Subnautica Analysis
1 Overview
Subnautica is a first-person open world survival game by Unknown Worlds Entertainment, which was released in January, 2018.
2 Formal Elements
2.1 Players
In Subnautica, you play as the lone survivor of a scientific exploration team sent to an alien planet. Your space-ship crashes at the very opening of the game, and you spend the rest of the game surviving, trying to find out what happened, and why. You control your character exclusively from the first-person, and even vehicles are controlled in this way. You will never met any living NPCs, and there are no other players in the game.
2.2 Objectives
As a survival game, you will spend a large amount of time managing your health conditions. You have health, breath, thirst, and hunger meters. Your breath limit starts at 45 seconds and will deplete whenever you are underwater and not in a vehicle. It replenishes quickly whenever you’re above water or in a vehicle. Hunger and thirst slowly deplete, although thirst drops at a slightly quicker rate. Health drops whenever you are attacked by an animal, burned by fire, fall from a great height, or receive too much radiation. Whenever one of these meters drops to zero, you will die and respawn in the nearest lifepod, seabase, or cyclops. Managing these conditions will occupy most of your first few hours in the game, but as you explore, gather more resources, scan new items, and venture farther and deeper from the safety of your landing zone, you will discover more about the planet, what happened to your ship, and why. You will even find a way to escape.
2.3 Rules
2.3.1 Movement
In Subnautica, you will spend most of your time swimming. In this mode, you can move vertically and horizontally, although the fastest movement directions are straight forward. While swimming, you can catch fish, pick up eggs, harvest plants, and gather resources from scrap and from rock outcrops.
There are some sections where you will walk around. These parts work the same as most FPS, where you can run, jump, walk and strafe, although there are no guns or other weapons besides a simple knife with which to defend yourself.
Movement in the vehicles functions mostly the same. One of the differences is in the control options for lights, movement speed, and grappling arms in certain vehicles. For instance, you can eventually build a PRAWN diving suit, which is like a large mech suit. This suit normally sinks to the bottom of the ocean, but you may use a limited jump jet function to return to higher areas. Later, this can be upgraded and a grappling arm may be created, allowing you to latch onto cliffs, creatures, or other features. This can be used to allow your jet to recharge so you can scale a cliff too high for the jump jet, or to launch yourself forward at speeds not normally attainable. The seamoth and cyclops submarines offer other possibilities.
One last difference between swimming and vehicle movement is the depth limits. All the vehicles have depth limits, after which their hulls will start to take crush damage. You will never receive crush damage, no matter the depth, but you may enter water which is too hot and start to get boiled.
2.3.2 Gear, Items, and Inventory
As a survival game, items and materials are crucial. You have a personal inventory made of 48 slots, although different items and tools take up different numbers of slots. You also have seven wearable slots which do not take up space in your inventory.
Unfortunately, you will also spend some of your most frustrating periods managing inventory. All of your tools occupy inventory slots, which reduces the amount of materials that you can scavenge. Similarly to the Souls series, when you die, you will lose any items that you picked up recently. These can be recovered by returning to the spot where you died.
The main frustrations will come from moving things around. During the mid and endgame portions, you will need large numbers of various materials including titanium, nickel, kyanite, and many others. To store these, you will need to construct numerous storage lockers. To construct a particular item, you will need to go from locker to locker, gathering the requisite numbers of each material, then carrying them to the fabricator, modification station, or vehicle upgrade station. And since advanced items often require mid-level and low-level crafted items, this will mean a kind of recursive and repetitive to-and-froing: ”I want to craft item A, oh so I need 2 Bs, 3 Cs, and 1 D. Oh. I don’t have any Bs, so to make 1 B I need 3 Es and 1 F. Oh. I don’t have any Fs. To make one, I need 2 Gs.” Now that you have the item with the lowest priority, you can craft it, then craft the item you make from that one, etc, etc.
2.3.3 Crafting
Crafting plays a major part in Subnautica. Each item crafted either takes the same amount of slots or fewer than the materials, so space is not an issue in this case.
2.4 Procedures
2.4.1 Searching an Area & Scavenging
Much of the game will be taken by searching for materials, particular resources, parts to scan, and fish to eat. This will involve moving around in a 3D environment in the ocean. The lighting becomes darker the deeper you travel under the surface, and this is also effected by the time of day. The lighting effects how easy it is to spot items.
Another consideration is the depth. Depth varies greatly, although not to the degree on Earth. Some items can be found nearly at the surface, while others can only be found below 1000 meters under the surface. Related to depth is the complexity of the path to the location. Some items are only found inside sunken ship segments which may have locked doors, blocked hatches etc; or inside convoluted caves. Both these tie in to the fact that you are underwater for most of the game. In order to reach a resource location, you need to factor in the amount of time it will take to reach there, in addition to returning to the surface.
Easing the difficulty of deep exploration is the fact that as long as your vehicles have power, they will generate oxygen, allowing you to use them to dive to the maximum depth of the vehicle without worrying about returning all the way to the surface for oxygen.
Two final considerations are inventory and animals. If you are searching for materials, you need to make sure you have enough room in your inventory to carry them, or be willing to drop other items to make room, or play inventory tetris with your storage and your vehicle’s storage (assuming it has storage). Lastly, there are a large number of different animals in Subnautica, most of which will ignore or flee from you, but there is a non-trivial number of animals which will attack and kill you, and some can damage or destroy your vehicles as well. Since you are swimming in the ocean for most of the game, these can be hidden by distance and appear from almost any direction to harass you or kill you, or damage or destroy your vehicle. Lights and sounds will attract some of them, and because they can appear quite suddenly, it can be shocking and scary to encounter them.
In any case, fish and different kinds of plants can be either caught in mid-ocean or harvested from the seabed. There are different kinds of rock outcroppings which can be struck to reveal a procedurally generated mineral, such as titanium, silver, gold, lead, etc. There are also larger outcroppings which of course hold larger amounts of the mineral, but which require the drill arm upgrade for the PRAWN suit in order to be harvested. The plus side to these is both the larger amount and the purity: if you drill into a titanium outcropping, you will only receive titanium, so you don’t have to wonder if you’re going to get what you want.
In sunken ship segments, and also scattered around the play area, you will find fragments of seabase parts, interior modules, vehicles, and others. Once the required number of fragments for a part has been scanned, you may construct it (provided you have the necessary materials).
A sub- or separate category of scavenging is related to the story. Your radio in the life-pod, and any later radios you build will receive transmissions throughout the game. Most of these will be from other life-pods that also launched from your ship (although you will find no bodies and no survivors). Pieces of the background and elements of the story will be revealed in this way, through the tried and true method of audio logs (as in Bioshock and many series after that), and text messages. Further, many of these will contain plans for needed tools, vehicles, etc. As you learn about the aliens of the story, you will also hear some translations of their transmissions, and learn about their civilization and technology.
2.4.2 Managing Inventory
This is one of the most annoying parts that you will have to regularly engage in. In order to gather ingredients, you will need to make excursions in the seamoth, cyclops, PRAWN suit, and in your normal diving suit. For example, in order to get kyanite in usable quantities, you will need to venture out in the cyclops submarine to the Lost River area, then take the PRAWN suit with the drill arm attachment down to the Inactive Lava region, then start drilling kyanite outcroppings. Since inventory on the PRAWN suit is even more limited than your own (24 slots), you may need to make several trips back and forth in order to empty the PRAWN’s inventory and your own into the cyclops, before returning to your life pod or seabase. Now, these excursions themselves are not the main issue, but dealing with the resources you’ve now collected is.
In the beginning, you will probably just throw material willy-nilly into storage lockers, but this will soon become unmanageable. For myself, I had to build approximately 10 storage lockers, and use some of my precious stores of copper ore to build labels for them in order to make it quick and easy to get the right items in the right place. Further, I had to move the storage lockers from a hallway in my base to a full room, which required a lot of back and forth movement and inventory juggling. Although ”realistic,” it would have been better for items in the cyclops, PRAWN or seamoth to be automatically moved to storage lockers, and to have materials in storage lockers automatically accessible to the base fabricator and other stations. This would prevent you from having to put things in the right place, then retrieve them from the ”right place” when needed and moving them to the correct crafting station (Fabricator, Modification Station, or Vehicle Upgrade Station, etc).
2.4.3 Crafting & Construction
Like scavenging, crafting items and constructing vehicles, vehicle upgrades, and base parts will take up a significant part of game play time. You start the game with a single life pod with a storage locker, radio, and Fabricator. This will allow you to turn some basic materials into tools and useful items, purify water, and cook food. However, the storage locker is quite limited in space, and in order to advance in the game you will need to build vehicles, which requires the Mobile Vehicle Bay. To construct this, you will need to first build a scanner from the Fabricator, using a battery and a piece of titanium (the battery will of course need to be constructed first, using a piece of copper ore and two acid mushrooms). You will need to explore the area until you find enough fragments of the Mobile Vehicle Bay to allow its construction, then you can gather the materials (a titanium ingot, made from 10 titanium ores, one lubricant, made from creep vine seed clusters, and one power cell made from two batteries and one silicone rubber, also made from a creep vine seed cluster) and build it at the Fabricator.
Eventually, you will find previous seabases and many other items and fragments for upgrades, and these will allow you to build your own seabases.
This system is quite in depth, if you can pardon the pun. From basic rooms, you can attach different kinds of connecting passages, both vertical and horizontal, as well as building reinforcing panels, windows, airlocks, and hatches for either the rooms or passages. Inside the base you can build a plethora of different modules, from planters, bed, chairs, and desks, to battery rechargers and water filtration machines.
On the exterior, you have similar options. You may build flood lights and spot lights to illuminate your base, solar panels to provide power, and several other cosmetic and utilitarian choices.
2.5 Resources
In Subnautica, like in many survival games, there are numerous resources.
2.5.1 Tangible Resources
- Minerals: There are numerous minerals in the game:
- titanium
- copper
- gold
- silver
- quartz
- lead
- lithium
- salt
- diamond
- nickel
- magnetite
- uraninite
- kyanite
- ruby
- crystaline sulfur
These are all gathered from rock outcroppings, or mineral outcroppings, although titanium can also be produced by processing ship scrap, and a few minerals may be found just laying around on the seabed.
- Plants: Just like minerals, there are numerous plants in the game. Most of these are just to provide ambiance, but others can be harvested for useful materials or for food. Some can be planted in a special seabase module.
- Animals: You will see dozens of different fish and other creatures in throughout the world of Subnautica. These range of tiny cave worms to horrifying leviathan beasts that can kill you quickly and damage or destroy your vehicles. Smaller fish can be captured for food, and even raised inside a special seabase module.
- Food: Some smaller animals and some plants may be collected for food.
- Water: Like the saying goes, “Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.” The water in the ocean is not drinkable, but must be processed, either using a bladder fish, bleach, or using a water filtration module.
- Materials and advanced materials: From basic minerals, animals, and plants,
you may craft materials and advanced materials. Although not incredibly long,
production chains can involve gathering several diverse resources, and multiple
processing steps. As one example, in order to craft the Shield Generator
Module for the Cyclops vehicle, you need 1 advanced wiring kit, 1 polyaniline,
and one power cell.
As you can see, from basic minerals and plants to finished product, there are three intermediary steps. This is one of the more complicated items you might build in the game.
- Vehicles: You may craft as many vehicles in each category as you like, although due to the material requirements for the vehicles themselves and for their upgrades, this may not be advisable. Personally, I ended up building two seamoths, one cyclops, and one PRAWN suit, besides the Neptune rocket and launch pad. Although not a resource, you may customize your vehicles to some degree, giving them different names and altering the color scheme.
- Vehicle Upgrades: As mentioned several times now, you may craft upgrades to your vehicles. These may increase the strength of the hull against animal attacks, allow it to recharge its power source using sunlight or heat, increase the depth it may dive to, or several others. These muse be crafted using the vehicle upgrade console or the cyclops upgrade console, and may themselves be upgraded using the modification station. They can be carried around, removed, and installed in different vehicles, or even stored in storage lockers.
- Equipment and tools: There are multiple tools in Subnautica, ranging from your basic knife, flashlights and fire extinguishers to advanced items like stasis rifles and propulsion cannons. Although these later sound like weapons, the former is used to freeze animals in place so you may escape, and the later is used to push or pull large crates out of the way during certain exploration sections. There are also tools which change the state of the items around you, such as a repair tool which allows you to repair damage to your vehicles or seabase sections, or a powerful base constructor tool which allows you to build new base sections and modules. Many of these require power to run, so you will need a good supply of batteries and power cells. You can also get different pieces of equipment which do not use inventory slots when they are equipped. These are items like swimming fins, a compass, your diving suit and mask, and of course your diving tank. Many of these may be modified or upgraded at the modification station.
- Seabases and seabase interior/exterior modules: As you progress in the game, you will likely begin building a seabase. There are over 20 different modules for the seabase, including foundation pieces and basic/advanced rooms, different types of connecting halls and vertical passages, and many different machines and accessories.
2.5.2 Intangible Resources
- Light: Light influences how difficult or easy it is to spot resources as you explore, and greatly effects the atmosphere of the game. When you see a huge leviathan lunge out of the darkness at you, it really gets your heart racing.
- Health: You have a separate health bar from your hunger, thirst and oxygen. This can be filled by using a medkit, and depletes when you are attacked by an animal, in hot water, touch lava, or fall from a tall height.
- Oxygen: As described before, you spend most of your time underwater, so the longer you stay under, the lower your oxygen meter gets, unless you are in a powered vehicle.
- Hunger: This drops naturally over time, and may be filled by eating food.
- Thirst: This also drops naturally over time, and may be filled by drinking water and by eating some food items.
- Vehicle stats: Your vehicles have several different stats: movement speed, amount of power, amount of storage, number of upgrade slots, and hull integrity.
- Seabase stats: Similarly to your vehicles, your seabases have stats: hull integrity, amount of power generated, amount of power used, etc. If hull integrity becomes to low to due damage or due to lack of reinforcement or adding too many sections/windows, this can lead to floods. Lack of light during night can also cause power to stop being generated by solar cells, which can lead to no oxygen being produced, and machines which require power to stop working.
2.6 Conflicts
Like any good story or game, there are many conflicts in Subnautica. One of the most basic is risk versus reward. As you continue to explore the world of Subnautica, you will go farther away from your life-pod, and ever deeper underwater. Although you will also given tools to make this exploration easier, the risks do increase, as do the rewards. Generally speaking, more of the animals farther away from from your life-pod are aggressive and are larger (capable of doing more damage to you and your vehicles), and there are additional hazards, such as hot lava or boiling water, running out of oxygen hundreds of meters under water, poisonous or acidic chemicals, radiation and fires. You must continuously monitor your situation and decide if it makes sense to press on, return to your vehicle, return to the surface, etc, knowing that you might not be able to find your way back easily, or that you might be attacked trying to escape or on your way back.
There are also conflicts involving the use of resources. There are several uses for most, so you must decide which use will be most beneficial to you. Of course, this is not immediately obvious and you may make a lot of mistakes or short-sighted decisions in this regard.
One final area is in cyclops vehicle pairing. The cyclops submarine can contain one extra vehicle, such as the seamoth or PRAWN suit. If you decide to take the cyclops out on a resource run, you must decide whether to bring one of the smaller vehicles with you, and if so, which one you want to bring along.
2.7 Boundaries
2.7.1 Inventory
As mentioned previously, inventory is limited to 48 slots, although vehicles sometimes come with internal storage and you may construct additional storage lockers in your seabases.
2.7.2 Map
Although the area which you may explore is quite large, at least 12 km2, and due to the verticality of the enviroments, the actual explorable volume is much closer to 6 km3.
2.8 Outcomes
There is one outcome for the game: you discover the reason why your ship was shot down, help a leviathan reproduce and cure the infection of the planet, and construct a complete Neptune rocket and launch pad, escaping the planet.
3 Dynamic Elements
3.1 Patterns
This section focuses on game patterns as discussed by Ernest Adams and Joris Dormans in Game Mechanics: Advanced Game Design.
3.1.1 Slow Cycle
This pattern has many manifestations. There is a cycle between day and night, with the consequences that have been explored above. There is an oxygen cycle, where you will start from a vehicle, seabase, or the surface and begin exploring the ocean until lack of oxygen forces you to return. Inventory fullness creates a similar situation, as does the discovery of new fragments or plans: first finding a fragment for a new plan that you think will be useful, then further exploration to find more fragments, then resource gathering in order to build it.
3.1.2 Static Friction
The static friction pattern most obviously appears in the drain of the hunger and thirst meters. These slowly drain over time, until you consume food or water.
3.1.3 Converter Engine
Due to the amount of crafting in the game, the converter engine plays an important role. You can, in the early game for example, go out swimming in the ocean, catch fish, bring them back to your pod or base and cook them in the Fabricator. After scanning enough items and encountering certain plants, you may build planters inside your seabase to grow edible plants, which allows you to spend more time focused on other activities. These plants can also be used to provide power to your seabases. Since you can affect this conversion of plant or animal matter into energy or food by builder more or fewer alien containment modules or garden planters, this is a prime example of the converter engine.
3.1.4 Escalating Challenge
This pattern mainly manifested in the increasing depths and distances from your home base you must explore, and the increasing numbers and aggressiveness of the creatures.
3.1.5 Worker Placement
The worker placement pattern appears in a few places. One is in the inventory management of tools. Although you could carry all your tools with you all the time, you cannot have all of them equipped at the same time. So you will have to switch them out and in as the situation demands. The other is cyclops vehicle pairing. You can store one smaller vehicle, such as a PRAWN suit or seamoth. If you have both, you will need to decide which one to take with you when you move the cyclops.
3.1.6 Unified Analysis
Below, find a unified analysis.
4 Dramatic Elements
There is a story to Subnautica, however, as it is mostly presented in text files and is not given great emphasis in the game, it is very easy to ignore it or even not realize that there is a story.
4.1 Characters
There are characters, but with one exception they are all dead and you have no interaction with them. The player character is flat, undeveloped, and voiceless. The only other character you meet and interact with is a large telepathic leviathan creature. This character is also flat and undeveloped.
4.2 Story
The story, such as it is, is this: you are a member of a scientific expedition. Your space ship, the Aurora, is shot down over a planet with only a serial number. You survive the crash in a life-pod, and must immediately put out a fire in your pod. As you scavenge materials to make tools, hunt fish to get food and water, you will receive signals from other life-pods. You will also receive warnings from your tablet’s AI about your oxygen, hunger, and thirst levels, besides information about your surroundings, and the status of the Aurora. For example, the Aurora will begin to pump out radiation shortly after crashing, making the area around it dangerous to traverse without a radiation suit. You may explore the ship and repair the nuclear reactor in order to prevent further radiation and an eventual explosion, but this information is indirectly convened to the player, and is completely optional.
These radio broadcasts will reveal the locations of the other life-pods. These crashed without survivors, but do contain more story and useful item plans. Eventually, you will encounter seabases and even an island base built by a previous group of researchers who crashed on this planet. Because of reasons which do not make a lot of sense, they were forced from their island base to various seabases before being wiped out.
You will also encounter various alien bases with advanced technology, although the aliens themselves are all gone. From these, you discover that you, and all the creatures on the planet, have been infected by a virus or bacteria. The aliens had no cure for this disease, and put the planet under quarantine, which is why your ship and the previous ship was shot down (miraculously close to each other). In order to escape the planet, you will need to deactivate the alien quarantine gun, which involves discovering that there was one leviathan creature which had immunity to the disease. For some reason, the aliens decided to capture this creature and imprison it, rather than letting it release its immunity granting chemicals into the water and saving the planet. Instead, they imprisoned it and stopped it from reproducing, which killed almost all the living things on this planet’s ocean. The only reason there are living things on the planet now is because you crashed close to its prison, and the creature is releasing small amounts of immunity drug into the water, which allows the nearby creatures to combat the disease. In order to get immunity to this disease, you must gather a lot of ingredients, craft some fertilization enzymes, then release the newly hatched leviathan creatures into the ocean. Then, you can deactivate the quarantine gun, which takes a blood sample from you in order to make sure you are disease free, and launch your Neptune rocket. If you have not constructed your Neptune rocket, you will have to construct it, and then prepare it for launch.
5 Conclusion
Subnautica is a beautiful and unique survival game set in an amazing and compelling ocean world. The core game play loops of exploration, scavenging, and crafting are smooth and well-designed. They reinforce each other and link together to create an interesting experience.
All is not brightness and sunshine, however. The inventory management leaves a lot to be desired, and the story, although meant to be mysterious and to motivate the player to progress, is mostly nonsensical. On the technical side, Subnautica features lots of bugs, including ugly pop-in, buggy collision detection, and numerous loading bugs. During one sitting, the water didn’t load. Yes, that’s right. In a game where you spend 90% of your time in and under water, there wasn’t any. The fish still swam around as if water was there, but my vehicles and my body reacted as if I was in the air. I had to find a cliff and jump off it repeatedly until I died, and this forced the water to reload.
In short, Subnautica is a great survival game and well-worth the price, but be prepared for some frustrations involving inventory, and just turn your brain off when you encounter any story elements.
