Game play

Norton

I want to see mid and late game Subnautica get away from swimming around and manually collecting things off the ground. So far that is the bulk of the game play, and personally I get tired of it very quickly. I would love some automated way to collect resources that you improved and upgraded as you progressed. Subs equipped with imaging devices could be used to scout out new places to set up drill sites. It would give a reason to explore but not have you tediously clicking the sand every 2 ft as you do it. Also, constantly filling up your inventory and swimming back to your sub to drop it off feels a bit played out from games like Diablo.

I'd prefer game play to be more about setting up bases and interacting with the animals. It gives me immense satisfaction to get inside the cyclops and out of the harsh alien waters. Increasing the comfort and coolness of your subs and bases would be a lot of fun for me. The game play would be designing the bases and exploring for new base locations.

I'm sure we can think of something more fun that collecting rocks off the sea floor for hours.

Soul_Rider

I agree, but am also confident this will be addressed in due course..

Zourin

From what I've picked up, there are a lot of plans, but they're focused one phase at a time, and they've only just begun groundwork on allowing a player to establish a base of operations. What mechanics or quality of life improvement that focus entails is still anyone's guess, and it mostly comes down to 'whatever they allocate time on'.

There are still some serious stability issues that need to be worked on. Crashing is still really common, and the X-build has fun little bugs that makes saved games unloadable. I can go at best an hour to an hour-and-a-half before the game dies on either build, which makes it challenging to even get a cyclops built. Major Quality of Life gameplay improvements are still easily six months out unless they hit a bug-hunt/feature streak.

Seldkam

I think we've heard plenty of times there will be drills- so I'll say it here : There are plans for drills :P

which will definitely help, however I agree food should not be quite as obnoxious to find as people have been saying

Zourin

Food isn't so hard other than the salt, I've found. I manually hotkey a Grav-ball and swim up on a school of peepers or whatever. One RMB click and I can catch 4-6 peepers in one go. You can also dive into the kelp forests and get a pile of hoverfish, which is decent when cooked (23 food) and are easy to catch.

First thing I do in a new game is eat about 20 or so mushrooms just to level off the needs initially. This can usually be done within the first sixy seconds. Snacking on shrooms/kelp can help stave off hunger, but it'd be good to see better food recipes that combine fish with shrooms/kelp for better yields. Storage can get kind of full when it takes 3-8 slots per meal.

Seldkam

That's my point, not that its obnoxious as in hard to find, but that its very time consuming

Maybe not for experienced players but definitely new ones

En9a9e

I'm sure it's a planned part of progression, as development continues, and is a fairly typical aspect of survival games - that the ease of regular resource gathering (including food) becomes greater after one moves past the earlier parts of the game and starts to tech up more. That is tech progression leading to better harvesting/farming tools or methods. If food gathering is that bothersome (I think the depletion rates still may need tweaked, not the initial gathering methods themselves) then one always has freedom mode they can jump in to.

Zourin

Necessity is the mother of invention. It's a good reason to progress into new mechanics/recipes rather than slow the need rate. Time will tell.