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I can't figure out what to do in Subnautica.

Kairu

Kairu

zonetrope said:
I'm playing on PS4 and starting to have some issues saving. I love this game, but it's about as buggy as I've heard in places. What did you all do when running into this sort of issue?
Click to expand...

Are you on the latest version on PS4? I believe they released a patch just a few weeks ago that was supposed to have some performance improvements.

I played through earlier this year (i.e. before this latest patch) and noticed quite a few bug and performance issues. Some of the later game areas are particularly bad, tanking the frame rate down to sub-15 FPS on occasion.

The biggest issue I worried about was when navigating some areas or moving at high speed you need to be careful and let the terrain finish loading or there's a chance you may trap yourself out of bounds.

Save game wise, I noticed the further I got into the game the longer the saves would take, I don't think it ever took longer than a minute, but it's bad no matter how you look at it. I setup a chair in an observatory and made it a routine to sit in the chair and start the save process and just wait till the message saying the save finished before I'd move on.

I have seen some suggestions that saving gets worse the more objects you have in the world. That includes how big/many bases you build and how many items you leave lying around. I've seen the recommendation that you limit yourself to two bases of reasonable size and where possible avoid just dropping items on the seafloor if you don't need them. For anything organic you can generally put it into a bioreactor, for everything else you can put it in a trash can's inventory where it will be deleted a short time later.
 
Troa11

Troa11

Not exactly Subnautica, but what seems to be the last major early access update for Below Zero dropped recently. Added some environment polish and most importantly full voice acting and complete text entries. Only the finale remains unavailable, which the devs said won't come until final launch.

We're getting closer, I'm playing it again again, and if you want in on EA pricing, soon is the time to do it.
 
MCBanjoMike

MCBanjoMike

Sudden chomper
(He/him)
Have they hinted as to when the final release will be? I'm dying to play this game, but every time I look up the release date I wind up seeing some new screenshots that I don't want to. The blinder I can go into this, the better.
 
Falselogic

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
MCBanjoMike said:
Have they hinted as to when the final release will be? I'm dying to play this game, but every time I look up the release date I wind up seeing some new screenshots that I don't want to. The blinder I can go into this, the better.
Click to expand...

SAME!
 
Troa11

Troa11

Given the cadence of their "major" updates and how they said this would likely be the last one before full release - I would expect by end of year or very early next.
 
Falselogic

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
Went ahead and purchased it! Looking forward to it being complete and me being able to play Subnautica again!
 
Troa11

Troa11

Having spent a few hours on the final update here, it really is finally feeling complete. I know I'm going to kick myself when I get endgame and can't finish it yet but... Subnautica lust must be satisfied!

And thankfully it is different enough from the original that both are still worth playing. It's not just Subnautica - new map and now it's cold.
 
Troa11

Troa11

I say this about Below Zero because on the surface it looks like it might be Subnautica with new stickers. After all, a number of the same components and tools are there. But if you approach it that way and try to play it like Subnautica, I expect you'll end up frustrated as I did initially.

Approach it on its own terms, and yeah, you'll probably really dig it.
 
Troa11

Troa11

Just going to update/teaser here, no spoiler... Been continuing on with playing the more or less feature/story complete EA build of Below Zero. Last night I kicked out of work early, had some dinner and sat down to play a bit around 6 pm. I wanted to unwind some and get to bed early cause I had to be up super early to flip some switches with a new product release here.

I glanced at my watch a few minutes later and it was 9:30. Oh. I should wrap up.

So I stopped playing and looked again and it was 11. Game's still got it.
 
Troa11

Troa11

Dragging this up for final warning, saw a notice last night that Below Zero is going up to its full retail price of $29.99 USD on Jan 5th with plans for it to be 1.0 ready in 1st quarter. If you want to get it at the EA pricing, now's the time.

Similarly, and in a move that kind of confuses me, they're actually raising the price of Subnautica to $29.99 at the same time they said? Justification was that they've still been supporting the game with updates, optimizations and bugfixes. I think I was just more shocked at... when was the last time a PC game went UP in price over time without adding new content?

Can't argue that it's not worth it though. For all its jankiness, it's still my favorite game of the last few years I think.
 
MCBanjoMike

MCBanjoMike

Sudden chomper
(He/him)
Subnautica is absolutely worth that price and then some, but I agree that it's weird to raise the price without adding anything aside from bug fixes. At least, I'm not aware of any actual new content that was put into the game? "We fixed the game-ending bug where key items and locations despawn permanently" doesn't seem like something that you increase your price over.

First quarter for Below Zero is soon! But...not as soon as I was hoping for. Sounds like it's still 3 months away, when here I was hoping it would be out in January. Oh well, I'm still incredibly excited to finally play it.
 
zonetrope

zonetrope

(he/him)
I hit a wall with this game, despite my love of its environment and overall approach. Just too many crafting doodads to keep track of, loading time was getting too long, bugs were getting more obvious and close to game-breaking. I might pick it up again soon, but I wonder if this is worth saving for a more powerful machine like the PS5. I really do honestly adore what it's going for.
 
MCBanjoMike

MCBanjoMike

Sudden chomper
(He/him)
Loading times are very long, but at least on PC it was only really at the start of a session? Not sure how they are on console. I will admit that the crafting in this game is a lot, but maybe if you only play it once in a while you won't be so fed up with it? It's always fun to just hop in the seamoth and take a long drive around the world, there's a whole lot of stuff to find.

I certainly hope that Below Zero does a few things to streamline the crafting. I played Satisfactory, another game that gave me serious Subnautica vibes, and that game at least allows you to pin recipes to the HUD so you know how many of each ingredient you need. If Subnautica allowed you to access every locker inside a single base as one giant inventory, it would make the process of collecting materials a lot less arduous.
 
zonetrope

zonetrope

(he/him)
I could handle the loading if it was just that. But having to try over and over again just to save my game is something I really don't want to have to worry about every time I start the game. And re: the crafting, it was starting to feel like I was constantly managing a giant multi-tab spreadsheet in my brain, and it broke the immersion for me. Maybe keeping a physical notebook on hand would help.

This is clearly a great, great game, and I'll probably start it up again before too long. It just has a lot of rough edges.
 
MCBanjoMike

MCBanjoMike

Sudden chomper
(He/him)
zonetrope said:
This is clearly a great, great game, and I'll probably start it up again before too long. It just has a lot of rough edges.
Click to expand...
For all that I love it, I can't really say that you're wrong. If they'd done a major overhaul to the inventory system, that's the kind of thing that I would say justifies the price hike. At least they've apparently worked on the inherent bugginess of the game. I had one run that I had to completely abandon when a bunch of important stuff up and disappeared from the world forever. Thank god it wasn't my first run when that happened!
 
Troa11

Troa11

Load times are indeed, long. At the very start. I've always played on PC and I can attest to the fact that my load times dropped significantly when I moved off a physical drive and onto an NVME.

The vanilla game isn't perfect and again, on PC, is improved by some QoL mods. One in particular was my favorite until I got good enough at the game that I actually enjoyed the inventory/crafting management aspect. When crafting, whether at a fabricator or with the base builder, it let you draw on materials from any storage container within a specified radius (so you could do whole map or just "is this at this base"), but it also built intermediate materials for you... so if it called for copper wire and you had 2 copper in your locker, you were all good.

I know that's all PC stuff and doesn't help you, zonetrope, but I hope you manage to push through and finish the game at least once! I've lost count of my playthroughs and I'm still enjoying more thoroughly exploring areas I've ignored previously or trying to build up self-sustaining bases in new areas.

Below Zero doesn't address that part at all, but it DOES introduce pinned recipes which is probably the biggest thing I miss going back to Subnautica. I mean... I honestly have most of them memorized at this point... but it is still a very nice feature. If they were to backport some of the BZ features into SN then maybe I could see upping the price? As it is, I still got my Prawn stuck in the end-game lair and needed my grappling arm to get free.
 
zonetrope

zonetrope

(he/him)
I'm back on this, and my saves appear to be saving properly, so that snafu is over with.

Where can I reliably find gel sacks? Sometimes I stumble upon one or two, but never enough to manufacture all the aerogel I need. I have a scanner room but there aren't any within range.
 
MCBanjoMike

MCBanjoMike

Sudden chomper
(He/him)
You can grow them! Smack one with your knife and it will turn into a few gel sack spores. Put those into a planter outside your base and they'll grow up into gel sacks, each of which you can then chop up again. You can do the same thing with the mushrooms that you find deep down so you don't have to go back when you want more. Growing plants is awesome! But the part where you have to hit them with your knife isn't entirely obvious.
 
Troa11

Troa11

I think the only plant-based resource you CAN'T just build a farm for is coral. Is coral a plant? Anyway, you'll always have to find and harvest that. Just be real careful harvesting shrooms that you don't pop a whole field at once and kill yourself.
 
zonetrope

zonetrope

(he/him)
MCBanjoMike said:
You can grow them! Smack one with your knife and it will turn into a few gel sack spores. Put those into a planter outside your base and they'll grow up into gel sacks, each of which you can then chop up again. You can do the same thing with the mushrooms that you find deep down so you don't have to go back when you want more. Growing plants is awesome! But the part where you have to hit them with your knife isn't entirely obvious.
Click to expand...
Thanks for this advice! I have both an indoor and outdoor growbed now. I think I'm finally starting to get the hang of what this game wants me to do when I hit a particular type of roadblock.
 
zonetrope

zonetrope

(he/him)
I got me a submarine now! This game is so good at making me feel more powerful than ever before and way more in over my head than ever before, in the space of a single moment.

The game is starting to crash sometimes in high-performance areas like the Grand Reef, which isn't fun, but I'm also getting better at remembering to save. I've kinda just started to roll with the bugginess, for the sake of experiencing what the game does well.
 
Troa11

Troa11

The PDA really helps sell those moments too. If I recall it says something akin to the Cyclops being intended for a 3-person crew and good luck on your own!

Not a spoiler so much as maybe a pro-tip... don't miss the fact that you can use the hab builder inside your new submarine to build any kind of interior modules (lockers, growbeds, actual beds, fabricator, chargers, etc.) Just be aware that anything that draws power will pull from the Sub's 6 power cells. Not that I ever came close to even draining 50% of my sub's battery.
 
zonetrope

zonetrope

(he/him)
Troa11 said:
The PDA really helps sell those moments too. If I recall it says something akin to the Cyclops being intended for a 3-person crew and good luck on your own!
Click to expand...
My favorite is "This ecological biome matches 7 of the 9 preconditions for stimulating terror in humans." for the blood kelp zones. This game is really funny.
 
MCBanjoMike

MCBanjoMike

Sudden chomper
(He/him)
Troa11 said:
Not that I ever came close to even draining 50% of my sub's battery.
Click to expand...
Did you never use the sonar or shield modules? I lived in constant terror of my batteries dying whenever I was exploring deep down, at least until I unlocked alien power cells.
 
zonetrope

zonetrope

(he/him)
I was thinking "so what, I'll just install a power cell charger on my Cyclops," then realized the critical error in my logic. Guess I'll be spending some time fabricating some spares.
 
MCBanjoMike

MCBanjoMike

Sudden chomper
(He/him)
God damn it, every time I read this thread it makes me want to play more Subnautica. When is Below Zero coming out???
 
Troa11

Troa11

Yesterday? Tomorrow! Just replay the original but challenge yourself to do it differently than before. Do it without a seamoth. Eat veggies instead of fish or vice versa. Go east instead of west. There's multiple viable paths to the endgame so try something different! Last time I built self-sufficient bases in 3 biomes I never touched before.
 
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