User blog:OKHeike/A true Noob guide to Subnautica

I'm a veteran player of Minecraft and Creativerse, and I've tried Unturned (without much luck, I die really quick), but not much else, so here is a guide from the perspective of someone who isn't an experienced player.

The game begins with a movie of sorts. When you get control, there is a fire in front of you and a fire extinguisher rolling on the floor. The mouse changes your POV (point of view, you use it to look around or select objects). When your little circle with a cross inside it (hereafter arbitrarily called the target by me) is on the Fire Extinguisher, a little hand will appear and you can pick it up by clicking the primary (usually left) mouse button.

Putting out the fire is a bit tricky (and time-consuming) but at this point there are no consequences for dying so don't worry too much, just get past it. If you get too close to the fire, you burn up. If you're too far away, the fire doesn't extinguish. Try taking one step to the right and one step forwards ( d  = right, w = forward), point the fire extinguisher at the panel (not at the base of the fire like you would in real life) and hold down the secondary (usually right) mouse button. Eventually the fire goes out.

Now you're floating in an alien ocean in a damaged lifepod. The game will inform you about your PDA and show you how to open your inventory (pretty empty at this point) with the TAB key. Under the display panel that tells you main power is off, you'll see a red rectangle. That's a storage container. Approach it and put your target on it until it changes to a hand and says 'open storage.' Click the primary mouse button to open it. The stuff on the right side is what's in the storage container, anything on the left (like the fire extinguisher) is in your inventory. In my experience, there are usually a couple of food bars, 1 or 2 bottles of water, a couple of flares, and possibly other random items in the storage. Right-click on the fire extinguisher to put it in the storage (you won't need it again for a long time and it frees up inventory space), and right-click on items in the storage that you want to move to your inventory.

You can, of course, eat one of the nutrition bars and drink water right away, but be frugal if you can - getting food and water is somewhat difficult. Now look to the left of the display panel and you'll see a white box with a red cross on it. Open it just like you opened the storage, and pick up the med kit (restores 50 health) inside. This "med kit fabricator" will give you a new med kit every 30 minutes. On the right side is your fabricator - you won't be able to do anything with it until you have some raw materials.

Now you can either climb the ladder (when you target the ladder you get the hand and text that says "climb ladder" or target and click on the orange hatch in the floor between the ladder and the display panel to exit the lifepod. You are now in an area affectionately called the "safe shallows" (because typically nothing here tries to kill you) and close to the surface of the water. Look down and press w to descend, and note that as you go under the surface the  O2 indicator on the bottom left of the screen starts to go down. That's how much O2 you have in seconds. Every time you surface, it automatically refills. If you run out of O2 you drown and re-spawn inside the lifepod with 100% health. You will gather raw materials from the ocean and return to the lifepod to fabricate food and materials. Note that if you die, anything that you have picked up or caught since the last time you were in the lifepod will disappear. That's why, when you re-enter the pod, it says "inventory secured." You can only enter the pod from the bottom; target the hatch and you'll get the hand and text that says "board lifepod," left-click to enter.

If you left the pod via the hatch, move out from under it. Look around a little and watch your oxygen; when it gets low press the space bar to surface, and you will see the oxygen bar fill up. On the seabed around you you should see glowing mushrooms, coral formations, sand, and some fish swimming around. One of the first things you need to do is catch some fish, then find some salt deposits, Take a minute or two to get comfortable with movement, because right now the fish are faster than you are.

(To be continued)