Subnautica

The Game Room
503

I haven’t looked at this thread in ages, but I can (belatedly) answer the question about broken knives. At one point in the early access, the knife had a durability rating and could wear out. I wore out one knife and about halfway through another the first time I killed a reaper using the stasis-and-stab approach.

The more fun and efficient way to take out the big stuff is Reaper Rodeo. As I explained somewhere far upthread, this consists of snagging the back of a leviathan’s head with the grappling arm, reeling yourself in, and punching or drilling its skull until it stops moving. You should expect to use your jets judiciously to stay close enough and get around obstacles it drags you into. With bigger leviathans and/or tight quarters, you’ll probably need to let go, take cover, and repair the PRAWN a time or two. (I’m pleased to report that this also works with most of the loud, grabby buggers in Below Zero, which I recently finished.)

Speaking of BZ: After an initially disappointed reaction to the seatruck, I warmed up to it. It was fun building all the modules and making my own little aquatic train, even if I didn’t really need most of them. I liked loading the sleeper car with my own image and music, and the aquarium module’s autocatch feature was nice for quick topoffs to food and water. I liked it enough that I usually took all the modules with me, chugging around the ocean at my own pace.

504

Found a good new starting spot, came up with a pretty solid first 20 minutes (one full game day.) Got pretty good at it, recorded it, then played it back side by side with my original run just for comparison. My original run was 10 seconds faster to the first fabrications (scanner, knife, etc…), but then leaps and bounds faster after that. On the order of 4 or 5 minutes faster in the first 20 minutes alone. That was massively deflating.

So I installed and have started playing Below Zero to take my mind off that crushing disappointment. It’s pretty damn fun. My only real complaint is that batteries are so much more difficult to craft. I found enough for two batteries fairly quickly and put together a scanner, knife and flashlight. Then it took me a full game day (over 20 minutes) to find more of that glowing battery plant to make more batteries. That’s quite a bit more difficult than finding acid mushrooms in the original game, that’s for sure.

It was made worse when one of those seamonkeys stole my scanner. Jerk! I had to craft another battery. Anyway, I’m fully fed and watered with a cured peeper and four bottles of filtered water, got my seaglide now, and saved the game there with two waypoints to check out.

Currently I have tons of raw materials but apparently I don’t have the blueprint for a habitat builder yet. Not sure where to find that; you start with that in the first game. I’m hoping it unlocks once I harvest some table coral, which I have seen but haven’t yet harvested. Also don’t yet know how to make water other than with bladder fish.

So far I’m excited to play this new story straight up, but I’m not loving how hard it is to find the equivalent of acid mushrooms for batteries and giant coral tubes for water. But other than that, it’s a whole new world that I’m technically unspoiled for other than having played the first game.

505

Hate those damn monkeys!

506

You might find them useful after a while.

507

Cobbled together a starting base just randomly near my life pod. Now I have a battery charger and four extra batteries to keep in it for easy swapping. Much better. Seems kind of weird that I don’t have the blueprints for a window yet, and my kingdom for a moonpool, but otherwise the structure is finished.

Just a few more titanium to finish off the mobile vehicle bay, and I may need more fragments for the sea truck. Not sure yet.

I am just murdering the bladder fish and peeper populations in my immediate vicinity. They don’t seem to be thinning out any, which is good. I think I might just leave a grav trap near my base as my food bank. But of course that’s another battery.

So fun. One checkpoint to investigate, though I really wish I had a rebreather, or even a high capacity tank. Hopefully I find the blueprints there.

Oh, and while I was at the first waypoint, when the lady in the prawn suit drops down in front of you, that’s the merc from the first game, right? From the Degasi? Don’t answer that. Checking her position out is my waypoint.

508

I’m around 9 hours in, straight up the whole way. I did look up where window blueprints are on wiki, but it just said twisty bridges. That wasn’t helpful. And that has been and hopefully will remain my only moment of weakness.

I finally realized that moonpools don’t exist in this game because there are no vehicles to park in it. So I put up a control room where my moonpool would go. Returning from the lady in the prawn suit waypoint (she ran away) I did find that tiny abandoned base, getting blueprints for windows and also the high capacity oxygen tank. The latter and the sea truck allowed me to find the rebreather databox (finally!). Armed with the rebreather I am exploring the twisty bridges as intended: Just a seaglide, breathing from those little 30-second oxygen bulbs. It’s really well laid out for that.

The twisty bridges are so vast and so deep that I’m starting to worry it might be the majority of this game. It’s vastly more detailed and populated than anywhere in the first game. Also extremely vertical, making vehicles impractical without depth modules. Those require diamonds, which I still haven’t seen a single one yet. So I guess maybe there is a different biome somewhere.

As for story, I found the first alien distress signal and now the alien is living in my head. He gave me a waypoint to gather items from but I haven’t been able to figure out how to get there yet. The twisty bridges are like a maze.

EDIT: My base is essentially done except that I don’t have power cell recharger blueprints, and of course no moonpool. Going to be leaning on the seaglide until I can recharge the sea truck’s power cell, which is currently in the 70%s. Plenty of area to explore with just a seaglide. Sure hope those blueprints are down there somewhere.

EDIT: I also have nothing for food. Still manually hunting peepers and bladder fish for all my food and water. No external grow bed yet, but it looks like I can put an alien containment on the sea truck? I’ll try that next.

509

??? Moonpools still exist. The prawnsuit still works, and the Seatruck can be parked in the moonpool as well, though you have to disconnect any modules first (or maybe it does it automatically; I forget). It is a bit less useful due to the module thing; I’d have liked an extra-long moonpool where I could park the whole thing.

510

Oh yeah, prawn suit, duh, nice.

Okay, adding moonpool back to my “still need to find” list.

I kind of like the sea truck so far. I haven’t added any compartments to it yet, so it’s pretty peppy and has good visibility. The problem is it can only go 150m deep so it’s essentially worthless to me until I find diamonds for depth modules.

I feel like diamonds are going to be the next thing I look up on wiki…

EDIT: The sea monkeys saw me harvesting gold outcroppings, then one of them came over to me and dropped a gold piece at my feet and swam away. I tried to hotbar a fish but mine are cured. I’m going to bring a couple live ones with me next time, see if I can feed them like the creepvine dogs from the first game.

511

I like forward to your discovery of the Snowfox.

512

Oh man, the Snowfox. I want to like it, but it’s just inferior in every way to simply running around in the Prawn Suit.

513

I forgot to mention a funny little throwaway moment that I thought was a nice touch:

I’m swimming around in the twisty bridges, feeling myself with my high-capacity tank and rebreather and lots of air bubbles.

So I’m strolling along, practically humming a tune, then something grabbed my arm. I figured it would let go if I kept going, but after a second or two it didn’t so I pulled out my knif… GULP!!! All of a sudden this weird plant animal thing had eaten me, and I was in its stomach. So I started slashing around with the knife I had just equipped and it spit me out.

That was a real nice touch. You should have seen how much of a scaredy cat I was as I proceeded to scan that same thing that just tried to eat me. It was unresponsive, so cutting my way out may have killed it. But I was still the biggest chicken you ever saw, creeping just barely close enough to scan it and then running away full speed as soon as it finished.

514

Yeah. It’s a cool concept. But super clumsy in reality.

515

I apologise if this has already been discussed, it’s a long thread, but I laughed out loud when I saw the name of the pengwings in Sub Zero. This is a reference to Benedict Cumberbatch’s inability to say “penguin” in a documentary he narrated.

516

That video cracked me up. If it was posted before in the thread I don’t remember it.

So I found Magda’s base with the moonpool to scan. Unfortunately didn’t have enough oxygen to scan it, but instead had to book it to the nearest air bubble. I saved the game with 30 seconds of oxygen next to a just-used oxygen bubble. It’s going to take some Indiana Jones type shit to get me out of there.

I’m not entirely sure I remember how to get back to the moonpool. I swear I placed a beacon there, but after reloading for the 4th or 5th time trying to get out of there, I realized that no I did not. Beacon is still in my inventory. Doh!

517

You know that moonpools have air in them, right?

518

Well I do now…

lol, it never occurred to me that it was powered despite the fact that I could hear her talking to me from inside it.

So can I actually use that base? Don’t answer that. Can’t wait to find out.

519

Found my way back to Marguerite’s base. Super weird to see an NPC in this game, even if it was only a cutscene.

Armed with the large room blueprints I scanned from her base I headed back home to save. Then I started up a new game in creative mode to come up with a base layout I like. I went ultra simple, with only a single base corridor. Basically everything connects directly to the large room, with a single glass tube connecting the observatory so I could add a hatch. Two moonpools because the stupid sea truck exits to the right. What the hell?! I’m going to be pissed if the prawn suit exits to the right in this game.

After a few hours in creative mode I went back to the real game and moved my base to a new location near the shark cage. Going straight down about 400m from there is a nice little diamond and lithium cache, which let me finish building the rest of the base.

After cobbling together enough lithium to get the ultra high capacity tank I ended up spending several hours just tooling around the twisty bridges with the seaglide. Even better when I crafted an ion battery.

At this point in my game (16 hours in) I had manually fished dozens and dozens of peepers and bladderfish; many more than is fun. So this is where I finally broke down and cheated proper: I looked up where to find the blueprints for the exterior grow bed, alien containment and water filtration units. As luck would have it, all three were in the same spot. I just now finished adding two water filtration machines, a nuclear power reactor, and two exterior grow beds to my base. Other than miscellaneous odds and ends – shower, toilet, refrigerator, etc… – I am finished with using the habitat builder. (I do not expect to build a second base.) Home sweet home!

Even though I have an alien containment growing peepers and two water machines producing salt and water, food and water are still an issue in this game. Not being able to craft water with salt is a problem, IMO. So much so that I think I want to build an aquarium module for the sea truck and stock it with bladderfish to get a renewable water source on the go. (I’m assuming they reproduce like in an alien containment. If not, there’s no point.)

My sea truck has had two modules for a while now: fabricator and storage. I want to add an aquarium and prawn suit dock for a total of four. I may or may not add a sleep compartment. (Don’t know yet if there are other kinds of modules.) With two modules attached I still like the sea truck. Still feels peppy. Not nearly as slick as a seamoth, but infinitely more agile than a cyclops. Big fan.

So far I’ve found three or four alien artifacts, but only one of them was at a waypoint the alien guy was directing me to. I just randomly stumbled across the others. So far I’ve mounted two or three good faith efforts to go to those alien waypoints, but I just can’t seem to find them. Hoping I’ll figure it out eventually, but two or three more failed expeditions and I might have to cheat and look up how to find them.

I’m finding this game really fun but I kind of miss the signature leviathans from the first game. Also not happy about how they ruined multipurpose rooms. It destroyed my base design from the first game. I like this new base design with the large room, but it’s not nearly as cozy and homey as my multipurpose room base design. No gardens to look at outside my window.

EDIT: Oh yeah, almost forgot, shrub nuts are an amazing food but harvesting them is just so very wrong.

520

Well that sucks. Who the hell thought a superman salad was a good idea? More food than a nutrient bar, more water than a bladderfish, double the heat of a thermos, and it only takes one inventory space. Oh yeah, and it doesn’t go bad. WTF?!

Here is me happily setting up an alien containment (no go on the sea truck version, btw; just a worthless aquarium) for peepers, rearranging plant pots to make all the different plants easily accessible but still out of the way, stocking up on large filtered waters, etc…

Turns out that’s all pointless. Just take the one superfood that solves all problems. Kind of took the wind out of my sails a bit, there, that poor game decision did. I admit that the peeper’s +32 food was feeling pretty low compared to the reginald’s +44 from the first game, but come on, +80?!

I guess all I need to carry are salads and health packs. Maybe a few large filtered waters, but maybe not even. Would that single inventory space be better spent on +50 water, or +30 water and +80 food and +100 heat? Yikes.

That’s just awful, awful game design. What were they thinking?

521

I don’t remember discovering a super salad. In any case, the point of finding those things the deeper you get into the game is to eliminate the nickel-and-diming you have to do in the early parts of the game. You’ve earned the right to forget those and move onto the story and exploration unhindered.

522

Bumping the thread to mention that they have released update 2.0 for Subnautica, which I discovered when I fired up the game to play it the other day. So I started a new game just to see what was different. I’ve only played for a couple of hours and haven’t noticed any significant gameplay changes, just lots of little tweaks here and there.

I think the most noticeable one so far is that “charged” items in your inventory, i.e. anything using a battery or power cell, but also fire extinguishers, now have a little “charge meter” along one side so you can see at a glance how much charge they have.

When using the habitat builder tool, the item you are building stays selected after you have finished building one, so that you can immediately build another. Which is nice if you are, for example, building a whole row of lockers all at once.

There are improvements to some graphical elements, such as the sand sharks which now leave a cloud of dust in their wakes.

I’ll be curious to see what other enhancements they’ve made as I continue playing.