Maybe you need to work on your business model? 
I imagine the Mongolian companies would be happy to extend landing rights to the godfather of an entire race of giant alien telepaths, who also has blueprints for revolutionary new power technology (among other things).
Is it normal to die a LOT or do I just suck?
It depends on how you play, really. I tend to be cautious* and methodical, and I over-prepare for everything in survival games. For example, with every vehicle in Subnautica, I stocked an extra food ration, a couple of water bottles, and a medkit in whatever onboard storage they had. I never went anywhere without supplies and medkits, and I never pushed my oxygen limits. Consequently, I didn’t die much.
If you decide to push faster, you inevitably take greater risks.
*Cautious in terms of preparation. Once I feel prepared, I try the crazy stuff, like reaper rodeo.
Shit - I’m just starting out and I die of thirst in less than an hour.
Are you catching and processing bladderfish and stashing the water in your lifepod storage? Bladderfish are the staple water source early on. They’re the flat, pinkish, translucent ones. Eat peepers and boomerangs, and make bladderfish into water.
You can also whack the big coral tubes with a knife to get samples, and combine those with salt to make disinfected water, IIRC, but salt is harder to find than bladderfish when you’re just starting. Later on, you can find blueprints for a water filtration machine to build in your base. It takes lots of power, but it will keep you stocked on water.
I remember this being another Wiki issue: while you could dig around to figure out what recipes were important for making water (and a few other things), it wasn’t very intuitive, and eventually I went to a Wiki to figure out what to do.
A “cookbook” function would be helpful: if you want this end-product, here are the raw products you’ll need, and here’s how you’ll need to combine them.
You can also turn off hunger/thirst, which (having tried it both ways) I think gets rid of what’s basically the only tedious part of the game.
How do you mean, exactly? If you go to the fabricator, there’s a fork-and-spoon icon labeled “Sustenance”. Clicking it shows you a water-drop icon, and clicking that shows you every way you’ve unlocked to make drinking water. You can get the same info in the PDA by going to the Blueprints tab and scrolling down to the water section. (I’ll grant that the wrench icon for the Blueprints tab doesn’t make it the most intuitive place to look for food and water, but it makes sense in context.)
Are you talking about items that require multi-stage crafting? Like making a survival knife requires silicone and titanium, but you have to click or scroll to the basic materials section to find that silicone requires creepvine seed clusters? I can agree with that–a “shopping list” of raw materials in the more complex blueprints might not be a bad idea. For example, mousing over the rebreather shows the components (fiber mesh and a wiring kit); it could also extend a small bubble off to the side that, when moused over, would bring up a list: “Raw Materials: Creepvine Sample x 2, Silver Ore x 2”. Maybe you could click on the item in the Blueprints tab to bring up the same list. The possibility that you may not have the blueprints for some of the components in advanced items could complicate it–there would have to be a flag that makes it show “Unknown materials” for those. (I don’t recall any items in Subnautica that would require that, but there could be in Below Zero, and I might be forgetting something in the base game.)
I could write it up as a suggestion in the Below Zero feedback, if nothing else. This would be an opportunity for quality of life enhancements.
I think what you’re describing would solve the problem I had. I’m trying to remember.
It took me awhile to figure out how to make water with bleach, I think. Or maybe it was the computer chip. Looking at the Wiki, it seems pretty obvious what to do. Maybe my confusion was in an early access/beta version of the game? Or maybe I’m a goober. The problem definitely involved figuring out which kind of coral I needed to harvest.
In any case, I remember getting irritated at not having the right coral, checking out a Wiki, and immediately knowing what I needed to do. In a crafting game, it should be at least as easy to understand the recipes in-game as it is to understand them with a Wiki.
It was definitely less clear early on, and “coral tube sample” versus “table coral” remained a bit confusing. I think there was also a time when bleach was the only route to making drinking water, compounding the problem. Once you could rely on bladderfish until you got a base and farm going, it became much easier. (Once my base was set up, fruit from my farms handled most hydration, though I also kept a locker full of water bottles for expeditions and convenience.)
I think I will write up the “shopping list” tooltip suggestion and send it to the devs. Maybe it will even get patched into the original game, if they decide to implement it.
I admit to not playing the game in a little while once I had to get into the underground tunnel. It was immensely difficult to do so and once in it I couldn’t figure out where to go or what to do, and couldn’t find any cool resources that made me want to stick around.
You mean the Lost River? The deep zone with the green-glowy brine “rivers” and falls? At that point, you should have had breadcrumbs from the alien data pointing toward more installations to look for in the deeps, where you might find a way to shut down the weapon and escape the planet. So, basically, you were looking for alien bases down there. (Although you would also need to find materials in the deep zones to craft upgrades to reach some of them.)
Minor Below Zero update: my mission to utterly break the game continues to progress. Currently stuck in a hole at the bottom of the sea with a rock. (But it wasn’t a rock, it was a rock…lobster!) 
Have you gotten the crafting recipes for matching towels and baking potatoes?
We’re you trying to get an ear lobe sample?
Already sent that off, just before my motion in the ocean broke my air hose.
No, but the sea Robin has definitely arrived.
What actually happened: I walked back into the water after visiting an island to do a story-advancing thing…and kept walking. The game didn’t register that I was in the water, and going back on land and jumping in again didnt’ fix it, so I just walked along the bottom for a bit. I fell into a steep-sided pit in a dark/hazy area, and couldn’t climb back out (because the game expects you to be swimming there). A crustaceous critter called a “rock puncher”, which looks kind of like a cross between a lobster and a mantis shrimp, was trapped in the pit with me.
I’m trying out Subzero as well and overall I think it’s pretty good. Finding a lot of bugs, reporting them but sometimes I don’t know if it’s a bug or it’s supposed to be that way. Like the ‘beacon’ from supply drops, the one with the parachute. It keeps disappearing once I get withing like 100m of it. Also a lot of barren areas. Can’t tell if they’re supposed to be barren or if it’s just awaiting further updates. I did find a really awesome huge fish skeleton but sadly could do nothing with it.
I think the beacons are supposed to fade when you get close to the target (so they’re not in your face when you’re trying to do something), but they shouldn’t fade that far out. I’ve also seen a beacon that’s more like a waypoint–it points at a beach, but its label is for something that’s way up on the island.
I think we can expect most of the barren areas to be filled with stuff as updates happen. The terrain gets built long before it gets populated with stuff. One of the things I broke led to some…unsanctioned explorations, and there’s a lot of unfinished territory in the game.
Thank you! I installed this mod over the weekend, and it was exactly what I wanted. It made the blips smaller when they’re far away, and puts a range value on them when you get close. Makes it much easier to decide which targets to track down first. It also gives you a handy toggle function, so you can stop foraging for your target material without having to go back & turn off the scanner room. I didn’t notice any performance hit either, and I tested with some common targets (limestone, salt, quartz) to get plenty of blips. Highly recommended.