Impressions and feedback
Alrekr_Ironhand
New Hampshire, US Join Date: 2016-03-22 Member: 214677Members
New Hampshire, US Join Date: 2016-03-22 Member: 214677Members
Subnautica! Travel to (and crash on) exotic alien worlds! Discover exotic alien marine lifeforms! ...And eat them.
(Try not to let them eat you.)
This is a compendium of my thoughts and observations of my first week or so of Subnautica play.
First of all, overall feel in Subnautica is awesome. It's both familiar and alien at the same time, especially to anyone who's ever gone reef snorkeling. I love the visuals. Dive time is severely limited, but on the other hand I don't have to decompress, so that's ... actually, a pretty good trade-off. (It'll be an even better one once I finally get the blueprint for extended-capacity tanks.) And being able to dive to five or six hundred meters without being crushed into jelly OR have to decompress makes me feel like Aquaman or something.
I wish there were some practical use for rabbit rays though. Not necessarily as food. They're just ... cute. So are peepers, in their way.
Good points about resource gathering: No made-up materials! No Fictionalite, no Magickium, no gobbledegook or Treknobabble.
Bad points about resource gathering: Silver, for one, is in very short supply (and difficult to find) considering how crucial it is for making computer chips to make ... well, almost anything beyond basic structures, really. It's only really found in one area, it's hard to spot the sandstone outcrops buried in the blood kelp, and even when you find one, there's about a one in four chance it'll drop gold instead of silver ore. But I already have more gold than I know what to do with, and far fewer uses for gold. (Hey, I'll trade you gold for silver, one for one! You'll never get a better currency exchange rate.)
And plant matter consumes unreasonable amounts of inventory space. Want to make something that needs several units of lubricant? You're going to swim back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth gathering creepvine clusters. Maybe if lubricant took only one creepvine cluster to make instead of three...?
Good points about food and sustenance: All food is not created equal. Different foods have different nutritional values. This is, however, slightly diminished by broiled fillet of Reginald (who named that fish?) being the best food in every regard.
Bad points about food and sustenance: OK, I can readily understand why eating dry or salty foods would decrease your hydration level. And eating very moist foods increases your hydration level, as it should. But why on earth does drinking filtered water decrease your nutrition level...?!? That makes no sense at all.
Lockers! Lockers work nicely. But can we please, please, PLEASE have longer labels? Ten character limits for labels lead to lockers labelled MRSMTHSTF. And, this is just a teeny, teeny gameplay thing ... could the locker labels be moved up to somewhere around the top quarter of the door where they're less likely to be accidentally clicked while opening the locker? Or, an alternate idea: Change the label editing method. Instead of interacting directly with the locker label, have the label be an editable text field in the locker's UI.
And speaking of lockers ... about those floating waterproof lockers. Is there any way to deconstruct or recycle them? Could we perhaps have a way to deconstruct or recycle them? I hate to just throw them away and litter the place up, but basically they are indispensable up until you build your first multipurpose habitat room, and from that moment onward they're all but useless.
(I did find, however, that you can at least minimize the clutter by putting a waterproof locker inside a waterproof locker, inside a waterproof locker, inside a waterproof locker. You can nest them at least four deep, but I think after four, the innermost ones start vanishing.)
While we're speaking of base furnishings, the medical kit fabricator seems to be badly glitched. It is next to impossible to place. I have so far found only three places that it can be constructed.
First, you can place it on ONLY a "diagonal" (i.e, non-hatch-placeable) multipurpose room wall — as long as the wall is not reinforced and has never previously been reinforced. (It simply will not place on a wall that has ever had a reinforcement on it.) And even then, you often have to be standing in the right place relative to the wall — far enough away, and at the correct angle to the wall. It will place embedded into the wall, with wall visible inside when you open it and the medikit hidden inside the wall, but you'll still be able to get the medikit.
Second, bizarrely, you can place it almost anywhere on a multipurpose room window.
Third, you can place it in several spots around the interior of the moon pool, mostly the spots where you can place the Seamoth upgrade station — plus, bizarrely again, actually on the moon pool railing. (If you do this, the railing is visible passing through the inside of the fabricator and through the medikit.)
In all of these locations, it places instantly, and "snaps" on its own to a place about a meter to the right of where you were aiming. If you stand in place in front of a window and turn in place with a medikit fabricator ready to place, watching the behavior of the fabricator, you can see that the game's idea of where you're "aiming" the fabricator is off by about a meter.
I ended up placing mine on a window simply because it's the only place aside from the moon pool railing — which was just too weird — that I could actually see inside it.
Signs are another example of glitchy placement. I have yet to figure out any place I would actually want to place a sign that it's actually possible to place one, or any place it's possible to place one that I'd want to. It seems I can place one in the middle of a window, for example, but ... why on earth would I want to do that?
Biters. Biters. Holy grandmother of Auguste Piccard, biters are annoying. Especially when they appear out of nowhere from behind you, from previously empty ocean, and take a bite out of your ass as you're trying to scan some important fragment. DANG, that smarts. I know, the devs would like us to be nonviolent in Subnautica. And I'm quite happy to be nonviolent when the world will let me. (Aside from, well, you know, that "eating the inhabitants" part.) But biters? Sorry, devs, I kill those psychotic little miniature murder-machines on sight by ramming them with my Seamoth, and consider it a public service. (Granted, it's a service to a public of one. Beggars can't be choosers.)
The Seamoth and the Cyclops.
The Cyclops rocks in many ways, but visibility from it is terrible. It's very hard to see where you're going. (Automatically turning off the the interior lights off whenever you're at the controls might help.) It really needs to have an installable sonar to at least show you large terrain features in your path and the general shape of the seabed beneath you. As it is, you're navigating blind 90% of the time. There's a sonar upgrade for the Seamoth; why isn't there one for the Cyclops? (1% of Seamoth power per ping, though? Seriously? Those sonar pings must have enough energy in them to rupture the internal organs of marine life at a hundred meters. On top of that, it doesn't appear to actually work at present, which rather diminishes its utility.) And please, for the love of all that's merciful, let us have some kind of plot-as-you-explore chart. It's nearly impossible to find your way back to anything again that doesn't have a beacon on it, even after you get the compass.
The Cyclops uses power oddly. It goes in strict numerical order of slots for its energy cells, and if you have a partly-used cell, you can't even move it to the first slot when "refuelling" so that it gets used first. You could easily end up with multiple partly-used energy cells in the Cyclops that you can't replace because they're not fully emptied. This could be fixed easily by having the Cyclops always draw power from the cell with the lowest charge first.
And — if the Cyclops and the Moon Pool can recharge the Seamoth's energy cells, why can't we recharge the Cyclops' energy cells? I mean, if Subnautica were "real", since we know in-game that the Seamoth and the Cyclops take the same energy cells, I could swap drained energy cells one at a time out of the Cyclops, plug them into the Seamoth, and let the Moon Pool recharge them from base power. Why can I recharge the Seamoth's energy cells, but not the Cyclops' cells? They're the same cells. I can mount a solar charger on my Seamoth to trickle-charge it. Why can't I mount solar arrays on my Cyclops to trickle-charge its energy cells?
(Yes, I know I can attach a nuclear reactor later. Haven't found the blueprint yet, and I've only found one piece of uranium. What's wrong with solar power in the interim, if it works on the Seamoth?)
Speaking of finding things ... Signals constantly show you the range to the signal. Beacons exist for the SPECIFIC PURPOSE of helping you find your way back to specific marked things. Why don't beacons show range-to-beacon?
Moon pool is good. I like the moon pool better than hatches as a way to enter and leave my base. Moon pool auto-recharges Seamoth, which is even better. However, the moon pool does not auto-repair the Seamoth, and you can't repair your Seamoth with the welder while it's docked in the moon pool. (At least, I've never managed to get a 'weld' indicator from my welder while my Seamoth is docked.) Could we possibly have a moon pool Seamoth maintenance bot that we can construct using the habitat builder, that has a robotic welding arm running on base power and automatically repairs the Seamoth while docked in the moon pool? Or maybe just have the auto-charging feature also auto-repair?
That's about it for now. More thoughts and commentary later.
(Try not to let them eat you.)
This is a compendium of my thoughts and observations of my first week or so of Subnautica play.
First of all, overall feel in Subnautica is awesome. It's both familiar and alien at the same time, especially to anyone who's ever gone reef snorkeling. I love the visuals. Dive time is severely limited, but on the other hand I don't have to decompress, so that's ... actually, a pretty good trade-off. (It'll be an even better one once I finally get the blueprint for extended-capacity tanks.) And being able to dive to five or six hundred meters without being crushed into jelly OR have to decompress makes me feel like Aquaman or something.
I wish there were some practical use for rabbit rays though. Not necessarily as food. They're just ... cute. So are peepers, in their way.
Good points about resource gathering: No made-up materials! No Fictionalite, no Magickium, no gobbledegook or Treknobabble.
Bad points about resource gathering: Silver, for one, is in very short supply (and difficult to find) considering how crucial it is for making computer chips to make ... well, almost anything beyond basic structures, really. It's only really found in one area, it's hard to spot the sandstone outcrops buried in the blood kelp, and even when you find one, there's about a one in four chance it'll drop gold instead of silver ore. But I already have more gold than I know what to do with, and far fewer uses for gold. (Hey, I'll trade you gold for silver, one for one! You'll never get a better currency exchange rate.)
And plant matter consumes unreasonable amounts of inventory space. Want to make something that needs several units of lubricant? You're going to swim back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth gathering creepvine clusters. Maybe if lubricant took only one creepvine cluster to make instead of three...?
Good points about food and sustenance: All food is not created equal. Different foods have different nutritional values. This is, however, slightly diminished by broiled fillet of Reginald (who named that fish?) being the best food in every regard.
Bad points about food and sustenance: OK, I can readily understand why eating dry or salty foods would decrease your hydration level. And eating very moist foods increases your hydration level, as it should. But why on earth does drinking filtered water decrease your nutrition level...?!? That makes no sense at all.
Lockers! Lockers work nicely. But can we please, please, PLEASE have longer labels? Ten character limits for labels lead to lockers labelled MRSMTHSTF. And, this is just a teeny, teeny gameplay thing ... could the locker labels be moved up to somewhere around the top quarter of the door where they're less likely to be accidentally clicked while opening the locker? Or, an alternate idea: Change the label editing method. Instead of interacting directly with the locker label, have the label be an editable text field in the locker's UI.
And speaking of lockers ... about those floating waterproof lockers. Is there any way to deconstruct or recycle them? Could we perhaps have a way to deconstruct or recycle them? I hate to just throw them away and litter the place up, but basically they are indispensable up until you build your first multipurpose habitat room, and from that moment onward they're all but useless.
(I did find, however, that you can at least minimize the clutter by putting a waterproof locker inside a waterproof locker, inside a waterproof locker, inside a waterproof locker. You can nest them at least four deep, but I think after four, the innermost ones start vanishing.)
While we're speaking of base furnishings, the medical kit fabricator seems to be badly glitched. It is next to impossible to place. I have so far found only three places that it can be constructed.
First, you can place it on ONLY a "diagonal" (i.e, non-hatch-placeable) multipurpose room wall — as long as the wall is not reinforced and has never previously been reinforced. (It simply will not place on a wall that has ever had a reinforcement on it.) And even then, you often have to be standing in the right place relative to the wall — far enough away, and at the correct angle to the wall. It will place embedded into the wall, with wall visible inside when you open it and the medikit hidden inside the wall, but you'll still be able to get the medikit.
Second, bizarrely, you can place it almost anywhere on a multipurpose room window.
Third, you can place it in several spots around the interior of the moon pool, mostly the spots where you can place the Seamoth upgrade station — plus, bizarrely again, actually on the moon pool railing. (If you do this, the railing is visible passing through the inside of the fabricator and through the medikit.)
In all of these locations, it places instantly, and "snaps" on its own to a place about a meter to the right of where you were aiming. If you stand in place in front of a window and turn in place with a medikit fabricator ready to place, watching the behavior of the fabricator, you can see that the game's idea of where you're "aiming" the fabricator is off by about a meter.
I ended up placing mine on a window simply because it's the only place aside from the moon pool railing — which was just too weird — that I could actually see inside it.
Signs are another example of glitchy placement. I have yet to figure out any place I would actually want to place a sign that it's actually possible to place one, or any place it's possible to place one that I'd want to. It seems I can place one in the middle of a window, for example, but ... why on earth would I want to do that?
Biters. Biters. Holy grandmother of Auguste Piccard, biters are annoying. Especially when they appear out of nowhere from behind you, from previously empty ocean, and take a bite out of your ass as you're trying to scan some important fragment. DANG, that smarts. I know, the devs would like us to be nonviolent in Subnautica. And I'm quite happy to be nonviolent when the world will let me. (Aside from, well, you know, that "eating the inhabitants" part.) But biters? Sorry, devs, I kill those psychotic little miniature murder-machines on sight by ramming them with my Seamoth, and consider it a public service. (Granted, it's a service to a public of one. Beggars can't be choosers.)
The Seamoth and the Cyclops.
The Cyclops rocks in many ways, but visibility from it is terrible. It's very hard to see where you're going. (Automatically turning off the the interior lights off whenever you're at the controls might help.) It really needs to have an installable sonar to at least show you large terrain features in your path and the general shape of the seabed beneath you. As it is, you're navigating blind 90% of the time. There's a sonar upgrade for the Seamoth; why isn't there one for the Cyclops? (1% of Seamoth power per ping, though? Seriously? Those sonar pings must have enough energy in them to rupture the internal organs of marine life at a hundred meters. On top of that, it doesn't appear to actually work at present, which rather diminishes its utility.) And please, for the love of all that's merciful, let us have some kind of plot-as-you-explore chart. It's nearly impossible to find your way back to anything again that doesn't have a beacon on it, even after you get the compass.
The Cyclops uses power oddly. It goes in strict numerical order of slots for its energy cells, and if you have a partly-used cell, you can't even move it to the first slot when "refuelling" so that it gets used first. You could easily end up with multiple partly-used energy cells in the Cyclops that you can't replace because they're not fully emptied. This could be fixed easily by having the Cyclops always draw power from the cell with the lowest charge first.
And — if the Cyclops and the Moon Pool can recharge the Seamoth's energy cells, why can't we recharge the Cyclops' energy cells? I mean, if Subnautica were "real", since we know in-game that the Seamoth and the Cyclops take the same energy cells, I could swap drained energy cells one at a time out of the Cyclops, plug them into the Seamoth, and let the Moon Pool recharge them from base power. Why can I recharge the Seamoth's energy cells, but not the Cyclops' cells? They're the same cells. I can mount a solar charger on my Seamoth to trickle-charge it. Why can't I mount solar arrays on my Cyclops to trickle-charge its energy cells?
(Yes, I know I can attach a nuclear reactor later. Haven't found the blueprint yet, and I've only found one piece of uranium. What's wrong with solar power in the interim, if it works on the Seamoth?)
Speaking of finding things ... Signals constantly show you the range to the signal. Beacons exist for the SPECIFIC PURPOSE of helping you find your way back to specific marked things. Why don't beacons show range-to-beacon?
Moon pool is good. I like the moon pool better than hatches as a way to enter and leave my base. Moon pool auto-recharges Seamoth, which is even better. However, the moon pool does not auto-repair the Seamoth, and you can't repair your Seamoth with the welder while it's docked in the moon pool. (At least, I've never managed to get a 'weld' indicator from my welder while my Seamoth is docked.) Could we possibly have a moon pool Seamoth maintenance bot that we can construct using the habitat builder, that has a robotic welding arm running on base power and automatically repairs the Seamoth while docked in the moon pool? Or maybe just have the auto-charging feature also auto-repair?
That's about it for now. More thoughts and commentary later.
Comments
you can repair the seamoth while in the moonpool it is just very hard to see the indicator.
Annoying, but it gives you incentive to start up some exterior grow beds. Drop a few creepvine seeds there and you're set. Place the beds on the terrain to the side or end of your moonpool and you can quickly dive in to harvest what you need, when you need it.
Agree 100%. Even if the label font was smaller, the label would still be clearer. I also wish the larger free standing lockers had labels. I've been putting signs high up on the wall behind them, but a label on the container would be much better.
I haven't tried this, but apparently if you deconstruct a wall locker, its contents are lost. So maybe you could stash the floating lockers inside a wall locker, deconstruct it and get rid of them that way? (you don't get any materials back though)
A cyclops docking station for your sea base is on the dev's to-do list. Presumably that will include recharging ability similar to the moon pool.
Welcome to the undersea world!
I've looked at the large free-standing lockers, but even ignoring the lack of labels, they are only fractionally better for storage density than wall lockers. You can fit three wall lockers on a wall, and have 90 spaces of labelled storage; or you can put two free-standing lockers in front of it, and have 96 spaces of unlabelled storage. The free-standing lockers would be a much more attractive storage proposition if they had 60 or 72 spaces of storage each, even if it took 3 or 4 titanium to craft them. Titanium is NOT REMOTELY in short supply. It's about the one material you have to be careful not to get overstocked on.
But the real advantage of including some freestanding lockers in your base is that their storage space is one square wider, so more larger plants like creepvine etc will fit in. I dedicate one freestanding locker for creepvine seeds and one for those large plant cuttings or seeds you pick up over on the Floater Island.
Hope this helps!
You can actually put four wall lockers per wall.
I only use the other lockers sparingly, but I agree those should have more inventory space consindering their size visually.