Getting Started

Welcome to the Getting Started Guide for newer players, and those who are having trouble or are preparing to survive in Subnautica. This guide covers some first steps, some survival tips, and how to access the latest builds, in both the stable and experimental branch.

Accessing the latest build, and the experimental branch:
Subnautica is currently in an early access phase. Although updates have no defined schedule, they often come out every month or two. This useful guide explains how to download the latest update and also explains how to switch to the experimental branch, which is updated most days and has lots of content which is still in development and is not ready, or is too buggy for the stable builds.

Reporting bugs and giving feedback:
As Subnautica is still in early access, you will be likely to encounter issues, or notice something that you think could be improved. This slightly outdated guide explains how to report bugs or other issues, and how to submit feedbackor suggest ideas through the in game tool (F8) and with some other methods.

Other getting started guides:
There are several other getting started guides out there, but most of them are outdated. The best guide I could find at the time of writing was this incredibly detailed and thorough and mostly up to date guide by Steam users Mango884 and firebirddudeguy. Another good option is this slightly outdated guide by SdjK.

Getting started videos:
A great video for new adventurers by MycroftCanadaNS, showing you the basics of survival in Subnautica.

Please keep in mind that this is very outdated, and doesn't cover most of the things in the current version of Subnautica.Another great video is by Youtube user Morax, and covers most of the beginning, like building a Seaglide and a radiation suit, and is mostly up to date.

Getting Started Guide:
Subnautica begins with a quick intro where you launch your Lifepod, but unfortunately you are knocked out by a loose panel and when you wake up a fire has started in your Lifepod, and you have to quickly get up and extinguish it. Luckily you have a Fire Extinguisher, which you should pick up and quickly extinguish the Lifepod.

If you started playing in the Survival mode of Subnautica, you should look at the HUD, which shows that you have around 80% Health, 50% Food, and 65% Water. After that, you should notice that your Lifepod is badly damaged, with malfunctioning secondary systems and a broken radio.

In your Lifepod's storage, you will find two flares, which can be used as extremely bright red lights or to ward of predators, you will also find two Nutrient Blocks, which are rare, but will recover 75% Food, these should be saved for emergencies and should only be used when you are under 25% Food to avoid wastage, and finally, 2 bottles of Filtered Water, which contain 6oz of water each and will restore 20% Water per bottle. As you will see, you have enough food for a 3-5 days, but barely enough water for even 1 day. You will also notice that your Lifepod will have crashlanded somewhere in the Safe Shallows, a lovely biome which is near the surface of the ocean, has abundant lifeforms, and several types of useful Fauna and Flora, and has very few dangerous lifeforms, the only real risks being Crashfish, which hide in caves, and Gasopods, which hang around in herds.

You should then proceed to leave your Lifepod, and jump into the huge oceans of Planet 4546B. Your immediate goal should be to pick up a few pieces of Metal Salvage, which you can use to create 4 pieces of Titanium in your Fabricator, which will be incredibly useful. After diving, you will notice that you have only 45 seconds of Oxygen, and you can't accomplish much underwater because you have to keep resurfacing for air. Luckily for you, if you head back to your Lifepod you can use your Fabricator to produce a Standard O₂ Tank, which will extend your Oxygen supply by 30 seconds, which should help with your exploring efforts. After fabricating your Standard O₂ Tank you will unlock the blueprint for the High Capacity O₂ Tank, which gives you 135 seconds of Oxygen. You will also notice that your Fabricator has used some energy; your Lifepod has 75 energy, which is supplied by three solar powered power cells, which are exclusive to the Lifepod and cannot be built anywhere else. In your Lifepod energy shouldn't be a problem, as your Lifepod should normally charge itself faster than the Fabricator can drain it. You should also put some of your stuff into your Lifepod's storage, preferably emptying most of your inventory.

Your next priority is swim to the nearest Kelp Forest, which is a neighboring biome to where your Lifepod landed. You can tell where the Kelp Forests are, because they are filled with tall Creepvines, and are often covered with Metal Salvage, because Stalkers, the local Fauna, often collect salvage. You will want to grab several Creepvine Seed Clusters, at least 4, and then return to the Lifepod quickly, because the Stalkers are aggressive, especially when you get too close or take their Metal Salvage. After you reach the Lifepod, fabricate a few pieces of Silicone Rubber, and make some Lubricant, then you should use the Silicone Rubber to create a Survival Knife, which is completely essentially for this game, and you should craft a pair of Fins, which will increase your Swimming Speed. You will then want to fill up any spare space in your Lifepod's storage, to empty out as much of your inventory as possible.

At this point you should leave your Lifepod again, and break several resource outcrops, Limestone will give you Titanium and Copper, and Sandstone will give you Silver, Gold, and Lead. All of these resources are useful, but some are more useful than others. As well as harvesting these resources, you'll need to collect lots of Quartz, which is useful for making glass. Along with everything else, you will need some Acid Mushrooms(Purple mushrooms found commonly in the Safe Shallows), some Table Coral Samples(Coral discs found hanging from terrain in the Safe Shallows), some Creepvine Samples(Knife some Creepvine), and some Cave Sulfur, which is probably the most difficult thing to collect as you will need to find a Sulfur Plant in a cave, and survive the explosion from the Crashfish that inhabits it, and then harvest the Sulfur from inside the plant. You should aim to collect 1 Gold, 2 Silver, 2 Quartz, 12 Copper, 1 Cave Sulfur, 2 Table Coral Samples, 4 Creepvine Samples, and 20 Acid Mushrooms at the minimum, before returning to the Lifepod. You should craft 7 Batteries, 2 Copper Wire, 1 Wiring Kit, 2 Fiber Mesh, and then a Computer Chip. With these you should craft a Flashlight, a Scanner, a Repair Tool, using the Silicone Rubber from earlier, and a Habitat Builder; after this you should head out again, and scan as many fragments as possible, you should try to unlock at least the Seaglide, the Grav Trap, and the Beacon by scanning their respective fragments. After returning to your Lifepod, you should craft a Seaglide using the Lubricant you made earlier, and a Grav Trap. Optionally, if you have the extra ingredients, 1 piece of Silver, 4 units of Titanium, and 4 Quartz, you might want to fabricate 2 pieces of Glass, and then craft a High Capacity O₂ Tank, which will give you 90 seconds more Oxygen, which is 60 seconds more than the Standard O₂ Tank you have already. (Make sure you take the Standard O₂ Tank off your Paperdoll UI, and place it into your inventory before you craft the High Capacity O₂ Tank.)

You should now proceed to release the Grav Trap outside your Lifepod, as it will suck small items, including fish, towards it. One of these will make it much easier to capture fish, for preparing Food & Water.

By now you will most likely be hungry and thirsty. If you want, you could just eat your Nutrient Blocks and drink your Filtered Waters, or you could swim around and catch some fish. (If you already released the Grav Trap, this will be made much easier as it will have attracted several fish, but if you haven't built it yet, or got hungry before you had the materials for it, you can just swim around, and grab one when you get close enough to the fish you are trying to catch.) In the nearby area, you can find several fish, for example Peepers, which are the best fish for Food when cooked, restoring 32% Food, but they are also the fastest; you can also find other fish, like Garryfish, which although they restore the least amount of Food when cooked, 18%, they are the slowest. After catching a couple of Peepers, or several Garryfish or some amount of other fish, you can cook them in the Fabricator, or cure them with some Salt. Curing prevents your Food rotting, but makes your Food remove Water. Now, to restore your Water levels, you can either capture Bladderfish and fabricate Filtered Water from them, which as stated earlier, restores 20% Water per bottle, or you could collect some Salt, and collect some Coral Tube Samples, which can be gathered by knifing Giant Coral Tubes, which are useful because 1 Salt, and 1 Coral Tube Sample can be used to create 2 bottles of Disinfected Water, which restore 30% Water per bottle. It's clear which option is most profitable, as the Salt and Coral option restores 60% Water, while the Bladderfish method only restores 20% Water.

After collecting your Food, you will want to use some of your new Tools. If you use the Repair Tool on the Radio and on the Lifepod's damaged secondary systems, you will repair the Lifepod, which gives you a full environmental scan, fixes the lights, and prevents the Lifepod from drifting. You can also use the Flashlight to light up areas, the Seaglide to increase your Swimming Speed, and you can scan things with the Scanner, and perform a self scan with F. Your Habitat Builder is useful to build Seabases.

You can build Seabases, by right clicking while holding the Habitat Builder, which opens a menu, with this menu you can choose which blueprint to build. Early in the game you will only have basic stuff, like L Comparments and Foundations, but later in the game you can find the Multipurpose Room, the Wall Planter, the Bulkhead, the Composite Plant Pot, the Exterior and Interior Growbeds, and the Spotlight on the Floating Island. Other Seabase modules can be found elsewhere, like in Wrecks and in abandoned Seabases in some of the more creepy, dangerous and deep biomes.

After a while of surviving, you'll likely go near the Aurora, where you will notice that the Crash Zone is badly irradiated. Radiation does damage to the player, and although it only covers the Crash Zone at first, it spreads out to cover a larger area after the Aurora undergoes a Quantum Detonation and explodes. The Crash Zone is an extremely creepy, dangerous, and inhospitable biome filled with mostly hostile Fauna, but is often worth the risk because of the sheer amount of resources, scrap, and fragments. Although you could just avoid the irradiated biomes, eventually you will need to explore this area, and if you want to find one of the lategame vehicles, you will need to explore the crashed spaceship. To explore the Aurora, the Crash Zone, and other affected biomes, you will need a Radiation Suit. A Radiation Suit can be fabricated out of 1 Titanium, 2 Lead, and 1 Fiber Mesh, and takes up the head, body, and glove slots in the Paperdoll UI, but when you are wearing the full suit it grants you full Radiation resistance, letting you explore irradiated areas without taking damage. Eventually you can stop the Radiation, but that's spoilers and not part of a Getting Started guide.

What to do next?
Now that you've done some earlygame things, you have enough supplies to last a while, you have a Seaglide, and maybe even a Seabase, you'll want to start exploring - however, your ability to explore is limited by how much equipment you've discovered and built. The biomes surrounding Lifepod 5 gradually get deeper and deeper, as well as more dangerous - and terrifying. While it's not required to discover every available piece of technology or point of interest, it will definitely help you along the way, and is often surprisingly fun. Here's some suggestions for how to proceed, in no particular order:


 * Locate the other Lifepods for extra provisions and even a full Radiation Suit, if you haven't built one already - the Lifepod's Radio will send you messages where they are located(Not all of them give coordinates, but they all give you a method to help you find them), assuming you've repaired it.
 * Find the Multipurpose Room fragments from the Degasi Seabases.
 * Build a Seabase, if you haven't already, to store your inventory, grow food and have access to more tools than the Lifepod provides. You can also improve and expand your base if you already have one.
 * Build Waterproof Lockers as temporary Storage. (If you can, build Lockers in a Seabase instead, as they are bigger and more useful.
 * Explore Wrecks for Fragments and supplies; most of the more advanced equipment and technology you will want. If you wish to spoil yourself, and look up the locations rather than exploring, these articles contains all the locations.
 * Build a Mobile Vehicle Bay and a Seamoth; so you can easily explore deeper waters and other biomes farther away from the Lifepod. (Requires you have found the Blueprints by scanning Fragments in their appropriate Wrecks first.)
 * Build a Cyclops as your mobile base (requires finding multiple Fragments to unlock the blueprints first, and many of them are in scary, dangerous, and deep biomes.)
 * Explore deeper biomes, and find Alien Bases.
 * Explore the wreckage of the Aurora. (Be careful, this requires a Radiation Suit, and there are extremely dangerous creatures around the Aurora.)
 * During exploration of the Aurora, you can find all Fragments of the Prawn Suit. Once you've unlocked the blueprint, you can build the Exosuit and explore deeper biomes or mine Large Resource Deposits.

While you can play the game at your own pace, the game will direct you towards certain story events that need to be completed in order for you to progress further and eventually escape the planet. These events can be completed at any time, but will often steer you to new locations and/or require you to have found certain items (whether it be a vehicle that can go deep enough, or various keys) to access them.

Good luck! ☻