up thread.)

431

So I just ran into another one of those teleport-y purple squid things I originally conflated with crab squids. Squinting on the wiki to avoid spoilers, I found a name: Warper.

I went down to grab a blood oil and it was “standing” right there, staring at me, so I booked it again. I just didn’t like the cut of its jib.

EDIT: I’m in the middle of a test run doing the entire lifepod 19 super quest. First stop is lifepod 17, then the blood kelp trench for blood oil and deep shroom, then on to lifepod 19, floating island, yada yada yada.

The only way I could engage with it right now is to cheat and switch to creative mode. After I get everything all set, I think I’m going to come back and get all up in that thing’s business.

(The two nutrient bars you start with can definitely get me to the island, no fish needed.)

432

Warper - later, if you follow the story, you can learn a bit more about them.

433

But you always spawn in the same place.

434

You always spawn in the safe shallows, but not always in the same place within the safe shallows. There are hundreds of actual spawn locations.

My preferred spot is on the very edge of the southern border of the safe shallows. Other spawn locations are over half a kilometer away from that. Half a kilometer away doesn’t seem like “the same place” to me.

435

Correction, it looks like I’m in the far southeastern corner. The southwestern corner is further south than I am. Also “almost,” not “over” half a kilometer.

Here’s a couple screenshots from the the northwestern corner of spawn locations with my lifepod beacon showing the distance. Each one of those cubes floating in the water is a spawn location.

For the second one I switched to creative mode and built a structure extending above water. Looks like the entire start map covers an area with a diameter of half a kilometer.

436

I hope this is not too much of a spoiler, Ellis Dee, but deep, deep, deep in the sea,

someone is watching you and muttering, “What the fuck is he even doing?”

I am amused and bemused by your way of playing the game, and enjoy reading your reports.

437

Ha! I bet. And it could make sense in-story; my behavior is so odd, the aliens let me live a little longer to try and figure out what the hell I’m doing. Then again, if they are watching me, they have to be saying to themselves: “Wow, that is some impressively fast production. We should probably deal with that guy sooner rather than later.”

My problem is I can’t do an entire game as a speed run because I have to scan everything and then read the PDA, neither of which is a speed activity. (I think grav traps will help with the scanning.) I think I want to do an exhaustive game, where I hit every little nook and cranny. So a speed start to a full game, I guess.

Is there such a thing as a side quest in Subnautica?

Like in The Urquan Masters, my walkthrough that I replay every few years hits every story point and coordinates the “best” order of events, so for example the Thraddash get convinced to attack the Kohr-Ah at the same time as the sad masked dudes and their plant friends join the fray. Admittedly, there are things in the walk through you could never know ahead of time, but perfect knowledge doesn’t bother me.

Back to Subnautica, my previous attempt boarded the seamoth at 18 minutes, but no habitat builder and no energy in the fabricator to make one. And also no titanium to build anything with. I did have all the basic gear (seaglide, scanner, knife, flashlight, repair tool, standard O2 tank, fins) so I could theoretically have just taken off for lifepod 19, but I’d come back with full storage and nowhere to put anything and not even a habitat builder to build something so I could put something down.

On my current run I’m hammering out day two. I get the first two pieces of my base and a temporary solar panel late afternoon on day one, meaning it has oxygen so I can build in it easily. By the 18-minute mark, instead of boarding a seamoth with basic gear, I have a base with one locker and a radio, but I already have the high capacity oxygen tank and rebreather. Those two combined will hugely speed up the lifepod 19 mission.

By the end of day two I’ve got six lockers, a fabricator, and I’m trying to have all the materials prepared to immediately build a moon pool, multi-purpose room, five plant pots, three external grow beds, a hatch, a second solar panel, and then in a perfect world I could immediately upgrade the seamoth too, at least for depth and storage. Also enough reinforcements so the base doesn’t spring leaks. And definitely a laser cutter. Altogether that’s a huge amount of just titanium.

So what I’ve been doing now is timing some metal scrap runs, whipping around with the seaglide. With the energy issue for converting the scrap into titanium solved, the problem now is I’m going into the grassy plateau and the border of the crash zone – so many metal scraps there, only like 300m from my base – but those areas aren’t loaded in my game yet. Everytime I go there they’re different.

The whole “not loaded until I go there” issue will also be a factor with LifePod 19. I may have to awkwardly splice in extra saves and call it good enough, where I enter the area, save it, and now I know exactly where everything is.

My current game has no saves except at the very beginning to save scum the starting location. So far it’s approaching 20 minutes in a single take. It’s faster that way.

438

Saving at the giant wall where the crash zone starts can be hazardous to your health. Silly me thought the reapers wouldn’t go over the wall. Oh they come over the wall alright.

They are f****** with me so hard, lying in wait and then appearing out of nowhere to terrorize me. I just have a seaglide, no seamoth yet, so it grabs me – my person! – and does a lot of damage. Like 80% of my health bar. (Same as when grabbing the seamoth, now that I think about it.) I won’t see or hear anything, and then for example I looked up because I was running low on air and about to surface, there’s the reaper directly above me coming straight down at me maybe 20 meters up. Holy s***, run! He chased me almost all the way into the kelp forest but I got away unscathed that time. He hasn’t killed me yet, but he managed to grab me three or four times now minimum.

So for my very first attempt at cheesy saving after new areas load, I happened to save myself at the perfect spot to be reaper bait. As soon as the game loads in, run for your life! heh.

First time running the full 20+ minute first section, I got lost/turned around and also forgot what to fabricate a couple times. Video says 23:28. Second try cleaned most of that up but still a little slow, 22:46. Third try went pretty smooth, 21:51. I could maybe get that down to 21 flat but it really was a solid run. I think I’m keeping it. So that means I’m officially onto the next (much easier) part.

Very first dry run of the next part just now was quite promising. Left for lifepod 19 just before sunset on day 2, arrived at the floating island mid-morning day 3, left the island as the sun set and got home during night 3. Moonpool was up before the sun on day 4.

So I kind of just aimlessly built stuff, being short on titanium and everything else, farming stuff up here and there, and the Aurora had still not exploded by sunset. That means I get all of day 4 to get my base set up. Then when the Aurora explodes, I can make a radiation suit and go straight there, since I’ll already have both the laser cutter and propulsion cannon. No food or water necessary; the Aurora is stocked.

EDIT: Forgot I edited out a paragraph. This current save locks in the grassy plateau and at least the wall (mountain, really) next to the crash zone. Grassy plateau sucks pretty bad. Terrible seamoth fragment location, but at least they’re there. Great crash zone, though: Two propulsion cannon fragments, woohoo! Done and done.

439

I swear, it’s like someone’s picked up my favorite book and I’m all excited and “TELL ME WHAT YOU THINK” and then I realize they’re reading all the odd-numbered chapters first and after they finish a chapter they tear out each page and make an origami sculpture out of it and I can’t look away.

440

Kudos for the dev team for implementing a non-random RNG. That’s how your cater to gamers.

Back in my DDO days, I enjoyed the crafting system. You would gain crafting xp by successfully crafting shards above your level with a lower % of success. So you’d be risking expensive mats to try and gain 3 crafting levels all at once by crafting a 25% success recipe using a +50% success booster. That kind of thing. They used a “true” RNG (for a computer) and just gave you the stated % chance of success.

As a result, there was always an abundance of posts on the forums about “I’m supposed to have a 78% chance of success, I’ve failed 10 times in a row, it’s bugged!” Sadly no, the larger the number of people trying, the longer streaks (both positive and negative) will manifest. That’s just how numbers work. Get 5 people to flip a coin 10 times, nobody is getting 10 of the same side in a row. Get 5 billion people to do it, plenty of people will see 10 in a row.

But not Subnautica. I’m not entirely sure they even use an RNG at all. Pretty sure it’s a pre-determined order. Whatever you’re “due” to get, that is always what you get.

For example, if you start a new game and go break two limestone, it is overwhelmingly likely you will get exactly 1 copper and 1 titanium. In fact, watching my video, the first limestone is random (I guess), and then it alternates forever more: Titanium, Copper, Titanium, Copper, Titanium, Copper, etc…

So when I decided to add a high capacity tank and rebreather to my early goals, I knew I needed 3 silver. How many sandstone does that mean I need to harvest? 8. Exactly 8. After collecting 8 sandstone, it is overwhelmingly likely you will have exactly 2 gold, 3 silver and 3 lead.

In other words, 10% of gamers aren’t just totally screwed because they happened to find themselves on the shit end of the curve.

441

The first two limestone are always one copper and one titanium, according to the speedrunners. There’s no RNG involved in that.

442

XCOM had a fun RNG system. It was a true (pseudo)RNG, but the current state was saved as part of the save game file. In principle, this eliminated save-scumming, since no matter how many times you reloaded you’d always get the same value.

But it enabled a different kind of save-scumming. Baddies always have a certain percentage chance to hit, and if you “roll” below that then you hit. Suppose there are baddies with hit chances of 30% and 50%. You roll a 40 and a 60. If you attack in the that order, you’ll miss both, but if you reverse it, you’ll hit the 50% guy. When you have a ton of targets to pick from, figuring out the right order can mean the difference between hitting almost all of them vs. hitting none of them. You want to spend your bad rolls on targets which you’ll miss no matter what, and for the rest use rolls which are only barely good enough to hit.