Next thing needs copper, uh oh, I'm out of copper because at the time when I was finding a bunch of it I didn't have enough room to hold much of it, so now I have to interrupt my building to go search for some. titanium is in the main lifepod chest, quartz is in one of several tiny free-floating chests, need to find which one. I'm in the beginnings of setting up my first base, and it has involved quite a lot of resource juggling. I often have to pass up valuable or interesting resources while exploring because I just can't hold much. Space is limited, nothing stacks, and there are a lot of different resources to juggle. My biggest complaint, and the thing that makes me hesitate a bit about starting it up each time, is that the inventory management is really painful. Here you feel clumsy and slow on land, comparatively swift and graceful in water, claustrophobic when tangled in what would normally be 'cover' and pretty much never even bothering to wave the little knife because you'll live longer by not playing action hero.)Ĭurrently playing this, maybe ~10 hours in. In a way, while it is a technical flaw, it does contribute to the sense of novelty: in most games, even the ones where swimming is possible and water isn't just a fast-killing map barrier, diving in means going from sure-footed, circle-strafing, heavily armed and ready to rock WWII hero and/or Space Marine to clumsy slow moving guy waving a worthless little knife. Luckily most of the game involves swimming around rather than grovelling around in contact with terrain, so this impediment is vastly less serious than it would be in a more conventional game. Draw distance/pop-in are kind of frustrating, especially when you don't even know you missed something because it was hidden behind its lower-complexity distant model when you passed it and when on land or in certain structures, especially the Aurora, the mixture of clipping and invisible walls can make you feel like a mime trying to sail tea from China faster than the competition.

(edit: while my verdict would definitely be that it's a great game overall it is worth noting that the engine is.serviceable. Are you certain whatever you're doing is worth it?' 'Detecting multiple leviathan class lifeforms in the region. That said, somethings are amply scary and amply dangerous. Not 100%, nor is the relationship just obnoxiously arbitrary but unlike games where 'ooh, the jump scare also insta-kills you, scary!' or basically nothing is particularly frightening so everything just boils down to DPS and HP, Subnautica has a lot of real threats that just sneak up on you(underestimate how many seconds of oxygen getting back out of that wreck or cave will take, get separated from your vehicle, get worn down by hunger, thirst, or scratch damage from fauna that are normally treated as scenery while pushing toward some objective) and a lot of real scares that don't derive from their ability to drain HP ( most of the time that gnawing feeling of dread that comes of seeing nothing but infinite blue-grey in every direction isn't accompanied by a reaper losing your sense of where the entrance/exit is can be panic inducing even if you have plenty of air in the tank, pretty much anything involving blood kelp). That said, I would say that (to its credit) Subnautica does a pretty good job of keeping 'what is dangerous' and 'what is scary' substantially unrelated. I lost something like a day's progress when a warper murdered me and I respawned in my deep base, something like 1.4km from my prawn suit and 1.5-1.8ish from the surface. 2 Ti and no power requirements or durability stats to worry about radio beacon and/or LED light if you think you'll have trouble finding yours). But you thankfully wont know the fear of playing this in beta when a Emperor Leviathan comes out of the wall and eats you leaving all your upgraded vehicles 900m below the surface to start over.Īlways have an escape path with oxygen depots if you are going to build deep because guess which base you will invariably respawn in if your vehicle is destroyed or you are killed outside it? (if you don't mind feeling a little cheesy you can cut down on the expense and complexity of depots considerably by just using outdoor growbeds with brain coral in them.

Farsky and subnautica