With Subnautica: Below Zero still pulling in new players, the series continues to draw more attention. It has received credit as being both relaxing and exciting, which is an effective combination. Both the first entry and Below Zero offer huge, beautiful, and dangerous worlds which you spend days if not weeks exploring.
However, the main focus of Subnautica is to construct bases, vehicles, and tools while making sure you don’t starve to death. There are a lot of small things that the games want you to notice but the closer you look, the more likely you’ll pick up on some illogical and downright silly things.
10 The Picky UI Interior Decorator
One of the first big tasks you’ll face in Subnautica is building a base. You start off in a functional escape pod, but as you’ll soon learn to build a bigger shelter by exploring around your ship’s wreckage. Once you have the blueprints, resources, and necessary tools, you can build a full base in a matter of minutes.
The interiors can be quite empty and expansive, prompting you to fill them with decorations, furniture, and devices. However, you’ll soon find that the UI won’t let you put small items just anywhere. At the same time, you can fill a small room with something roughly half its size that blocks the entrances.
9 Plundering Depths For No Rewards
When you first arrive in the watery world of Subanutica, you’ll be taunted by its mysterious depths. Much like in real life, the ocean depths threaten you with overwhelming pressure and unknown entities. All vehicles have their own depth tolerance which can be improved by crafting and installing the right upgrades. The story missions will frequently ask you to reach new depths in order to progress.
Regardless, that classic gaming reasoning sinks in: if it’s really hard to get to, it must have some great loot! Imagine the disappointment of sinking all your resources into depth upgrades just to get down there and hit a dead zone.
8 How Do Bags Work Again?
In RPG series like Fallout and Elder Scrolls, bags are everywhere. With the power of mallet space, you don’t need to worry about carrying one and can just look for loot in each one you find. In Subnautica, inventory space is quite limited so there are whole upgrade trees for capacity increases for your suit and vehicles.
You can also construct and find storage containers, such as the infamous Carry-All bag. Found commonly around abandoned bases and the Aurora, this is a portable storage unit that you can place almost anywhere. Just know that it only works as a bag when you’re not carrying it.
7 If I Can Scan It, It Must Be Important
A device that you’ll want to master early on is the Scanner. Like its namesake, this device scans almost anything that catches your attention. Its main drawback is its limited range which makes scanning hazardous materials and dangerous creatures risky. Scanning is important to gather blueprints for base rooms, vehicles, and other tools.
When used on creatures, the Scanner can tell you important details about their behavior and whether they have usable materials. Still, even though you can scan the world, it doesn’t mean you should. Still, it’s easy to spend hours scanning everything you encounter just for kicks.
6 Titanium Not Found
Ironically, the actual building of a base in Subnautica is the easy part. Bases not only require the Habitat tool but also a number of different resources. Depending on which part of the base you’re constructing materials will vary. However, a common denominator that is shared across many items is titanium.
Referred to as a “basic building material”, titanium can be found in various locations across different biomes. It’s mined from Limestone Outcrops and Large Resource Deposits. The problem is that Murphy’s Law dictates that when you decide to build something, especially a base, titanium will suddenly become the rarest substance of all time.
5 The Camping Reaper Menace
Though the commonly encountered and consumed Peeper is the icon of Subnautica, it’s not the face of the game. That honor belongs to the Reaper, a Leviathan-sized creature that looks like a mashup of an eel, crab, and shark. These monsters are encountered more often than you would like and can appear at various depths and times.
Despite this, it appears that one Reaper enjoys hanging around the wreckage of the Aurora. Since you’ll need to return there both for missions and valuable resources, you’re likely to run into this Reaper multiple times.
4 Otterly Harmless
Subanutica can be compared to a pool where you need to learn to swim in the shallows before going in the deep end. The game graciously starts you off amidst a colorful, well-lit, and lively coral reef ripe in resources and consumables. Your only shelter is a crashed escape pod with little equipment, but it’s better than nothing.
Limited only to what you can carry, you’ll spend the start of your adventure harvesting everything you can before frantically swimming back to your pod. Just like an otter, you’re active while being at the mercy of even the smallest threat.
3 Pretend As If Nothing Happened
There was a time when saving a game was an ordeal. You couldn’t just shut it off, you needed to find a good place to stop and hope there was a save-point nearby. Nowadays, save points feel like a novelty when games save your progress after every few steps. On top of that, many also give you the option to save manually. Subnautica offers the latter, but not the former.
Considering how much you can accomplish in just one session, it feels unreasonable that it doesn’t have autosave. Even so, it’s such a chore to undo all the damage from an excursion that it feels better to simply turn it off and pretend like it didn’t happen.
2 Bizarro Metal Values
If stories of fantasy and medieval times have taught anything, it’s the value of gold. While gold is considered very valuable, it has very little practical use. In Subnautica, it’s more useful yet takes a backseat to materials often taken for granted such as copper. Described as being an “essential wiring component”, you’ll need to gather a lot of it to construct various electronics.
It can be found in various regions from Limestone Outcrops, Large Resource Deposits, and Ore Veins. In spite of this, RNG can make copper frustratingly hard to find but maybe you’ll get some gold instead.
1 JUST. ONE. MORE.
Nothing torments a collector more than being one piece shy of a full set. From PDAs to fragments, Subnautica has a lot of collectibles to find. The latter appears in the game world as broken pieces of machinery that need to be scanned before they can be used. They’re necessary for building vehicles such as Cyclops and Prawn Suit.
They spawn randomly but are commonly found around the Aurora, wrecked ships, and abandoned bases. Each vehicle requires a different number of fragments to complete the blueprint and after you find the first several flawlessly, the time it takes to find the last one is unbearable.
NEXT: 10 Games To Play If You Love Subnautica
