I have an HTC Vive (first model, from 2016). For whatever reason I hadn’t tried VR mode in Subnautica before, so I gave it a shot.
First thing, it’s standard controller only. The Vive controllers are pretty good in my experience, but Subnautica isn’t made for them. And using the keyboard is close to impossible due to the lack of visual feedback.
The good is that it’s visually impressive, and generally adds to the experience. And–this was surprising–it makes navigation in close quarters much easier. Normally, piloting the Cyclops through the Lost River is a matter of bumping and feeling my way through. In VR, I was able to pilot my way through with no problems at all. The stereo feedback makes an incredible difference here.
The bad is that there’s a lot of visual… jank. Some aspects are just not that well thought through. The map markers are huge and often block what you’re looking at. The Seaglide is right in front of your field of view and blocks a lot of it. There’s a headless body (of you) that in theory you don’t see much of, due to your head being on top… but it often isn’t aligned quite right and you see a weird neck in front of you. There are also some slight visual oddities with heat effects and a couple other things.
It all made me think that some mild fixes would dramatically improve the experience–like with a mod. And lo-and-behold, I see that there is such a mod. Not sure if it fixes all my complaints, but I’ll give it a shot.
Ok, the VR mod improves the experience substantially! Probably around 90% of the janky stuff is fixed or at least much better. I played it for about an hour with no substantial issues. Built a cute little base down at around 1200 m. I’m not sure I’ll play it this way 100% of the time, but it is very immersive and pleasant in moderate bursts.
BTW, for food+water purposes, I like lantern fruits. They give 10 food+3 water, which isn’t much, but they grow quickly and have a lot of fruit per tree, which you can collect and chow down on quickly. A quad grow bed produces more than enough to supply your character. In fact, probably two pots is enough. Plenty of room on the Cyclops or even a small base.
I have all edible plants at my base, and typically when I eat I have a proper meal: one cooked Reginald from alien containment, one Chinese potato, and one lantern fruit for dessert. Also two purified waters from bleach. The trick is to eat the Reginald when your food bar is at around 90 so the Reginald kicks you up to 130 or more. I find if I eat the Reginald at 100 I just stay at 100.
For my Cyclops I just set up two pots worth of marblemelons and two pots of bulbo tree. Seems plenty sufficient to keep me fed and watered.
If I’m just puttering around the base, I’ll keep popping lantern fruit to stay topped off. Now that I type this, I should probably put a lantern tree on my cyclops for when I’m puttering around the cyclops.
I’m excited to hear your experiences with VR in that it’s very similar to other things I’ve read that made me want to try it. Everyone agrees that the VR mods are necessary and effective.
It is definitely a lot of fun to pilot the Cyclops in VR. It’s like driving a big truck, but in 3 dimensions. The bubble cockpit is actually useful–you can look in all directions, even down. And you can lean over if necessary to get a better view.
I have a little base next to a hot vent, and I like to park the Cyclops next to it so it recharges. But I have to get pretty close, and usually there’s a lot of banging around due to other stuff nearby. In VR, I can drive up and slot right in perfectly. Yeah, there are the alternate camera views, but it’s more immersive to just look. It’s very satisfying to maneuver around like this.
In my experience, VR tends to make stuff look better even if the rendering quality is the same. The main reason is that anything with a reflective quality gains a certain depth to it. This includes both plain reflections (like the water surface) but also things like brushed metal, which no longer look like a flat gray, but properly look like a highly blurred reflection.
There are a few graphical problems that VR exposes, though, such as some blurry textures. I’m going to look for more mods.
Played around with some more mods. Found one that adds a Seaglide-like sonar to the Cyclops map. I always found the sonar useless on the Seaglide, but on the Cyclops it’s great.
I tried some graphical mods, but they all use ReShader, which seems to be incompatible with VR. Oh well. What I’d really like is a hi-res texture pack, but I haven’t found one.
I might just upgrade my VR rig. It looks like the Vive Pro 2 is compatible with my current controllers and basestations, and has the best visual quality (2.4x2.4k @ 120 Hz). Pricey, but not too bad if I can use some of my current components.
Managed to scan the Sea Dragon Leviathan. I think I got lucky, though. Main problem was just keeping up with him.
Been playing more in VR. It’s really a shame that the out of the box experience is so poor as it really is quite majestic and perfectly playable with a few tweaks. One thing I like is how everything looks so big in VR. Ordinarily, you just don’t really have a sense of scale… but from the Cyclops to the creatures to just the seaweed, everything looks so imposing in VR. Would probably be a lot scarier if I weren’t used to the monsters by now, but in any case the environments still give a sense of awe and wonder.
Apparently, a friend has a spare Valve Index that I can have. Should be a noticeable upgrade over my current setup. Not as high res as the Vive Pro 2, but hits 144 Hz. High refresh rates are very important in VR.
Tried out the Valve Index. Pretty nice upgrade over the first-gen Vive. Decent resolution upgrade, slightly better field of view, and a noticeable increase in refresh rate.
Set up some more bases in out of the way areas. The big anchor pod area looks really great. The brain things are really menacing up close, too.
I have infinite disdain for Facebook, so I’m not going to say anything about the Oculus products. The price is right, though, if you don’t value your eternal soul.
It occurs to me that my soon-to-arrive 3050 might not have enough horsepower to run Subnautica in VR. It’ll be a month or two at least, though, since I just spent $276 on the video card. (I got it for actual MSRP! Supposed to arrive Monday.)
I’m running a 3080. A 3050 is a bit on the wimpy side, but VR systems pull some tricks to get better results from modest hardware. It’s super important that the head tracking happens at the full rate; less important that the game itself renders at that rate. So they desynchronize the two, with the head tracking running at 90 Hz or whatever, and the game rendering what it can. What’s your frame rate at 1920x1080? 2560x1440?
That’s great news about Subnautica 3! I need to try S2 in VR mode; I thought it wasn’t supported (no startup option), but it looks like there’s a third-party mod for it.
My monitor is only 1920x1080 (thus the 3050) and the 1050 ti placeholder card I’ve been using gets around 50 FPS with settings largely maxed. I’m expecting the new 3050 to be comfortably over 100 FPS with maxed settings.
Switching topics, I’ve read several times people complaining about broken knives and having to make and carry extras. Did they remove that at some point?
I ask because I only have the knife I originally made – not even an electro blade, just a plain knife – but in the past few play sessions I’ve killed at least eight warpers and four crab squids total. (I make a beeline for either the moment I see one and kill it with extreme prejudice. Love me the stasis rifle.) As far as I can tell the knife is still good as new.
EDIT: I don’t think I’m actually killing the warpers; after two or three hits it looks like they warp away even though they’re still caught in the stasis field. The crab squids, on the other hand, go belly up when they die. So satisfying.
Never broke a knife. Didn’t realize it was possible.
I play “pacifist”, though. Never built any of the weapons aside from the knife, and only that for food in the early game. Well, there is the occasional cave crawler that gets in the way of my drill.
If you’re getting that performance from a 1050, I expect VR on a 3050 to be fine. You might have to dial some of the settings back a tad, but it should still look pretty good. The ideal is to render at the same resolution of the screens (or even higher), which on the Valve Index would be 2880x1600 (2x1440x1600), but you can run at the equivalent of 2560x1440 via scaling and it’ll still be decent.
I’ve never had a knife break, and I used mine more than Rambo. From googling, Subnautica spent a lot of time in early access, and the comments I found about knives breaking were all (both) from the early access period, so the knife degradation/breaking mechanism was most likely removed at some point.
I spent a while (couple weeks) setting up my cyclops, then emptied out the lockers in my base to load it up with everything I might need to build another base. Also collected a bunch of shrooms, plus seeds from all my gardens. And finally an aquarium of my domesticated Reginalds.
I don’t know where I’m going to build the second base yet. I’m also a little short on a few resources, so right now I’m tooling around the map in the Cyclops eating marble melons and drilling large mineral deposits until I’m fully stocked up. Once that’s done I’ll go explore the Lost River more properly.
I’ve been there a few times in the seamoth, but it gets pretty deep. I feel like my second base is going to be deeper than 900m so it’s kind of pointless to even try scouting with the seamoth.
Setting up the Cyclops was a huge hurdle to overcome. I’m very picky, and it was hard to find a design I was happy with. It’s not quite perfect yet but at least the locker placement is solid. I also have five of the six upgrades installed.
I’m rethinking the bed; I’m having trouble coming up with a scenario where I would actually sleep on the cyclops. And even if I did need to sleep, I could build a temporary bed and then deconstruct it after sleeping. I do occasionally sleep at the base, but it’s pretty rare.
I have too many lockers to be picky about placement. Where the in-built lockers are, I have a second layer of small lockers above them, densely packed. And on the other side, I have two full layers of lockers, except for one area with a fabricator. I’m starting to fill up the little egress room with lockers, too! I have 2-3 lockers for each of the common resource types, and at least a full locker for each of the others.
Does sleeping actually do anything? I forget. I do often set up a bed in an observatory room in a pretty area, but that’s just for fun. Or, sometimes a toilet.
Fair point. Still, the only time I’ve been desperate for daylight is when I’ve depleted the batteries in a solar-powered base and oxygen production has been disabled. In that case, sleeping would be… bad. More than once I’ve had to just float on the surface until the sun came up.
It passes time if you’re trying to grow plants or hatch eggs, and also as mentioned if you want the sun to come up. None of those seem like things I might be doing on a cyclops.
Pretty sure sleep grants total immunity to all hazards. In fact, sleeping is the only safe thing to do in the situation you describe.
I’m not 100% sure, but I think you can just build a room, a hatch, toss a bed on the ground and sleep in an unpowered base and be just fine. Not sure if you need power or the water to clear.