Subnautica 2 is now out in its earliest iteration of Early Access, with at least two or three years before the game is intended to reach its final form. But even now, there’s an awful lot to do and a very solid survival experience. With that come some quirks and oddities you’ll want to know about right away. I’ve put together all the things I wish I had known before I started playing Unknown Worlds’ underwater crafting and exploration adventure.
Your first base is a corridor with a door
Subnautica 2 may be a little frustrating in the way it won’t stop holding your hand, but when it comes to base building, it leaves you entirely out in the cold (and wet). It’ll encourage you to build a base as soon as you’ve crafted the Habitat Builder, but it doesn’t do much more than that. And given all you seem to be able to build at that point is a corridor and a hatch, it feels a little futile. But nope, that’s really the plan. Building these things requires titanium, and you should find that in bucketfuls all over the place in the starting area (especially in caves), and you just want to build a single corridor, then add a hatch. Inside, you can mount some cabinets on the walls to contain your items, and even—although it’ll be tight—some of the early machinery. It’s not long until it’ll add the option to build proper rooms, but quite why they’re not there at the start is something of a mystery.
Build your base close to a current
Once you do get rooms, you might not want to just build them below your escape pod, however. For reasons that won’t become clear until a while after, it’s a much better idea to seek one of the jetstream tubes you see curling through the ocean in various places. There are a couple quite close by, but you’ll save yourself a lot of work if you set up camp right next to one. This is because the solar panels that power your base are only any good during daylight, and for night you’re going to want to set up a hydroelectric turbine inside one of these streams, then connect it to your base via power transmitters. If you make the mistake I did, that means chaining transmitters (which require copper and titanium) the whole distance, and it’s a faff. Far easier to just have the power source right outside the window.
Don’t go outside the Early Access area
If you reach a red stripey wall, you’ve encountered the outer area of what’s considered playable in the Early Access. However, the game will let you go beyond it, with a warning that it’s not bug-tested. Although it should perhaps also mention that the game will absolutely kill you the moment you try. It’s worth it, so long as you’re not carrying valuables with you, because this way you get to encounter some titanic creatures, but not for long enough to get to know them. It’s folly to try to play out there, is what I’m saying.
Death locations aren’t marked on the map
I suspect this is something that’ll change soon, but one of the most irritating aspects of Subnautica 2 is that when you die, your character is reprinted back at base, but most of your valuables are left floating in the sea. Sure, that makes sense narratively (except for the bit where some of your possessions somehow come back with you), but it means swimming back to wherever you died to pick up rarer items you might have been carrying. This is made far worse by death sites not being marked on the screen despite everything else getting labeled, making it often very tricky to recover items.
You can build vehicles far sooner than you’d think
The Early Access game has a vehicle you can build a lot sooner than you might realize. Called the Tadpole, it’s a little egg-shaped one-mad sub that’ll offer you protection as you pass through more violently occupied waters. There are a lot of steps to get it, but they’re all ones you can do in the early stages. First, you’ll need a Processor, which requires titanium, copper wire, and mild acid, all easily crafted in the Fabricator. Then you need to use the Processor to make a couple of titanium ingots and a copper ingot, which when added to glass (made from quartz) will get you a Vehicle Fabricator.
Make a Moonpool (a swimming pool in your base), which is just more titanium, while you’ll want to expand to a larger square, and then place the Vehicle Fabricator on the side. That done, all you need now is another titanium ingot, some glass, a power cell and a system chip. The latter two are the trickiest part: For the power cell you need a regular battery (easy), salt (go swimming and look for fuzzy pink rocks), and Strong Acid. This requires the Processor again, and Necrolei Cysts. These are just the tops of flowers that are really close to the starting area, and you can locate them with a Scanner Station. For the system chip, you need quartz, silver, and copper wire. Like I say, a lot of steps, but all the stuff is available very early in the game, and you’ll be glad you did it.
You can attach storage to the back of your Tadpole
For the longest time I was deeply annoyed that the Tadpole doesn’t have an inventory of its own. It’s pretty silly, honestly, and seems like it should have been the default. But there is a way around this. The back of your Tadpole has two teeny circles on it, and despite near-identical textures being on either side too, these ones on the back allow you to attach items to the vehicle to take with you. I learned this after my Fabricator had gone missing, then after crafting a new one, I eventually found I’d somehow stuck it to the back of my sea-car. With this realization, I tried attaching one of the Portable Lockers to the back, which adds a 15-slot inventory to the Tadpole and makes the game approximately 1.7 times more fun to play.
Your Tadpole can be upgraded in a slot on its roof
Another detail the incessantly waffly game omits among its tightly gripped handholding is that your Tadpole can be upgraded. On top is a hatch into which upgrades can be added. For this, you’ll need a Modification Station, and this is something you can’t get early on—it’s gated by the need for celestine, a mineral you won’t find until a good few hours in. But once built, it can add extras to the Tadpole that’ll speed it up (although so marginally, bah), toughen its armor, and add abilities like scanning. Each is a pretty tough ask, requiring lots more stages of crafting, but worthy goals.
If it won’t let you move something, just demolish it
When using your Fabricator gun, you’ll see there’s an option to press move items. This is super-useful as it means you can rearrange your habitat nice and quickly, but every now and then you’ll find something that just won’t budge. It’s easy to consider that a bust and something you’re stuck with, but don’t forget you can just demolish it instead! Demolishing returns to you the ingredients that went into the build, and so when you find that you cannot—for some godforsaken reason—not move your Tadpole dock from a Moonpool, just smash it to bits and build a new one. There’s no extra cost.
You can switch off quest markers in the menu
As I’ve suggested, Subnautica 2 is way too hellbent on guiding you through so much of the game, and that includes taking away a lot of the exploration aspects by just telling you where everything is with map markers. If you’d prefer to find these things through pure chance, there is a way to switch them off. This is also useful when markers get stuck after you’ve completed the task, which is a minor bug I encountered a few times. Open your inventory, and then tab across to Signals. This features a huge, long list of every destination and black box you’ve been told about, with what look like radio buttons down the left side. They’re not radio buttons, though, and in fact, toggles that let you switch the marker on or off. It’s super-useful to make sure your home base is always marked, and absolutely leave your Tadpole ticked—that one’s essential. But the rest are up to you.
