A small study of more or less usable things in Subnautica

zetachron

After gaining some Subnautica experience, I've made list of things in Subnautica considering their usability in my eyes.

*** = highly essential and frequently used
** = usable to some extend
* = not much use, could get reworked

Anorganic resources:
*** Metal salvage, Titanium & Titanium ingots
*** Quartz & Glass
*** Salt
*** Copper ore
*** Lead
*** Silver (hard to get until drilling)
*** Lithium
*** Magnetite
*** Uraninite crystal & Uranium
** Gold (more found than used)
* Diamond (not many needs)
* Crash powder (only 1 tool recipe)
* Sulphur (only 1 tool recipe, needs console to get?)

Organic resources:
** Creepvine (only for fiber mesh)
*** Creepvine seed cluster (glowing)
*** Common coral
*** Table coral
** Acid mushroom (only for batteries)
** Purple brain coral (good for growing O2 beds)
** Bulbo tree
** Chinese potato plant
*** Lantern tree (good for bioreactor, glowing)
*** Marblemelon plant (fast growth and much food)
*** Stalker tooth
** Tiger plant (grow your defenses)
* Blood oil (not many needs)
* Deep shroom (not many needs)
* Spore sack (not many needs)
* Other plants (only deco or for bioreactor)

Usable Creatures:
*** Peeper & other small fish (food source, especially Bladderfish & Reginald)
*** Gasopod (harvesting gas, good predator defense)
*** Stalkers (harvesting teeth, living metal detectors)
** Seatreader (still can play game without using it)
** Crash fish (cave threats, give powder; should be usable with Propulsion cannon)
* Other creatures & predators (mainly good looking and fun)

Creature threats:
*** Crabsquid (tough now, waiting for EMP attack ...)
*** Ampeel (almost too tough to kill even with Prawn, no weakness like Reaper against shock?)
*** Sand and Bone Sharks
** Reaper leviathan (can be circumvented too easy; let him roam the open sea or guard something)
** Bleeder (need more in wrecks and narrow tunnels)
** Biters & Blighters (not enough swarm behaviour)
** Cave crawler (needs to stick to metal like the lava larva)
** Lava lizards (can't harm Prawn, but should protect or eat lava larvas)
** Crabsnake (cool, but too easy to circumvent; should roam and also hide in caves)
* Mesmer (slow, avoidable & medium bite; better use paralyze or poison)

Fabricated materials:
*** Silicone rubber
*** Lubricant
*** Enameled glass
*** Uranium
*** Copper wire
*** Battery
*** Computer chip
*** Reactor rod
*** Big filtered water
** Bleach
** Fiber mesh
** Magnesium
** Plasteel ingot
** Power cell
** Wiring kit
** Advanced wiring kit
** Filtered water
** Disinfected water
* Benzene (needs more uses)
* Synthetic fibers (needs more uses)
* Aerogel (needs more uses)
* Polyaniline (needs more uses)
* Hydrochloric acid (needs more uses)

Fabricated Equipment:
*** Survival knife, Hardened blade & Thermoblade
*** Fins, Ultraglide fins & SC fins
*** O2 tank, Plasteel tank & HC tank
*** Rebreather
*** Thermometer
*** Radiation suit
*** Flashlight & Light stick
*** Scanner
*** Welder
*** Habitat builder
*** Laser cutter
*** Propulsion cannon (add inventory pickup?)
*** Stasis rifle
*** Seaglide
** Repulsion cannon (don't want to carry both cannons with me)
** Beacon
** Gravsphere
** Stillsuit
** First aid kit (less use with autoheal; bleeding or poisoning would improve their use)
** Fire extinguisher (more environments with fire, maybe random habitat disaster events?)
* Pipe (pain to use, needs situation where it's a monopoly or easy handling)
* Dive reel (could need it in wicked tunnels where it doesn't work)
* Air bladder (only at the very begin, use them to lift waterproof lockers?)
* Flare (in rare situations the best tools, maybe use them to distract creatures?)
* Compass (who needs with only 2 HUD slots available?)
* Waterproof locker (inventory should slow down player & locker should rise to surface?)
* Current generator (could serve as creature barrier?)
* Mobile vehicle bay (only 3 uses, get more constructions or use as general drone bay?)

Vehicles & Greater exterior habitat modules:
*** Seamoth
*** Prawn suit
** Cyclops (could still improve: navigation, scanning, docking, ...)
*** Habitat corridors
*** Multipurpose room
*** Moonpool
** Foundation
** Vertical connection (maybe add turbolift improvement?)
** Observatory (maybe too small to enjoy?, missing a glass dome)
* Scanner room (needs a real rework, but cams and looking are good)

Other habitat builder items:
*** Hatch
*** Window
*** Reinforcement
*** Ladder
*** Alien containment
*** Water filtration machine
*** Vehicle modification station
*** Power transmitter, Solar panel, Thermal plant (could use creature attacks)
*** Bio & Nuclear reactor (needs water support?, nuclear meltdown risk but more power?)
*** Fabricator
*** Battery charger
*** Lockers
*** Growbeds & Pots
** Communications relay (gets better as story improves ...)
** Power cell charger (mainly useful for Cyclops)
** Spotlight
** Plant shelf (no hanging plants?)
** Other decoration elements
* Bulkhead (needs flood incidents, maybe earthquakes?)
* Medical kit fabricator (suffers from low med kit usage: only need 1 med fab for entire game)
* Modification station (unfortunately tools never degrade, add repair functions for degradables?)
* Floodlight (cool but impractical, where do I need it?)
* Vending machine (ugly, non Alterra style, no food container, no dispenser menu)
* Trash cans (ugly & useless; should be smart container with item disintegration)

Vehicle extensions:
*** Pressure compensator Mk1-3
*** Seamoth solar charger (a bit overpowered)
*** Seamoth perimeter defense system (a bit overpowered)
*** Prawn suit jump jet upgrade (God is a DJ!)
*** Prawn suit drill arm (fear the Prawn!)
*** Prawn suit grappling arm (forget Spiderman and Tarzan and ride that Sea dragon)
** Cyclops pressure compensators (too easy, menu better at Vehicle mod station)
** Hull reinforcement, Power efficiency & Storage modules (upgradables?)
** Seamoth sonar (cool & useful for beginners, upgrades?)
** Prawn suit thermal reactor (underpowered, recharge time should greatly depend on heat!)
** Prawn suit propulsion cannon (only miss a button to store to cargo)
* Seamoth torpedo system (cool in video but impractical for play, practical upgrades?)
* Prawn suit torpedo arm (torpedos suck!!!)
* Vortex torpedo (only looks good but is worse than a stasis field)
* Gas torpedo (the Ampeels & Reapers only laugh in your face while the Peepers cower in fear)

Scanner room extras:
** Camera drone (best of scanner room, can scout ahead)
** Scanner room HUD chip (needs practical scanning)
* Scanner room range & speed upgrades (waste of effort)

Summary & some thoughts:

Most failed tech that could be better is Scanner room and Torpedos. They both look good for videos but are utterly impractical.
The torpedos need better non lethal use (not necessarily more lethality). Maybe homing, better capacity or simply being more efficient.
The scanner room range is mad and useless in open areas, which is for most parts of the game.
Maybe scanning is only good at Crash caves and Kelp forest and was only tested there and nowhere else.
And maybe different ranges for different scan types or scan type upgrades might fix the problem.

Most tech recipes probably will be refined over time to improve.
Like the small aquarium needing 4 glass + 2 titanium, while the big alien containment needs only 4+1.
Or maybe resources like Crash powder get more uses than 1 in the whole game, as the welder never degrades.
The Pipes should really attach to powerless bases for O2 support and get better construction.
Very slow degradable tools would allow to reuse the fabricator menu or offer a repair station for degradables.


EDIT:
The Ladder and the Moonpool are still missing a 90 degree rotation option in the game
The Compass and Medkits might be good beginners items but less for experienced players

Mouse

One other issue with the scanner room is that because resources don't regenerate, its usefulness degrades over time.
After you've scanned for quartz once, you can collect all of the quartz in range and then never need to scan for quartz again.

Sidchicken

zetachron wrote: »

*** Propulsion cannon (add inventory pickup?)

Not quite sure what you're asking here, but you can already grab the thing you cannon. Just left-click. Helpful for catching peepers if you don't want to run them down.

EDIT: Also, I love having a compass. Makes it much easier to figure out where I'm going. Or to navigate back to an area (I know I'm going west to reach my base, so I'll head east when I leave to get back to that cave full of silver I didn't have the inventory for).

Hexiva

Some of these are pretty subjective based on your play style - for instance, I found the power cell charger, the compass, and PARTICULARLY the medkit fabricator to all be indispensable. On the other hand, I found the Moonpool to be very nearly useless, and I still haven't figured out how to get the vertical connector to work properly.

I definitely don't think that the Reapers need to be any more frequent than they are; I personally was terrified of them the entire time. Every time I went into a new biome I was asking myself, "IS THIS A REAPER BIOME???"

Kesselbrut

Hexiva wrote: »

(...)
I definitely don't think that the Reapers need to be any more frequent than they are; I personally was terrified of them the entire time. Every time I went into a new biome I was asking myself, "IS THIS A REAPER BIOME???"

Don't fear the reaper, we'll be able to swim, don't fear the reaper...

BTW I want a T-Shirt with a Reaper Leviathan and "Don't fear the Reaper Leviatian" on it...

Back to Topic:

I agree with most of the items the thread starter said, but some things are more useless or lesser, so I want to share my experience.

For instance:

-Flashlight, if you use the Seaglide, it is completely useless and even if no Seaglide I rarely use it.
-Radiation Suit, just needed untill you patched the Aurora beyond that no use
-Radiation gloves, same as Suit, but there isn't even an alternative to that slot, I would suggest Flashlight gloves (as I don't know what else could be useful in this slot...)
-Spotlight, I find it highly annoying that it moves, can we maybe have a moving and a stationary one?
-Floodlight, as Spotlight alternative, maybe Floodlight Battery keep recharging or uses base energy if near a base (if you have more than 4 Floodlights it gets annoying to change the batteries...)
-Ladder, please make it rotatable! Please! Please! Please!
-Trashcan, yes, please make it able to desintergate items, I have a landfill, umm, seafill, near my base with items I accidently crafted and broken down knifes, doesn't looks that good...
-Compass, most usefull for navigating, if you habe a map you mostly know, well I wanna go northeast (etc.) from my base to come the biome X or in 90% of map you have either Mountain Island & Aurora or Floater Island & Aurora to triangulate your approx. position. I find it highly usefull!

So far to that, it's just my thoughts on my experiences, so remember experiences may vary

Sidchicken

Kesselbrut wrote: »

I would suggest Flashlight gloves (as I don't know what else could be useful in this slot...)

That would be pretty freaking sweet actually - I'm thinking gloves that you craft with some sort of fiber mesh (or advanced fibers), and creepvine seed clusters, and they make your hands glow like a seed cluster, so you're surrounded by yellow light while you swim.

zetachron

@Sidchicken
Maybe I meant the Prawn propulsion having no pickup (at least didn't find one).
For the compass - I played this game too long and might have memorized the whole map. A beginner could find the compass useful, but it annoys me to switch the HUD elements with only 2 slots.

@Hexiva
I might be too experienced to get much health loss and thus don't need much med kits. The med dispenser is probably more essential for beginners. The moonpool is the central docking bay and recharging station for Seamoth and Prawn later in game.
The Reaper has a big disadvantage that it stays in a certain area and can be observed from afar. Then you can circumvent him. But yes, for beginners he looks frightening.

@Kesselbrut
Seaglide light is indeed better and even perfect for wreck shaft mazes. But the other lights are 1 inventory size only and needed without the seaglide. I heard the Rad suit will be needed to handle uranium or get damage - if that's true he'll stay useful if you use nuclear power.
Ladders and the Moonpool are missing a 90 degree rotation, that's right, forgot to mention it.

Enderguy059

I honestly believe that most, if not all, of the vehicle modules should be upgradeable. For example, Torpedo Launcher/Bay upgrades could let you decide between: more storage, homing torpedoes, or both.