Subnautica

The Game Room
543

Once you have a decent line of nets, it sort of calms down. One tip I’ll offer for food involves something you can build before doing any of the story islands, but I’ll spoiler it in case you want to keep totally blind:

Craft a cooking pot (table) and then start making vegetable stew, which only requires any combination of four potatoes or beets. 2/2, 3/1, 4/0, 0/4, whatever. Once you’re hungry enough, eat two in a row and you’ll be full for quite a long time.

Oh, that reminds me, this I won’t spoiler because it’s not really a mechanic that is ever explained: The hungrier/thirstier you are, the more effect you get from food and drink. That means you shouldn’t top off, but rather wait till you get woozy (or almost woozy) and then fill that bar up near full in one go. There’s also a “bonus” mechanic later on, which you can check out if you follow my spoilered tip above. It’s more relevant for food than drink.

As for your general question, you can make it relaxing, yes. You’ll need some stuff from the story before you can carve out significant downtime, but it does get there. It’s funny, though, ever since posting the link to my full game above I started rewatching it from the beginning and got totally sucked in. I’m a little over halfway through now, and in these videos I never slow down for a second. It’s like 17 hours of non-stop manic action, sometimes doing two things at once. (While fishing, you can still do some things like empty the nets.)

Tips for Bruce the shark: If you destroy the thing he’s biting with your axe, you get some of the materials back, making it cheaper to rebuild. Costs wear and tear on the axe, of course. You can also remove a net he’s biting and just put it right back. They don’t take damage. Killing Bruce is also a decent source of food.

EDIT: Here’s some intro tips for drink, again available before you even start the story: Race to the advanced water purifier and craft yourself a bottle, not the cup. Both the advanced purifier and the bottle hold five cups of water, and the purifier works for free since it’s powered by the sun instead of a wood fire. (It still works if you cover it.) Having five drinks in a container is a huge improvement over the initial purifier and cup. Combine this with the food tip above to really take the edge off survival maintenance. One of those items requires vine goo, which you get by smelting seaweed.

544

Thanks for the tips!

I started another run on peaceful and it was definitely a help. Not just not having to deal with shark repairs, but having the time to explore the menus and such. Somehow I’d missed that you can make nails from scrap, so I was solely getting them from crates, and so my net production was rather limited. It definitely settles down once you can build a bunch of them.

Good to know about the food mechanic, too. I’d been trying to keep my food/water topped off.

The advanced purifier is also super nice. The lowered micromanagement is super nice.

I do with there was some kind of intermediate setting for Bruce. Like not totally peaceful, but not quite as omnipresent. Something to keep you on your toes, but a little easier to avoid.

545

Once you research metal, you can armor the exterior of your ship, including nets. Armor shows up at the end of the foundation row in the hammer menu. If the entire exterior is armored, Bruce never attacks again. Interior holes (like for an anchor) are fine, he can’t get to them.

Remembering back to my early days, I feel like it was around a 30% chance that Bruce would bite you the instant you hit the water. Definitely a stressful introduction to the game!

My favorite tactic for farming small islands, especially early on, is to park a little ways away from the island and swim to it, ignoring a couple bites. Once you get on land Bruce goes back to your raft and you can farm the island in peace. Just don’t park so far away that you can’t see your raft from the island! (Visibility is reduced if it starts raining.)

If you find yourself in the water with Bruce harassing you and for whatever reason you don’t want to just run away, if you have a spear, attacking right when Bruce opens his mouth hurts him and makes him miss you.

546

I’ve played a lot more of Raft and am through most of the story islands. Just a couple left, I think. I’ve kept it on peaceful mode.

And… I’m not that happy with it. It certainly has some positive qualities, but overall it has too many flaws for it to be anything beyond adequate.

The raftbuilding is fine and probably the high point. It’s neat to assemble a vehicle from nothing into something resembling a permanent but mobile residence.

The story islands are just this weird mix of stuff that’s not really gelling for me. Lots of “fetch quests” in the form of having to scour the place for N parts of some item that you have to deliver somewhere else. Exploration in these ridiculously undistinctive environments–whether a repetitive forest, or stacked mobile homes, or dark metal corridors in some station, or dozens of identical apartments… it’s all pretty miserable. Then there are the “parkour” segments, which I hate, especially since the game just has a boring and normal jumping system. And then, the combat–which even in peaceful mode you still have to do. All I can do is slowly poke enemies with this crappy spear.

I just beat that annoying shark in the flooded buildings. That was the most tedious boss fight I’ve had to play in a while. Especially as my fins and air tank broke halfway through. So I’m slooooowly swimming around, and although it does no damage to me, I can still drown, and overall it takes forever to finish.

I guess I’ll see this through to the end, but I’m tempted to just forget the story and build up my raft more. The actual snippets of story (via the notes) are reasonably compelling, but not the means of collecting them. I can see that I’m getting achievements that 15% of players have, so apparently a lot of people gave up already.

547

I tend to refer to the story islands in raft as videogamy, as opposed to subnautica’s story elements being immersive. There are multiple times on story islands in raft where you think to yourself “Why would this ever exist?!” Like, seriously, are you telling me that the rangers walk that path every time they go to and from the ranger station? Seriously?

You only have two story islands left, but at this point you have all the meaningful blueprints except one. That one blueprint remaining is in the very next island, and even that isn’t very critical. It’s nice, but not a mission critical must-have. (Advanced biofuel refiner.) The windmill is the last great item worth getting, and you should have just gotten it, so you are pretty much good to go.

Undistinctive is definitely not the word I would use. There are eight story islands in total, and I would say seven of them are pretty darn distinctive. All your other criticisms are fair, though.

As I said initially, I don’t really care about story, I’m much more focused on building, so that helps explain why I greatly enjoyed raft.

548

They’re distinctive from each other. I think that aspect is pretty good, actually. It’s just that within each island, it’s all very samey-looking. I never really acquired a mental map of any of the larger ones, because there are very few landmarks and the buildings/corridors/vegetation/whatever are all identical. Some areas had signs, which helped, but if I was looking for anything except what was on a sign, I pretty much had to explore everything until I found what I wanted.

549

Oh, gotcha. I see what you mean.

Of note is that the greatest offender of what you describe is the next story island after Varuna Point. So if you decided to bail on the story where you were, you saved yourself that headache.

Then the last story island finally does have distinctive areas, kinda sorta. But it’s pretty much the only one that does. (Unless you count Tangaroa, but I’m not sure that counts since each distinctive area is so large as to have its own quality of vast sameness. eg: Tunnels vs street level vs building interiors.)

550

I recently started a new run of Subnautica - apparently there was an update last December that added a lot of things from Below Zero as well as some other improvements. Anyway, I named my first Seamoth “Stockton’s Folly” - too soon?

551

Yeah, that update bummed me out in a major way. It took away many of my base concepts, kind of ruining my fun. On the plus side, it doesn’t remove elements that are no longer valid, so I can continue on from where my save game ended. But I would not be able to restart from scratch.

Here are my design concepts that are no longer valid because of that update:

  • In the multi-purpose room, any exit walls are now unplaceable, meaning they have to be left bare. In my base, that’s where I put lockers, the radio, the fabricator and wall planters. Gave it a real homey feel to me. Without any of that stuff it would just feel barren.
  • Benches are no longer two-way. I had a bench that was designed to be sat on in both directions, but now every time I sit on it I’m forces to look out the window. That is the better view, but I very much enjoyed using the bench facing inside as well.
  • You can no longer put exterior grow beds on top of hatches. This is a big downer because that window view from my bench I just mentioned was to a planter that was on a hatch. In fact, that window view was the centerpiece of my base. By far its best feature.
  • The bed is no longer usable when there is an alien containment on the level below. This change feels almost spiteful; I see no reason for it.

Here is the full video I made way back when, with the first 5 minutes being a tour of the base. (The video begins with me sitting on the bench facing the interior, which no longer works. The window view is a couple minutes into the video.)

552

Re-watching that now, at a couple of points it may not be clear what I’m looking at. I spent an inordinate amount of time and effort planning out the legs of the base. All foundations have full legs, none of which are overly long. And the moon pool only has two legs in the back, leaving the front open for ease of access.

And then after the tour, the video shows the entire 2 hours and 39 minutes it took me to build that base from scratch.

553

That is a very cool base. I had no idea you could put a hatch on the top or bottom of an I compartment. The bed over the alien containment is a really nice touch. Any reason why you put the water purifier in the bedroom? The gurgling and humming and sparking would keep me up all night.

FWIW, I tested a few things on my new game that I started with the update. I could still sit on a bench facing either direction - maybe they changed the spacing requirements and you need to put it a little further from the window? But you’re right, you can’t put anything to either side of the exits from a multipurpose room. I’ll try out the bed and the grow bed issues when I get further along.

554

Interesting. I bet a dollar it’s the same alien containment issue that makes the bed unusable making that side of my bench unusable.

It’s not so much the bedroom as it is the everything room. That is the only room I actually use. Food, water, fabricator, radio, place to sit with a pleasant view, bed, and as much storage as I could fit in there with additional storage fanning out from the room.

Regarding the noise of the water purifier, agreed. It can get annoying. Similar deal with the medpack fabricator that beeps when it’s full made me banish it to the moon pool. So I guess technically it’s the “everything except medkits” room.

555

Well, yesterday a guy in the shop had music on the speaker which remind me a LOT of Subnautica. Then I got to taking with someone about it, and realized that I have forgotten a lot of story/plot details.

Which means that I am ready to play again! I tried a couple years ago but it was still too fresh from my first time and a lot of the suspense was gone.

Anything sustantial changed since 3-4 years ago?

556

There was an update last year that brought some changes from Below Zero into Subnautica. Some new building parts (the large room, large room glass dome, multipurpose room glass dome), the ability to pin recipes (hugely useful), and other small things.

The downside is that most of the mods broke. If you want to use them, you either have to boot a legacy branch (which I didn’t try), or download the uploaded versions of the mods, assuming someone has updated the ones you like. I’m running with additional quickslots and improved scanner blips, both work OK in the new system.

557

Interesting, I hadn’t used mods before but I’m not against it, especially for a new playthrough. Does it work through a separate mod manager I assume?

558

Yes, the new mod manager is called BepInEx.

I’m not big on mods either, so many break the game IMHO. But increasing the number of quickslots is a no brainer - 5 is way too few and forces you to go back to the inventory too often.

And the scanner blip fix makes the scanner so much more useful. It resizes the blips you see based on range, and once you get close enough it gives you an exact range under the blip. So much better than dozens of blips of exactly the same size so you don’t know which ones are 20 meters away and which are 300. And it makes sense in-game - the scanner room itself can pinpoint the resource exactly, so when it’s transmitting the location info to you it’s easy for it to do the math of exact range.

559

So I don’t know if this was an unintended part of the upgrade, but I just had my seamoth eaten by Reaper. That’s perfectly normal of course, but there was no roar ahead of time - I’ve always heard the roar before a Reaper got me. I jumped out in time, and it was pretty cool to watch the Reaper swim away with my seamoth and the broken pieces fall out of it’s mouth a few seconds later. Though it’s ironic that “Stockton’s Folly” was destroyed by a sea monster, instead of my intended plan to drive it way deeper than it was rated for.

560

I got far enough along to try out another of the bugs you saw. I put an alien containment under my bedroom (which is brilliant BTW), and I have a bed, a chair, and a bench all on top of the a.c. window. All of them are usable normally. I can sleep in the bed, sit on the bench in either direction, and sit in the chair. Here’s the setup:

Imgur

So I wonder if your bug is caused by loading a pre-update save into a post-update game? This game was started on a clean install of the updated game. Maybe try deconstructing a few things and reconstructing them?

561

I did, including the plant pots and the bed itself, but what I did not deconstruct was the alien containment. I’ll try that.

562

Final update - I finished the game, and sat through the credits waiting to hear my bill from Alterra as usual. I noticed the following at the end:

CYCLOPS® is a registered trademark of OceanGate, Inc and is used under license.

That’s… kind of creepy now. Especially since I had named my various craft things like “Stockton’s Folly”, “Oceangate X” and “Imploder”.