Subnautica 2 improvements & changes
Will try to relatively organize these, but I’ll be throwing them into a bullet point list.
Your Scanner shows the fragments of an item when hovering over something. Once all green bars are filled, it lets you know that scanning it would only give you some titanium.
When you haven’t fully scanned something, including having never scanned a fragment of it ever, you’re shown a ghostly, static image on your scanner to indicate that it’s a new item/new fragment.
On your scanner’s radar, it’ll show orange dots for anything nearby you haven’t scanned yet. Which includes completely new, or only partially completed fragments.
In your blueprints section of your player menu, each tab has sections, like in the other games. However, they added the building catalyst to make the items.
When using the fabricator, you can multicraft now. You don’t get to choose how many you’re crafting like the mod for 1 & BZ, but you can click multiple times and you’re shown a progress bar at the bottom showing how many you’re waiting to craft and how many have been crafted. Additionally, the fabricator menu never disappears. Previously, it would only persist when crafting resources or sustenance. Now it persists when crafting equipment, tools and deployables.
You can now move lockers, both wall and floor lockers, without needing to take out the items and deconstruct them now. The Habitat Builder has a move mode for doing this quickly and easily.
Additionally, as you saw in the above video, they have taken the Snap Builder mod and integrated it into the game. So now everything will snap into place on a grid, and you can turn it off if you want.
In addition to THAT, your fabricator and Habitat Builder will now craft items pulling from your storage, like the EasyCraft mod does for 1 & BZ. The range seems to be around 40-50m, so it’s fairly generous.
You have an indoor facility called the Processor now, built with the Habitat Builder. Previously, everything was crafted through the fabricator. Now, some recipes have been moved to the Processor. The Processor has a fairly large power draw (10 energy per second), so you’ll need a decent power solution. The recipes that are now exclusive to the Processor are all the ingots and acids, and probably some other stuff in the future. Additionally, the Processor takes considerably longer to craft anything. The fastest recipes take 30 seconds, such as Titanium & Copper Ingots, and the longest (so far) are up to 2 minutes. There are also “alternative recipes”, giving you different material inputs for the same product at the cost of longer crafting time.
You can now craft nutrient blocks, which wasn’t possible before. Previously, they were only found in supply crates, and thus were pretty finite. They’re not hard to craft, either. You just need 1 Salt and 1 Biofuel Block, the latter being made from 5 Fibrous Pulp, which is easily acquired from three different types of flora scattered across the starting biome.
Related to food, they’ve made food harder to get, to seemingly balance it with how much slower it drains relative to water. All of your typical fish are 25-30 food, but are a bit more spread out. To compensate, they’ve made a new type of food called prepped meals. which offer 40-80 food, and the best one (80) also gives you 70 water and 10 health. They’re not hard to make either, just more involved. Typically involving 2-3 different kinds of fish + salt or 2-3 of the same fish + salt.
Water is easier to get now. Bladderfish are now Water Slugs, and these are immobile creatures that sit on the sea floor and are pretty brightly blue colored, making them easier to spot. They also often are in groups of 2-3, up to around 6. When crafted into water, they give 40 water now instead of 25, and there’s a stronger version of them in midgame areas that, when mixed with salt, give 55 water.
The scanner station sucks now. It can only search for one mineral type at a time, and you have to highlight that one specific mineral you want to find, then return to the station and select another mineral spot via the signal.
Speaking of things that also suck, Beacons are a lot worse now for some reason. Instead of crafting them at a fabricator, they’re built using a Habitat Builder. This does mean that you can make Beacons out in the wild now as you discover things you want to come back for (or can’t explore yet), but that means you need to use 2 inventory spaces per Beacon now. However, the really sucky part of it is that Beacons are now a special item you carry using both hands. They cannot be placed into your inventory or your Quick Slot Bar, for some reason. Which means that if you want to craft a Beacon at your base and go place it at some location, such as a new area you forgot to bring Copper & Titanium to, or a resource area you discovered near your base, you now get to manually haul it while swimming. It is immediately dropped if you enter your Tadpole (Seamoth equivalent).
Resource outcrops are gone now. Every resource exists as their own thing, similar to Quartz and Salt.
Additionally, the mineral deposits you previously required a Prawn Suit in order to mine are now mineable with an early game tool called the Sonic Resonator. You only get a few uses of it per battery (I think around 8 or something), but each mineral deposit has 5-8 resources in it, and they’re not super rare either.
Biobeds are a new thing. Your starting inventory space is pretty small, at 20 spaces, but you can now improve that with biobeds, which offer improved inventory space. Not sure yet if your total space is equivalent to or exceeding previous games. In addition to that, biobeds will also upgrade your dexterity (endurance affects inventory). When they do, you gain an extra Quick Tool Slot. The settings menu says there’s support for 10 tool slots, double what we had before, but so far only 7 biobeds currently exist, and only some of them are dexterity upgrades.
Related to the QTS bar, putting an item in it will remove it from your inventory, meaning you effectively have 25 inventory spaces at the start, and will eventually have +10 inventory spaces once we get all the biobeds.
We now have something called biomods. These are active and passive effects you can equip onto yourself via its own system. Some examples of these are a short ranged dash while swimming, greatly reduced oxygen consumption while immobile, a “perimeter defense” electrical pulse on your person rather than vehicle, become invisible to predators while immobile, a sonar for detecting nearby resources. These are changed via biolabs (which you can make eventually).
Building is a lot more modular now. You can build the walls, corners, ceilings and floors in and out, but also in different directions to create much more uniquely sized and shaped rooms to greatly expand base building options and customization.
There are water tunnels in the starting biome and a little bit outside of it. These are essentially rapid movement to a specific location, which you can exit before you arrive at the end of the tunnel if you want. They’re also the main way you power your base now, as solar panels are far less powerful. You do this by placing Hydroelectric Turbines (missile shaped objects with spinning fans) inside a tunnel and connecting them to your base, kind of like Geothermal Plants.