Subnautica - SCUBA, Unknown Worlds, drowning

Yeah, sonar is seriously useful for stripping visual noise away and seeing distant shapes.

The GRDB entrance is less straightforward than the lifepod entrance…which is easily the closest the game has placed a beacon to the Lost River…without just straight up placing a beacon to the Lost River.

I agree with this completely. I only found the others AFTER exploring all the exits from the Lost River on my second playthrough.

And to make it worse, there is a juvenile ghost leviathan on the way down to that pod the first time, plus shockers, warpers, and other fauna. It’s intimidating being that deep with that stuff nearby. And it’s later game so you want to get down there, get the stuff out of the pod and get out.

In my humble opinion, they should have left out some of the danger on the way down and breadcrumbed some things over to the cave entrance and down. Maybe getting to the cave entrance gives you a dream clue or you pick up another radio frequency tied to one of the buildings down there, etc.

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.

Depends what you mean by ‘forced reboot’, exactly. If you’re talking about your entire system effectively losing power and rebooting without you ‘doing’ anything I’d have to say this is strongly indicative of an underlying hardware issue.

You’re probably encountering a part of the game where the geometry or whatever is more complex and putting additional strain on the part of the system that is unstable. At least, this has been my experience every time this has happened in the past decade.

There are a couple of programs that can help diagnose this, run a Prime95 stress test for 10+mins and keep an eye on your CPU temps while it runs. If that runs in a stable manner you will probably need to put your GPU through a similar workout with FurMark. Finally MemTest86 for your RAM if the other two work ok.

Best of luck.

Yeah, that’s what happened. Thanks, I’ll give those a try.

If a mere videogame causes your system to reboot, you have a power/heat problem. In a stable computer you should be ale to run FurMark for 30 minutes, and Furmark hits the gpu harder than any real videogame,

To this specific question, unfortunately the answer is both yes and no. Every, “zone,” in the game is different from a flora / fauna perspective, but there are artifacts scattered throughout, as well as wrecks, abandoned facilities, etc. Everything you would expect after your trip to the island and the Sunbeam, aka, something is going on and that huge facility on the island is a sign of things to come.

If you get stuck in the story your biggest tips come from repairing the radio and ensuring you have a radio to get clues from if you built a base early on.

That being said, I’ve played this game with waaaay underperforming work laptops at times and not really had issues. You definitely have some GPU issues it sounds like.

Just as an update if anyone else comes to this very late like I did, I decided to look up some fixes and try the easiest ones first after it started crashing on the Aurora even at low graphics. Simplest one did it. Increased the size of virtual memory by 2GB and the crashes went away. I haven’t tried turning the graphics back up yet, but at least I can play the game now.

As a side effect the crashes somehow made me more irritated and determined to finish the game than afraid of the creepy things so the likelihood of me finishing has increased! I’ll be interested to see how well that determination stands up to whatever the next creepy thing is.

Finally getting back into this game. I spent about 15 hours in the pre-release version. Loved it then. Love it more now.

Dumb question: How do y’all deal with keeping track of things you’ve explored? I’m constantly running across a wreck and wasting time sorting out whether I’ve searched it before. It doesn’t help that the data things still register as such in the map room even after you’ve pulled the card.

Saying that, I just realized there are flares in the game. Maybe that’s an answer? Do they go out? Will it kill performance if I leave flares lying around all over the place?

Flares go out after a while but they do tend to last a bit. Good for back-and-forth grabbing stuff from an area initially so you can see it from further out.

Beacons are how I map things I’ve been to. If needed, I’ll change the beacon name to like “E-name” meaning explored. You can also disable certain beacons showing up within your PDA so that they don’t obscure everything when you’re traveling around.

Oh, yeah. I was using Beacons a bit at first but they clutter things up unless I turn them off. And If I turn them off they are small enough that I don’t always realize they are there. Maybe if I try to position them consistently or some-such.

Question #2: DO I need to fret about time passing at all? For some reason I feel a sense of urgency, but want to relax and pretty up my base. I Also get frustrated by what feels like slow progress such as not having all of the submarine blueprint bits. But maybe I can just chill? It feels like the beginning of the game has a fair bit of timed event stuff, but that eases up thereafter?

Pardon the dumb questions, but trying to avoid wikis and such because I enjoy the sense of discovery in this.

Ahh, the time question. I’m going to spoil it a bit:

No, despite the rush based on clues and things happening to you and broacast messages, etc, there is absolutely no actual thing that you need to worry about with time passing. Take your time. In the case of the Sunbeam, the messages you see on screen change a bit. That’s it. In the case of the push to the final part of the game, no, nothing will change if you take your time. The coding and messages make you FEEL urgency, which is pretty amazing if you think about it. But that isn’t followed up by any gameplay punishment at all.

Just posted this over in The Long Dark thread. Was going to put the same text in here but Discourse isn’t happy with me doing that!

So I’m finally starting with this game! Yeah, took me long enough, I know it. It’s one of those games I’ve kind of held in my back pocket because I knew it would be totally up my alley, with the ocean-based environment and the wide open exploration and discovery. And so far, that’s how it’s worked out. Funny, but whenever I see a video or someone streaming about this, they’re wandering around or building or adding onto their base, and at about 6 hours I can’t even start one! I mean I guess I could start one but the only blueprints they seem to start you out with are connectors. Looks like I need to find blueprints for a multi-purpose room, but no go just yet. I’m getting antsy.

But I have found some really cool stuff! I managed to get into the Aurora and clear up its little reactor problem. In fact, I’ve been back a few times because the first time I didn’t have a laser cutter for getting through locked doors, and then the second time I didn’t have a passcode to enter the captain’s room and literally as I was swimming back I got a radio call where they just flat out told me the code, so back I went.

I found a cool alien tower that’s, uh, also a really big gun so there went my shot at a rescue I guess. Still even with the tragedy and loss of life it looked really cool. And it would have been kind of a bummer to leave the planet with so much unexplored stuff lying out there in the depths! Except now I’ve got some kind of infection and I guess that’s my next ticking clock? Figure out what the heck is going on and how to clear it up?

Anyway, all I can do is continue to explore and hope for the best and lucky for me that’s pretty fun, so back into the deep I go.

This game has base building? I saw hints of it in some of the descriptions of items, eventually, like they’re supposed to go in a base. But I also played for a long time and never came across any kind of base building or how to start one. Not yet anyway.

It sounds like you got a lot farther than me in your 6 hours though so I’m trying not to read the rest of your post.

You can do a simple base with just connectors- in fact you should. Get battery rechargers, fabricators, etc going in there, power it via solar.

If you look at your starter blueprint set you already have a set of things you can build for a base from the beginning of the game. Not a lot, as I mentioned, and some of them don’t tell you how to make them - you have to get out there and scan stuff to put them together. But I can’t imagine any of that is spoiler material.

Is that right? You can make a base out of only connectors? I see that I’ve got a placeholder blueprint for a multi-purpose room that reads like it would be a base hub, and I figured it was a pretty important part of building a base. But ok, I could use battery chargers and especially storage. You guys should see how many floating lockers I have surrounding my life pod already just for all the crap I’ve found. I’m assuming I’ll be able to do something with all those creature eggs I keep finding? Maybe make a kickass omelet?

Haha, yeah. You can. A couple of X-corridors, a Hatch or two to get in. Then you can fill out with lots of storage lockers (floor or wall mounted), and there’s plenty of wall space for the mentioned rechargers, etc. The multu-purpose rooms are needed for reactors, but really that’s about it- the other ‘needed’ rooms are specific - the scanner, the moon pool.

You can get the multipurpose room pretty early if you thoroughly explore the “rendezvous site” location.

If it’s good enough for the ISS, it’s good enough for you.