I’d had the glitching through the floor which was annoying and anxiety inducing, especially when hung over deep trenches and somehow just managing to not fall straight into them, but this bug was… well, quite surprising and the exact opposite:
I just watched this amazing speed run of Subnautica:
It made me realize that one of the reasons I gave up on the game was that I reached a dead end of organic discovery. I’d spent so long without discovering anything new that it just completely burned me out.
I’d keep trying to explore deeper, but got attacked endlessly. I read wikis but none of the stuff they described in ways which implied I should understand sounded familiar to me.
The biggest thing which the speed run showed me was the underwater lost river. I never found it or found any journals which hinted at it, after 40+ hours, yet it seems core to everything next beyond what I’d done.
Was the game supposed to guide me there somehow and I missed it? It seems frustrating that I never found something so important.
The game places you literally right in-front of one of the entrances to the lost river when you explore the last life pod beacon (Life Pod 2 Blood Kelp zone). IT IS RIGHT THERE. SUPER CLOSE. You just needed to explore a little further beyond it. You can physically see a larger than normal cave entrance.
In fact the game also places you near 2 other entrances to the Lost River MUCH MUCH earlier. Even before the Sunbeam event. The only difference is you’d have to explore a bit more thoroughly to find those entrances as they are not as obvious. (as in a bit hidden).
The earliest lifepod beacon near the Lost River is…lifepod 12 in the Bulb zone. This entrance also doubles as a path to both the Inactive lava zone that is even deeper, and it also leads you straight towards one of the alien facilities. The problem is the entrance is directly behind the bulb zone near the fringes of the map where the light is dark, and you have to go deeper before you are likely even ready when you first go there.
Besides what @roguefrog mentioned, the game also leads you to the degassi base that is deep and near the crabsquid. Less than 100m away is another back entrance to the Lost River.
I kind of like that the game leads me to the water but I had to drink, pun intended. I mean, the wiki came about pretty quickly, for a reason. Not everyone caught every clue. Mentioned way up thread, I didn’t find several things until my second playthrough. I also didn’t see the sea treaders until my second playthrough, nor the zone they were in for the most part.
Wow that’s so strange then. I fully explored all those areas and don’t at all remember finding an entrance to the lost river. I especially explored the final degassi base and that whole underwater area for a while.
For exploration it is better if you have sonar in your vehicle. Then again, I had trouble finding the vehicle upgrade module for the longest time to make sonar. Sometimes underwater in the dark, if you aren’t looking, you won’t find it.
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!