If you’ve been playing the Experimental branch of Subnautica on Steam Early Access this week, you may have noticed that the entire loot system and crafting tech tree have been reworked. I wanted to write something quick detailing the what and why of these big changes.

There were a few basic problems I wanted to solve:

• It wasn’t clear for players where to find a particular type of loot. Sometimes this was due to the loot being in too many different places or because the loot element itself was abstract or overly-scientific (Carbon, Membrane, Rutile, etc.). Players would see what elements they need in the crafting menu, but then have no idea where to find it.
• Many recipes were very

Since creating the first underwater prototype in January of 2013, I’ve been obsessed with the underwater and the unknown. Actually, this obsession goes back much farther than that, which is why you can feel its influence in the name of our company, Unknown Worlds. I really wanted to make games that take players to fantastic, rich, alien worlds.

Now the Subnautica team has been growing like mad. From just me, to over 25. Along the way, we’ve made quite a few prototypes to help us “find the fun” in this strange game about being a scientist on a submerged alien planet. It’s now our pleasure to share those with you.

These prototypes will unlock at a rate of one per …

New dev blog

We’ve been inspired by the Rust Friday devblogs, and thought we’d try doing them ourselves. Not sure if they will be worthwhile, but we’re hoping to keep them image and video heavy, using just the media we happened to create this week and shared with each other. We weren’t planning on releasing any of this media, or else we would’ve made it look a bit nicer…

Procedural to hand-crafted

About a year ago, we had tons of low-fidelity, but totally playable prototypes (which we’re hoping to release to you – details coming). I was thinking that we had the game “in the bag” and that it was merely a question of arting things up. Boy was …