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One of the issues is that you can run out of ion cubes before being able to build story material to finish the game. There needs to be a way to acquire ion cubes end-game if you accidentally used up all of them creating ion batteries.

I would love to see an alien artifact that fabricates ion cubes slowly when provided the appropriate material and power. You have to bring some rare material and provide 2 power cells to fabricate and charge the ion cube. The power cells would then slowly discharge over 10 minutes to produce an ion cube.

Before I delve in to why my first play-through was frustration-inducing I wanted to say I think this game is beautiful. I played Subnautica for the 3rd time in preparation for the Below Zero release, and Below Zero brings that same wonder and terror that I've come to love in Subnautica. I also want to commend UWE for not being afraid to try new things. As much as I would have loved "Subnautica that looks different with new features", the expanded dialogue, on-land adventures, new vehicles and character development are all refreshing ideas that I thoroughly enjoy. I quickly found myself invested in Robin's story, I wanted to uncover what happened to Sam and learn all there is to know about Sector Zero and what Alterra was doing there. To me, that was my primary goal when I landed on 4546B. To find out what happened to my sister.

And therein lies the beginning of my problem, and I want to be clear: I am not without blame in how my play-through happened.

It's hard to remember the exact order of events that led to some serious missteps by me, but I think my first mistake was accidentally discovering Outpost Zero within the first 30 minutes of playing. I found it long before I got the signal that is intended to lead you to it. But when I found it, it reinforced this notion to me that my primary goal was to discover what happened to Sam. As I continued playing, gathering materials and exploring I had multiple new beacon signals appear. And this is when I made the biggest mistake of my entire play-through. I decide to go to Delta Island before investigating the Architect Sanctuary. I can't tell you exactly why, maybe I thought my equipment wasn't advanced enough to get as deep as the beacon appeared to be, or maybe I was just more interested in whatever might be on the island. Whatever the reason or circumstances, I found myself exploring delta island before the architect sanctuary.

This lead to a cascading effect of chasing leads that I assumed were the main story, and inevitably a lot of frustration. I had my first encounter with Margeurit there, giving me a new beacon signal, and I found the Alterra Facilities map. What proceeded after this was hours of having fun exploring, base-building, trying to find Margeurit and track down these Alterra bases which I assume will progress the main story. That little signal in the twisty bridges, admittedly, got pushed to the back of my mind. Out of eagerness, excitement to explore more, trying to find and build the seatruck, whatever it be; I simply forgot about it and assumed I explored it. I played for several more hours like this until I started to hit a brick wall. I had built the Seatruck which allowed me to discover the Omega Lab by using the map, and find the Mercury II pieces. But I hadn't found the mining base, Phi Robotics or Margeurit's base yet. I believe the PDA's I had collected completely out of order at this point mentioned Phi Robotics, so I was more focused on finding how to get there than the mining base.

The brick wall was this: Using the map to find Phi robotics lead me to the Eye Jelly area, where there appeared to be cave systems that went too deep for me without diamonds to upgrade my depth module or get the Ultra High Capacity tank. So I tried looking for ways on land, but only found areas that appeared to need the Snowfox to jump over. I completely missed the small dock in the corner that gets you right up. Again, my own mistakes and assumptions. From finding the Mercury II and needing a laser cutter, I assumed the next step for progressing at this point was to find diamonds.

I'm going to be honest with you: I'd love to say that after looking in every deep-area I possibly could with the 150m depth sea-truck and high capacity tank without finding diamonds for 2 hours, I had an epiphany that I should try harder to find the mining site. But I didn't. I googled it out of frustration, and learned that there's a cache of diamonds on Delta Island that is accessible using the Spy Pengling. The Spy Pengling which fragments can be found at Phi Robotics. But keep in mind, this entire time I've been trying to find the bases using the Alterra Facilities map in my PDA. Finally, after reading what I googled, I was determined I had missed a way to get to Phi Robotics. Sure enough I had. Eventually I found the little dock, discovered the land area and Phi Robotics, and got the blueprint for the Spy Pengling. I went and got the cache of diamonds on Delta Island, upgraded my Seatruck Depth module, built a modification station, and equipped myself with a laser cutter.

This allowed me to fully explore the Mercury II, mining site and finally find Margeurit's base. I of course immediately went and installed the module in the communications tower, because I thought this was the way to progress the main story. Margeurit called me, and for the first time 12 hours in to the game, I thought I was on the right track to actually advancing the storyline. So you can imagine my confusion after the greenhouse leads me to somewhere I've already been and Margeurit stops calling.

At this point I'm just lost. I can now explore deeper, and I certainly have a lot of new area to explore on land, but something feels very wrong. In Subnautica the story is by no means forced upon you, but there is clear direction from radio messages, "Codes & Clues" and voice logs. You can follow the bread crumbs, or wander aimlessly and both are amazing and rewarding experiences. This is when I realized I have missed something crucial. All of these alien artifacts that seem to serve no purpose, the alien facilities that don't have any clear way to get inside. Surely this isn't the way UWE intended their game to be experienced.

After 14 hours of play time I finally realized I never actually discovered what the Alien Sanctuary beacon lead to, and that's when I found Al-An.

Everything made sense after that. Al-an leads you to all the key areas, in the "proper" order. Al-an is the Subnautica equivalent of the radio. I'm a big fan of all of the dialogue between him and Robin. It's an intriguing story ark, and I was upset at the prospect of missing a lot of it. I had to go back to several artifacts I had already discovered that Al-An didn't mark in order to trigger his clue for the final body part location.

Which brings me to the point of this suggestion post.

Despite all the mistakes and misguided assumptions I made as the player, I don't think it should be possible to accidentally skip such a fundamental part of the game. I think that's a large oversight that needs to be addressed. Although it didn't irreversibly break the sequence of the game, it surely affected the entire experience negatively. Compare Al-an to the radio in Subnautica, and any player would have to try extremely hard to ignore the Radio and the new message indicators. I had the misfortune of getting side-tracked in side-story which I presumed was main-story. So please consider adding much more emphasis on finding Al-an. Finding Al-an should be as intriguing an event as the Sunbeam landing, the occasion that really jump-starts the story.

Thanks for reading. If anyone wants a crash course on how NOT to play Below Zero, my DMs are open.

Hey, I'm a big fan with hundreds of hours of playtime across both games. I'm writing this in case there are any plans to make more Subnautica games.

DO: Put emphasis on the aspects that relate to thalassophobia and the feeling of being shipwrecked, lost and helpless.
The original Subnautica did an amazing job at creating the feeling of being lost in an ocean. It triggered an archaic fear in the players. As the player progressed through the game, they not only got more technology and knowledge about the environment, but they also progressively overcame this archaic fear in themselves. This is arguably the most rewarding aspect of the game. Therefore I will enlist a few factors that relate to this:

• Have the player start out with being alone and lost, this is a key component in crafting/survival games to create tension. Do not give them side characters to guide them or keep them company. Do not give too much directions with direct signal locations, it feels a lot less rewarding to progress that way.
  
• Make the technological progression more challenging. The longer it takes to get your first flashlight, the more rewarding it will feel once you got it. Also, we've had two games by now to get trained, so you should ramp up the challenge accordingly!
  
• Make the environment challenging. Do not shy away from making a horrible death area near the starting location of the player (like we had with the crash zone in Subnautica). These moments of terror and helplessness are the most exciting thing about the game (and it is also what makes content developers make your game go viral on the internet). We secretly didn't want the reaper to be removed, but to see a more terrifying beast than the reaper, perhaps even one that could instantly kill the player. The layered depth progress of blood kelp -> lost river -> lava zones, was extremely awe-inspiring. We would like this type of level design to be expanded upon, to perhaps force the player to build bases in such deep underground biomes and become truly acquainted before moving deeper. The extreme challenges of deeper water's should not just include the predators, but also the environment. It is a good step forward that the crystal caves are a lot more violent than the lava zones. But we also need more challenges on the side, like we had with the extreme heat, lava lizards, and lava larvae.
  
• Make deeper and darker waters. The main element of the archaic fear of the ocean, is of course, the inability to see what's below you, or in any other direction. Subnautica did an amazing job at giving players an adrenaline rush as they dive into vast open waters where you couldn't see the seafloor or into the pitch darkness of the blood kelp. In a sequel we need these to be enhanced, not reduced. The Below Zero map is much smaller but clearly much more detailed. We don't need a lot of attention everywhere, we need expansiveness. We don't need land gameplay (there are plenty of other games that excel at that), we need the feeling of having no choice but to live in the water (at least until later in the progression). We want more of the feeling of diving into an abyss, such as the void offers. But the abyss should have something to find deep within it.
  
• Put more focus on horror elements. One of the most iconic moments in the entire Subnautica series is when the PDA warns against going into the dunes biome "Are you sure whatever you're doing is worth it?". We need more spooky tension buildup through such PDA information, spooky music (not electronic dance music everywhere, like we have in BZ), distant growls of a massive beast that you can't find for a very long time, destroyed human bases with horror story PDA's in them, etc. Also, it goes without saying that the most popular demand from the players is for bigger and scarier leviathans (as we can see from the popularity of the mods relating to such), and I subscribe to that. However, the leviathans, especially the more dangerous ones, should not be too abundant, there should be more time spent fearing the appearance of them from their sound, than actually seeing them (this is where BZ fell short of the original). Another significant misstep with Below Zero was in the writing and voice acting for the main character. She is always the alpha woman who never shows much signs of being vulnerable, afraid for her life, or in any serious way worried. The constant quirky jokes from her and her PDA do a disservice to any attempt to build tension and immersion.
  

DON'T: Put emphasis on a storyline!
The story is nice most games, but in crafting/survival games it doesn't fit very well. The story elements should be kept to a minimum, so as to avoid creating a linear feeling to the game and reduce the feeling of an open-world exploration.

DO: Put emphasis on non-progress related gameplay features (side content).
The original Subnautica did a great job with the sandbox elements, allowing players to interact creatively with the world. Such elements included the harvestable tiger plants (that shoot), the harvestable and moveable brain corals (that give bubbles), the floaters that could be used to make other animals float. We would also like more emphasis on secret interactions with animals, such as acquiring the stalker tooth, or using the sea treaders poop for bioreactor fuel. The addition of the rare collectible toys and pet fish (cuddlefish and trivalve) is another such aspect that would keep the players interested and engaged in the game, beyond just exploring superficially.

DON'T: Let your game design become politicized. I understand that there is an intention to promote inclusiveness, but doing so just for the sake of it ruins the artistic depth of the game. It is immediately obvious to many players that the sudden change of a character from a white man to a colored woman was done solely for this purpose. The same goes for the PDA voice (who is now harder to understand and yet less robotic sounding). The same goes for the only love story (that I'm aware of) in the series. It is no problem to add pro-LGBT messages in the game if the game's narrative relates to it. The random PDA of the two women flirting felt completely irrelevant and meaningless to the player (there was nothing funny, intriguing, or shocking about that dialogue, which is why it wouldn't have been implemented if it was proposed as an opposite sex flirtation). If you would like to make a statement about inclusiveness, it still needs to be delivered with substance and be relevant to the game, not thrown in there half-heartedly. Consider for example how Dragon Age 1 created an entire social climate of racism between humans, elves, and dwarves to deliver this message in a powerful and meaningful way.

Thank you for reading!