Subnautica - SCUBA, Unknown Worlds, drowning

So I’m just getting around to this game, and not reading above to avoid spoilers. And to save myself 1500 posts of reading material. Double benefit.

I’ve got a high end pc, and can run the game on max settings except in the first land area I discovered, where the Sunbeam gets shot down. Well, so far I can. I’ve found references to depths of 1200m and I’ve been down maybe 150m, so there could easily be other problem areas I haven’t found. There’s a cave system there with a lot of lithium, shale deposits, spider things, and an alien arch. If I don’t turn the settings down to low, it crashes my pc to a forced reboot every time. edit: Just in the caves; the alien building behind the forcefield was fine.

Was this a problem area, and are there a lot of areas to explore of similar architecture? I’m assuming my pc just doesn’t like a texture or shadow or something in there but I don’t know much about this stuff. Googling is useless to me as there are plenty of reports of pc crashes but I don’t know how I would go about finding out about a specific cave area in an world region I don’t even have a name for!

It might not matter since I’m terrible at playing games like this where I have to just run from everything. I expect at some point I’ll get too creeped out and will just watch a let’s play instead but I’m trying not to do that this time around.