Subnautica - Deep Sea Exploration & Survival-All

Tamren wrote:
EvilDead wrote:

I think I'm burning out. Ferrying resources to build complex stuff is feeling like a job and there is no guidance on what to do next. Maybe it's just not for me.

The mistake I made in my first run was exploring the map in a systematic fashion. I would explore 500m out in clockwise order them move out another 1000m. I felt the same way you did in that I didn't encounter new things frequently enough to be interested. In particular I left out exploring the Aurora wreck until halfway through the game which was a mistake.

TLDR explore the Aurora as soon as you can, if you don't know what to do next always explore further and deeper away from your liferaft. Building scanner outposts to map the terrain can help you find interesting things.

I haven't explored the Aurora so maybe I should have done that sooner. I'm not sure how much drive I have to go back to the game though. I find the exploring pretty fun but the crafting really cumbersome with the small personal inventory.

EvilDead wrote:

I haven't explored the Aurora so maybe I should have done that sooner. I'm not sure how much drive I have to go back to the game though. I find the exploring pretty fun but the crafting really cumbersome with the small personal inventory.

The secret to deal with that is a Cyclops with a ton of storage lockers.

Yeah @EvilDead it sounds like you need access to some more vehicles to open up the map a bit. Do you only have the Seamoth at the moment? Explore the Aurora (take a repair kit, laser cutters, spare battery, you'll find food and water there) and get yourself the PRAWN suit blueprints. They are all there (other locations on the map too but Aurora is the most reliable). Then go on the hunt for Cyclops fragments. Inventory tetris never seemed like a really big issue for me... occasionally irritating right near the end of the game.

It's funny, I had the Cyclops long before I got the Prawn. Guess that's what I get for ignoring prompts and missing obvious on-ramps to the ship. Haha!

Coldstream wrote:

It's funny, I had the Cyclops long before I got the Prawn. Guess that's what I get for ignoring prompts and missing obvious on-ramps to the ship. Haha!

I also had the Cyclops before the prawn! Only a bit before though, I got them roughly around the same time. I put off going to the Aurora for way too long because I was scared of Reaper Leviathans. You can get on board without being spotted easily enough though.

Thinking back, I only died twice in my entire playthrough, and both were avoidable deaths from running out of oxygen. So, never got killed by a big beastie, basically because I was a big wimp and played super-cautiously.

Are there any games like this but set in space?

strangederby wrote:

Are there any games like this but set in space?

Well, Subnautica is set in space... sorta

Planet Nomads is set on an alien planet but based on land. It's still in early access but looks to have a lot of similarities. Alien crash landing, base building, a story (which is not fully implemented yet). I came across it because I was watching a youtuber play Subnautica, and he also had some PN videos...

But actual, flying in a spaceship space? Then nah, I don't know of anything similar. Would be challenging. Subnautica is able to use terrain and big beasties to create so much atmosphere. I don't know how you do that in space. I think Veloxi is the man you need to ask. If only this forum had an @*username* function.

Edit: And after I clicked 'post' I actually watched the beginning of the video I linked, and the guy is talking about another game called Empyrion. Hmm, actually that might be more like what you're looking for.

Empyrion - Galactic Survival is the game and it has consumed quite a bit of my time, even though it’s still in early access.

Alpha 8 is just around the corner and contains a major list of new features:

https://empyriononline.com/forums/ne...

So I finally got around to finishing... I'd started a new playthrough just after the final build, but got distracted and didn't get back to it until now.

I enjoyed the heck out of it. This is a great damn game. I've seen it described multiple times as being a horror title, but I don't think of it that way at all. Horror is about never being in control, of being in a perpetual state of fear, and Subnautica is about asserting control over the environment. Yes, things can be dangerous, but you're always choosing to put yourself at risk, and can go detox anytime you want in the Safe Shallows.

I'm particularly impressed that it changes so much as you progress. Early on, you're in the water with maybe a pair of shorts, and you transition through multiple tool levels. First you built little handheld tools, then three or four different vehicles, over time, each shifting the nature of the game in subtle but important ways. Tools mostly don't go obsolete, you typically keep using them, although you do kinda stop needing a few. (air pumps and swim bladders become kind of irrelevant after you've got a portable air supply and don't need to go back to the surface all the time.)

Each new level has associated challenges, and you're typically using an early version of a new tech to find resources and other tech to work around its limitations. Early on, you're scrambling for food and water, and are almost entirely defenseless other than running away from things, but by the end, you can take a bubble of (relative) safety with you into quite hostile environments, and can see almost anything the game has to offer without much fear. You always have to stay cautious around some creatures, you're never invulnerable, but the scale difference of the things that worry you, between starting and ending, is quite remarkable.

This playthrough took about 28 hours total, but that was knowing roughly what I needed, and where to explore to find it. I think 40 hours is a more reasonable expectation. If the game has a weakness, it's probably about 10 hours in the middle, where you (as a new player) wouldn't know where to go. Most techs are found in wrecks, and you typically need to explore wrecks that are right at your oxygen limits to find the ones to get to the next level down. But that means you have to find them, and they're not exactly obvious.

Which leads to the other major weakness of the game: the refusal to implement maps. I get the 'no guns' thing, that's a good game design principle, and it's quite defensible from an in-world standpoint, too. In a world with universal fabricators, would you really want anyone being able to build guns? The backstory is quite clear that corporations have enormous power and are Not Your Friends, so of course they lock you away from most weapon technologies. That adds to the richness of both the gameplay and the world itself. But no maps? That's just stupid.

You even have techs that generate 3D topo projections on various displays, so it's just, flat, ridiculous that there's no tech to correlate these projections into a map. I can totally see starting out without mapping capability, but being able to get a really solid overview of your environment should be a late-game reward. And it would be a reason to build the topographic techs, which I found useless and never bothered spending the resources on them. Having their projections gradually add onto your map, once you built the personal tech to collate the data, would have been excellent. As is: it's a half-baked, dumb idea that needed to be rethrought, but they seem to have been emotionally attached to the "no maps!" idea. It's the biggest mistake in Subnautica.

So: awesome opening, weak midgame because of poor design decisions around mapping, strong endgame once you start to really figure things out. Outstanding core gameplay loop of explore/gather/extend capabilities/explore deeper. If you like exploration games and seeing really, really neat stuff, Subnautica is likely to be your jam. Some parts of it practically feel like a Disney ride.

The in-progress builds were quite difficult, but things have been made a fair bit easier in the release version, especially into endgame, which was quite hard in the alphas. I vastly overprepared for my first truly deep expedition, bringing far, far more resources than I actually needed; power cells didn't last long in the early versions, and certain baddies (being vague because spoilers) were extremely common, so it was easy to get stuck down there. But things have been detuned quite a bit in the release, so I never even touched my stockpiles, and I could probably have saved two or three hours of scavenging/prep time.

I'd expect it to last 40-45 hours for most people, less if you consult the wiki frequently. I think 25 hours is a reasonable lower bound on time to first completion. Speedrunners can probably go quite a lot faster, but assuming you're more normal, 25 hours is probably the shortest possible time to finish. I can easily see many people playing it twice, too, because it really is a lot of fun, and going back through the beginning, with full knowledge of how things work, is a neat experience, one I've done repeatedly.

As of right now, with all the various playthroughs in the alphas, I've gotten 165 hours from Subnautica. If you're starting with the release version, though, I'd be very surprised if it lasted you that long. 100 hours is a more likely upper limit.

strangederby wrote:

Are there any games like this but set in space?

No Man's Sky. And it's come light years past the SNAFU it started as a couple years ago.

This game has got its hooks in me deep. About 13 hours in and obsessing over it. It's, so far, extremely well paced. Every time I think I hit a lull, I either remember there's a new thing I can build or a place to explore.

Built my first base in between a sand shark feeding ground and a creepvine forest in a very nice little alcove. Constantly growing marblemelon so food and hydration is no longer an issue.

Just poked around the Aurora last night and encountered my first reaper leviathan on the way there. It took my Sea Moth down to 3 health. Now at the point where I'll really need to explore between 200-300 meters. I'm scared and intrigued.

Vector wrote:

Just poked around the Aurora last night and encountered my first reaper leviathan on the way there. It took my Sea Moth down to 3 health.

I was such a scaredy cat that I was never attacked by a reaper until very near the end. I practised avoidance which meant I probably didn't get some cool stuff until later than most. Those early hours, like 10-30 were quite fearsome for me.

So I just got this game yesterday, and it pretty much ate up my entire afternoon and evening. It's also all I can think about today at work. I just want to ditch work and go exploring more with my Seamoth.

EriktheRed wrote:

So I just got this game yesterday, and it pretty much ate up my entire afternoon and evening. It's also all I can think about today at work. I just want to ditch work and go exploring more with my Seamoth.

This is me and I'm much further along; almost 30 hours.

I have the Cyclops and Prawn Suit and have basically completed all of the story I could at this point and just started going deeper and deeper. I am finding the Prawn Suit unwieldy and difficult for exploration but excellent for resource gathering.

I looked up where I'm supposed to go to next and while I may have eventually found it. There is an entry in a datapad but it is not specific about how to get there.

Right now my biggest complaint is with the Prawn. It's pretty easy to get it stuck in places and not be able to get out but it looks like it so I have to be careful. The problem is that I can't upgrade it at the Moonpool. The only option is to get in so I have to park it close to my base, jump in the water, and upgrade it manually. I also wish would could access the Prawn and Seamoth's storage in the Cyclops. Harvested a tonne of uranium-like material and then had to manually transfer it to the Cyclops.

It was supposedly a bug that you couldn't access Prawn and Seamoth storage from the Cyclops. Not very high on their 'to fix' list apparently. Little things like that are an occasional bug bear in Subnautica, and there were a few of them. The fact I still rank it among my favourite games of the last 5 years speaks to how good the rest of it is.

It's been a while since I played it but I thought there was a console just above/next to the prawn suit hatch in the cyclops that allowed you to access the prawn's storage.

Sonicator wrote:

It's been a while since I played it but I thought there was a console just above/next to the prawn suit hatch in the cyclops that allowed you to access the prawn's storage.

You're 100% right and I just learned what that console did last night. I feel like a moron. Still not sure if the moonpool works correctly with the Prawn.

Started exploring the Lost River last night. I've really enjoyed slowly navigating while switching between sonar, silent running, and finding a vent to recharge my batteries. Finally unlocked Alien Containment and am excited to return to my base to hatch some of these eggs I've been collecting.

Haha, I also used the console but I'm too much of a dummy to remember/mention it to you. There's something that doesn't work though, perhaps it's prawn suit in the moonpool as you say.

The Lost River is very cool, plenty of good stuff to find down there.

Spoiler:

Which entrance to it did you find?

(Spoiler is safe for you vector)

I vaguely remember having to get the prawn out of the moonpool to get into its storage - and the drop between my moonpool and the seabed being almost exactly the jump height of the prawn, making it a bugger to get back in.

Yeah there was a glitch for the prawn that messed up storage occasionally. I don't think it was solved in release.

Mods make this game my game of the year. Hit up Nexusmods and there's a simple to implement solution for all the problems anyone could have (mine was ingot management)

Man, I wish they would hurry up and release this already for the Xbox. The current version has too many issues.

kergguz wrote:

Haha, I also used the console but I'm too much of a dummy to remember/mention it to you. There's something that doesn't work though, perhaps it's prawn suit in the moonpool as you say.

The Lost River is very cool, plenty of good stuff to find down there.

Spoiler:

Which entrance to it did you find?

(Spoiler is safe for you vector)

Spoiler:

The southern blood kelp. I had made a scanner outpost on an overlook and didn't realize it was actually right beside a Lost River entrance except my AI told me so. Took me a while to find the actual entrance, however.

Spoiler:

I just built my second base down in the Lost River (I think thats where I am). I ran into my first (Juvenile) Ghost Leviathan while I was building it, which was exciting. I really love the idea of creating staging areas for deeper and deeper exploration of the ocean. I feel like I am slowly learning to bend the ocean to my will. I do wish I could figure out how to harvest the large ore deposits I see all over the place. I thought my laser cutter would do the trick, but that didn't work. Not being able to take advantage of them made building secondary base more difficult since I had to haul down all this titanium from the shallows to get set up.

After I got the base up and running I started exploring down in this lava area and ran into some enormous fire-breathing leviathan that scared the crap out of me. I have decided to return to that section later when I am better equipped. I might need to build some torpedoes for my prawn suit.

Anyway, I'm still really enjoying the game.

One of the vehicles you have has an optional attachment that will let you get at those deposits. I believe you still have to scan it but those parts should be in wrecks around where you are.

The Prawn strikes me as a cool idea they shoe-horned a game feature onto just to make it useful. Navigating the underwater world on foot and having a sort of Aqua-Knight to fight with is compelling, but as executed the Prawn is relatively useless. It moves too slow. It gets better with upgrades, but those take a long time to be able to craft, essentially forcing you to endure some bad Prawn gameplay in order to get to some better Prawn gameplay.

The only real way to use it is to carry it around in your Cyclops, drop it as close to resource nodes as possible, drill drill drill, and hop back into the Cyclops.

Now, the Cyclops is brilliant. It's about as expensive as it should be, gives you tons of great functions, yet still doesnt replace stationary bases entirely. I love that you can build inside it but space is precious, so choose your upgrades well. Driving it around feels right. You're big and bulky but you're pretty fast too, and you gain access to the deepest parts of the game with it, which are all designed with it in mind, with large enough spaces to navigate a school bus.

Now I'll admit I played the whole game on coward mode. Underwater terror consumes bits of my soul, so I chose to play with the Invisible cheat. The terrible things underwater no longer see you, so there's only the general dread of the crushing depths and not being able to see the bottom of the ocean sometimes to reckon with (its plenty!)

While I agree that the Prawn is pretty slow, it is all I've been using lately. Being able to fend off creatures via punching them is super useful at the depth I'm working at. I like being able to harvest resources without having to leave the vehicle. And it has a much higher depth rating than the Seamoth, at least early on (I've not researched beyond the mk1 depth module for the Seamoth). Also, once you've ungraded the jump jets, I don't feel like the Prawn is too slow. I only stay on the sea floor long enough for my jets to recharge.

I'm always surprised when I see people critical of the prawn. Once I got used to the grappling arm I was basically spiderman. That + the drilling arm was the way to go, but I did occasionally switch out the drill for a 2nd grappling arm and ultra mobility.

polypusher wrote:

The Prawn strikes me as a cool idea they shoe-horned a game feature onto just to make it useful. Navigating the underwater world on foot and having a sort of Aqua-Knight to fight with is compelling, but as executed the Prawn is relatively useless. It moves too slow. It gets better with upgrades, but those take a long time to be able to craft, essentially forcing you to endure some bad Prawn gameplay in order to get to some better Prawn gameplay.

Hehe