Craig Bowen 
Subnautica’s weird alien existence and dramatic rock formations make it smooth to spend several times beneath the waves, but it is also smooth to get absolutely where in-the-hell-is-my-Seamoth sort of lost. Maybe human beings aren’t built to navigate as properly underwater as we do on land, or perhaps Planet 4546B needs to rent a higher city planner.
Whatever causes it, getting grew to become around below the ocean isn’t any a laugh. There’s no such thing as an in-recreation Subnautica map, or even the surely clever fish have not discovered how to invent GPS satellites. To assist our fellow marooned survivors, we prepare our own map and a few of our quality strategies for finding your way around in Subnautica.
A be aware of spoilers: This guide is spoiler-loose. We may not deliver away any places from later in the game or share directions to the absolutely stocked, 24-hour grocery store hidden underneath the sea. That stated, exploring Subnautica and not using an understanding in any respect, getting misplaced, and stumbling throughout something top-notch is a pretty first-rate experience. If you haven’t gotten into the game in any respect, pass, get your toes moist, and come returned here when you want help.
Orientation for beginners
The international you explore in Subnautica is a volcanic crater, although you wouldn’t comprehend it with the aid of sailing a boat across it. On the floor, you’ll find nothing but an open ocean and four landmarks: your lifepod, the crashed hulk of the Aurora, and mountainous islands (commonly obscured by fog until you get close to them). To get your bearings, the lifepod is in the middle, the Aurora is to the east, and the 2 islands are to the northeast and southwest.
Click the map to increase to complete length in a new tab.
You’ll discover a schematic for a compass pretty early in the game, and it’s critical for finding your manner round. With a compass and this map, you may plot a few simple directions for yourself using the grid markings that have a line every 500 meters. For instance, to get to lifespan 19, you swim approximately 250 meters due west from your crash site. Lifepod 6 is around 300 meters east and 200 meters north—in step with Pythagoras, it is 360 meters due northeast.
As for depth, it really is a lot simpler: hug the sea ground. Almost all of the good stuff is found on the ground, whether inside the captivating shallows at 8 meters or the inky depths at 900 meters. Whether or now not you could pass deep sufficient to find the ground depends on your equipment and automobiles, but the query of “wherein is that issue?” relies mostly on directions, now not intensity.
Filling in the rims
Since there may be no in-sport Subnautica map, you will want to take some notes yourself. When commenters or forum posters say they need a map in the game, they generally need to go off explored regions or consider vital locations. If you want to maintain the track, make it like a ’90s-era journey game and escape a notepad. You want a coordinate machine to observe places clearly, and you have two options: console coordinates or homebrewed beacon triangulation. One of them is cool and fun, and the alternative is dumb and dull. You can use whichever one you want, and I’m now not your dad.
Here’s the first way: Everything in Subnautica has in-sport coordinates. You can discover coordinates using pressing F1 to bring down a console menu. Under “Camera global pos,” you will see three numbers proven as (x, y, z), where X is east-west, Y is depth, and Z is north-south. If you locate something cool or you’re finished exploring a sure sunken smash, press F1 and notice the coordinates so that you can check with them later. If you sincerely get caught and also seek advice from the wiki, you may use those coordinates to discover whatever you’ve got been searching out.
Personally, I discover pulling down a console menu a critical buzz-kill. That’s why I decide upon the second approach, which suits higher within the sport’s equipment: Triangulation. Triangulation may be used for making maps in all forms of approaches. Still, the approach we’re going to use here is position resection: using 3 fixed, regarded points to determine your unknown vicinity. To get a known constant factor to the degree from, you want beacons, floating radio transmitters that stay solid in water. After you experiment with some fragments of wrecks near the shallows, you will free up a blueprint for a beacon, and a bit of copper ore and titanium will let your fabricator whip one up. For exceptional coverage, swim (or pressure) out to the rims of the map and drop all 3 beacons. This may take you over a few deep and dangerous waters; however, so long as you stay at the surface, you possibly might not die.
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The key with beacon triangulation is to spread ’em out as an awful lot as you may. Once you have got all 3 placed and categorized, you could carry up your tablet and toggle a HUD display to reveal icons and distances. When you want to notice a spot, get a distance studying from every one of the beacons, e.G., 900 meters far away from #1, 640 meters far from #2, 1,000 meters far away from #3. If you find a spoil with a damaged door panel, however, you left your repair device lower back at base, the one’s distances will work like coordinates to help you discover your manner returned.
Biomes
There are loads of awesome biomes in Subnautica, and some crafting recipes will pressure you to song down a specific biome with a few rare creatures or minerals. This listing is not exhaustive—there are principal mushroom forests, such as indifferent and unconnected elements of the arena. I’m also no longer bringing up many uncommon, hard-to-reach biomes that display up late in the sport.
Shallows and kelp woodland
This is the smooth one. The shallows and a bordering kelp woodland are the first things you may see whilst you swim away from your lifespan for the primary time. There’s a ton of meals and basic crafting materials to be found right here.
