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

air_show

elementary my dear baxter
I started it this afternoon and other than figuring out how to make food and water from the local fauna and upgrading my oxygen tank a couple times, I can't figure out where to go or what to do. I seem to be surrounded by thousands of inventory trash that's not used for anything while any vital components I need to make anything remotely complicated with my fabricator is nowhere to be found.

Am I supposed to be this lost? Is there something obvious I'm missing or is it just supposed to click after you spend x-amount of hours wandering aimlessly?
 

jpfriction

(He, Him)
Been a minute but I seem to recall making a knife was the biggest first step other than the scanner. Getting the habitat builder really opens things up though. Any blueprint in general you are shooting for at the moment?

Repair tool let’s you fix the radio which will give you some points of interest.
 

ThricebornPhoenix

target for faraway laughter
(he/him)
any vital components I need to make anything remotely complicated with my fabricator is nowhere to be found.
Some resources are very rare or nonexistent outside of certain biomes, and some are less obvious than they maybe should be. If I remember correctly, you may sometimes require a material that is actually crafted rather than found, but you don't get the recipe until you pick up one of the base components. The scanner should tell you if an item is useful. Eventually you can unlock a base room that lets you scan for materials nearby.

Subnautica does not give you much direction (repairing the radio helps), but if you keep exploring to your limits, you should be able to find the tools and materials you need to keep expanding your limits.
 
Yeah, the biggest initial hurdle is probably repairing the radio, after which you'll start to get some directions that will nudge you in the right direction. After that, the best advice to progress is probably "go somewhere deeper/scarier".

Gosh, I love this game. I need to play it again.
 
yea get the radio repaired, then it will send you to some specific places. I'm somewhat stuck in my game. I vaguely have things to do but not sure where to collect some materials, but the idea is mostly the same: go out and down as far as you can while still surviving, get everything you can hold, then return and fix/build what's possible. More or less follow that throughout
 

Purple

(She/Her)
Yeah, once repaired, checking the radio for new messages breadcrumbs you through about the first half of the game or so. After that you should probably have stumbled across a few Points of Decided Interest which point you to a few more. The final couple quests for lack of a better term are a bit more "explore and find this on your own" but the basic rule of thumb is if you're stuck, you quit avoiding that place you really really don't want to go and explore it to find access to a place your sense of self-preservation tells you is even worse.

Well mostly. I can't stand being in the Grand Reef but the Lost River feels like a downright mirthful Halloween Town I can hang out in all day.
 
Yeah, once repaired, checking the radio for new messages breadcrumbs you through about the first half of the game or so. After that you should probably have stumbled across a few Points of Decided Interest which point you to a few more. The final couple quests for lack of a better term are a bit more "explore and find this on your own" but the basic rule of thumb is if you're stuck, you quit avoiding that place you really really don't want to go and explore it to find access to a place your sense of self-preservation tells you is even worse.

Well mostly. I can't stand being in the Grand Reef but the Lost River feels like a downright mirthful Halloween Town I can hang out in all day.
i got to the degasi station in grand reef and theres a leviathan just circling it. It was especially bad since my closest base was like 1500m away. Ended up taking that as a cue to build a mini base at the floating island but either way its such a frustrating area
 

Purple

(She/Her)
Yeah, that's pretty much the end of the radio gimmie chain (although there's still maybe 1 or 2 to blindside you later in the game). Further progress is only really clued from the points of interest on the two islands, and the three DeGrassi bases, which overlap a bit. And I think the only thing that's strictly necessary to find in any of those is an artifact key in the Grand Reed base and seriously WHAT THE HELL WAS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE THAT THEY DECIDED TO BUILD A PLACE TO LIVE IN THAT HELLHOLE? AND GIVE IT WINDOWS! Otherwise it's officially self-directed exploration from here out. There are some significantly better exploration tools you might not have just from scans the game never really particularly pushes you towards. Typically literred around pretty generously in the mushroom forests, not to be confused with the jellyshrooms and if you have that "this is clearly an endgame toy" already, and you're really stuck on where to go...

And I mean really stuck. Don't want to explore on your own, just want to make progress.

And you're sure you don't want to find it on your own...

There's a big underground hub biome called the Lost River you will definitely recognize when you see it, connecting to the ocean above in like 3 places or 4, the easiest to consistently find, in my opinion, is to start in the safe shallows, head for grand reef, stay low going in, the Degrassi base will be off to your right, but you want to veer slightly left and keep going down. Stop when you plow into like 100 rays, turn right, and suck it up because there's just the one, it's a baby, and you totally have room to squeeze by without trouble.

There's like one point of interest in that location itself (which is also just a fantastic place for finding damn near every resource), plus passage to where the two big obvious end game locations are tucked away.
 

zonetrope

(he/him)
I love this game so far. Crafting is usually a red flag for me, but it's done so well here that it's making me reconsider that stance. I'm looking forward to getting lost in this for months.
 

Falselogic

Lapsed Threadcromancer
(they/them)
I love this game so far. Crafting is usually a red flag for me, but it's done so well here that it's making me reconsider that stance. I'm looking forward to getting lost in this for months.

I hope it lasts your for months. Being able to play Subnautica again for the first time would be amazing. I wish I could do it!
 

JBear

Internet's foremost Bertolli cosplayer
(He/Him)
I love this game so far. Crafting is usually a red flag for me, but it's done so well here that it's making me reconsider that stance.
Same, on both counts. I very nearly didn't play the game at all since crafting systems are not my thing.
 

Kalir

Do you require aid.
(whatevs)
I am very interested in playing Below Zero when it finishes the whole Early Access thing.
 

zonetrope

(he/him)
My lifepod's radio seems to have repaired itself, and apparently this is a known bug, according to Google. It kinda feels like I cut in line a little, but I guess I'll take the early-game help.
 
I've played this game so many times now. Gosh I love it. I've also played most of what BZ has to offer right now, and there's a lot there. It's a different game than Subnautica and that's taken me some to get used to, but once I met it on its own terms, I enjoyed it almost as much as SN.

I remember last month when I got my handheld PC and I was going through testing various games to see what ran well - boot it up for 5 minutes, make sure the gamepad works, etc. When I did Subnautica I lost an hour.
 

Purple

(She/Her)
I keep finding myself wanting to say "Subnautica is a damn near perfect experience" and then a fish swims through a wall.
 

muteKi

Geno Cidecity
I keep finding myself wanting to say "Subnautica is a damn near perfect experience" and then a fish swims through a wall.


OHHH YEAHHHH
--
274.jpg
 

zonetrope

(he/him)
I was a little lost, but then realized that you don't need a knife for the creepvine seed packs. Now I do have a knife, and all sorts of new equipment has opened up for me. Hell yeah.
 
OHHH YEAHHHH
--
274.jpg

My favorite glitch was a juvenile reefback managing to wedge itself squarely into my base built on the border of the safe shallows and grassy plateau. Just *really* wedged himself in there in such a way that the head clipped inside the base. I put up with it for a while, but the sound was too much and eventually I was forced to push him out with the propulsion cannon.
 
im ok with the glitches except for when my prawn suit glitched through the ocean floor into an entirely empty box that i couldn't propel through. I got myself into a kind of sticky situation anyway because it was in a ridge that was hard for me to jump out of, but once i found a good seam i ended up just falling straight through it.

just a reminder to be careful about the prawn suit i guess.
 

zonetrope

(he/him)
Just built the Seamoth. This game is so good at making you feel exponentially more powerful than you were just a moment ago, while still feeling utterly alone and lost.
 
Seamoth is my buddy. Though, on repeat playings, I wish I'd been less conservative and used the Seaglide a lot more.
 

MCBanjoMike

Sudden chomper
(He/him)
My first playthrough, I didn't find the last piece of the Seaglide until like 30 minutes before finding what I needed to make a Seamoth. I basically went straight from swimming for 20 hours to a mini-sub. It took me a while to realize that the 'glide is incredibly useful even in the late game.
 
Here's a simple mechanics tip, no spoiler, that I did not realize until I played Below Zero: Whenever you're just swimming, put away your current tool. Amazingly, you swim faster with 2 free hands.

If you knew that, kudos for being way ahead of my curve.
 

zonetrope

(he/him)
I played this game for like six hours yesterday, which I haven't done in ages. It's safe to say I'm hooked.

I now have a base with a moonpool, and the ability to dive 300 meters in the Seamoth! Fetching water and food is starting to become a bit of a bother, but it looks like some blueprints are appearing to make my life easier in that regard.

My clock is at about 18 hours now. How much should I be worried about this infection?
 

MCBanjoMike

Sudden chomper
(He/him)
I now have a base with a moonpool, and the ability to dive 300 meters in the Seamoth! Fetching water and food is starting to become a bit of a bother, but it looks like some blueprints are appearing to make my life easier in that regard.

My clock is at about 18 hours now. How much should I be worried about this infection?
There are ways to grow food at your base so you don't have to go track it down, and for water you can eventually build a water purifier in your base. As for time pressure, there is none, you can take as long as you want. I was an incredible chicken on my first playthrough and I think it took me like 50 hours to complete, which is easily 20 hours more than is really necessary. You'll be fine!
 
My clock is at about 18 hours now. How much should I be worried about this infection?

It's entirely driven by the game's plot and certain key events; your overall play time has no bearing on it. IIRC correctly you can actually make things a bit easier for yourself by ignoring the option to scan yourself for as long as possible.
 

zonetrope

(he/him)
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?
 
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