I keep bouncing hard off this game. O2 i can manage (swim up) Health I can manage (the pod spits out health kits). But in my brief, extremely frustrating time with game. The only ways I've seen to manage my food/water gauge are A-Assumed limited items that you start with in the life pod and B-death.

Distinctly lacking is any kind of tutorial or sign-post for what I am suppose to be doing. None of the options I am able to see as 'craftable if you have the right parts' seem to deal with food/water. None of the resources in the immediate area I explore seem to consumable from my inventory..nothing.

So can someone point me too the most basic of turtorial's on how to manage the meters in this game? What even is the first renewable source of food/water your suppose to work towards? Or, scratch 'renewable' how about just 'gatherable/findable."

I've gotten fed up with this game multiple times. I don't want to turn the meters off, I want all the upgrades I find to mater, not just half of them. I want to keep as much of the sense of wonder and exploration/discovery intacted for myself as I can. But at this point if I've come back to this game multiple times, only to bounce off it hard once I realized I had no way to even painstakingly slowly grind my way to sustaining my meters.

Am I meant to simply die of thrist/hunger until I've explored hundreds of meters beyond my pod? Am I meant to not see a single item in the crafting menu related too those two meters to even know I can work towards? Am I not meant to have even the faintest idea of how to manage half the meters the game is meant to be played with until I randomly find a blue-print? I don't want to know much..I just want the barest sense of direction because, lost as I feel without it, this game's opening 30 minutes kills it for me.

Just right out of the main area you can catch fish that gives both food and clean water. Most fish will actually give you food, the lung-looking fish are used for clean water.

It's a little annoying to catch 'em, but they're not all that rare and make the hunger/thirst meter abolutely manageable from the get go.

You can catch and cook any of the small fish around and can make water from the bladderfish, there are a lot of them at pretty much any given time around the pod.

The only fish I ever run into are small schools (like, super small) which look like background fauna not actually interactable, or stuff which swims faster then I can catch them sans I think flippers.

So...the upgrades I need are 'knife' for killing fish and/or something to upgrade my speed? That was the best guess I had left tbh so no suprise if that's the case. I just wish the game had a helpful pop up of "hey those fish might be tasty," or "hey you might need to swim faster in order to catch fish". Any little thing of "hey try this" to give me the simpliest of direction..man.

Thanks.

I watched my brother tear through Subnautica in a couple weeks, clocking in at around 54 hours. That includes him meandering and superficial exploring/crafting.

Starting the game: It's not initially obvious that you need to take these fish to your crafting table to COOK. It's also not obvious that the pink Bladderfish is your main source of clean water. You'll find consumable fish in most areas, and the less obvious pink Bladderfish is your main source of clean water. These are mostly in the Shallows, which is why you will always find reason to go back to the starting area to prepare and pack food. This will always be the same, because the food and hunger system is extremely simple. Later upgrades make this process easier/portable. You will find more effective and varied food later, but exploration and crafting is truly what will consume your time.

The loop is as people have said: you start in the Shallows, find blueprints that give you more capabilities to inch slowly to deeper and deeper areas, until you reach the ending.

Said blueprints are heavily redundant, meaning you'll find plenty of duplicates, because the game ensures you find the core devices. The rarer blueprints are fewer, obviously, but are arguably non-essential. Some, my bro never found.

@bladededge: I dunno it was pretty intuitive that I should catch the fish for food.

Less so that I should catch a specific fish for WATER but that would just sort of happen in pursuit of the former.

You can find salt clusters not too far from your starting point, collect up a few of those and a few bit of the right type of coral and the mid sized water is easy to manufacture...

It's not long into the game, even at the slow pace I played it at, that a few other food options become apparent. Also, check the locker on your lifeboat - a few supplies to keep the belly based deaths at bay while you start to get established.

3 easy steps to starting the game off right

1. Catch and cook fish in your fabricator; the pink bladderfish you can turn into water

2. Build a scanner; scan EVERYTHING you find

3. Read every scanned log for sometimes important info/clues

Win!

I know others have said it, but i just played through the game over the last few weeks so here you go.
Catch fish and cook them in fabricator, use fabricator to turn Bladderfish into water, Bladderfish are very obvious because they look like lungs and glow bright pink, fish are plentiful, but will start to dwindle if you catch and cook them all. Keep some Salt supplies, because when Bladderfish become harder to find you can combine Salt and a Coral Tube Sample (hit a coral tube with a knife) to get Bleach and the next tier of water.
The games narrative will take you places where you will discover things which will drastically improve your quality of life.

It's been quite a while since I played when the game was still in EA, but some basic pointers from back then:

Note: I put spoiler tags on some of the stuff that's kinda cool/a big game changer in terms of resource management, I did not put spoilers tags on the stuff Vinny already showed off in the QL.
Bold stuff is the rather basic/important stuff that really helps out knowing but the game does not explain very well (at least used to).

- You don't need the knife for the basic fish, you can just grab them alive. Afaik the heated knife straight up cooks them if you attack with that, but then they can go bad/rotten.

- Peepers are pretty much the best (easily found) fish for food. Reginald's are the best food fish period but rarer. As already mentioned by others: Bladderfish is for making water, do not cook/cure them as that's a waste, they are more easily caught at night. Another good beginning source of water is the Stillsuit, which periodically gives you reclaimed water and thus allows you to generate some drinkable water on the move/while exploring.

- Cooking the fish (for eating) gives best results for H2O+Food, but cooked food will go bad rather quickly (starts going bad after 2-3 mins, will be rotten after like 30 minutes). Unless I wanted to eat something straight away I would always cure the fish (uses salt) which makes them last pretty much forever so they don't go bad, allowing you to build up a good supply of food. Alive fish in your inventory will also never go bad, so if you lack the salt/energy to cure them just store them away in a container for later curing/cooking. That's also why you shouldn't use the knife to kill small fish, just catch them alive with your hands, it's also really fun to hold them and have them look at you awkwardly.

- Making disinfected water out of bleach (salt+coral tube sample) is very energy intensive, you can do it in the starting pod but it's best used after you build a little habitat with more power generation. There's also the issue of coral tubes being a finite resource (afaik) so relying too much on this could lead to you having used up all the coral tubes.

- Get the fins asap, they make you swim way faster (+15%) making it easier to catch fish and allowing you to explore further. If you are clueless where to get the materials you need just look through the fabricator options to find the stuff required for crafting something, that way you can figure out what resources you need, which are often rather self-explanatory.

- The sole exception for that being Cave Sulfur, which is required for the Repair tool (among other things). Cave Sulfur can be found in the nests of Crashfish (the suicide fish found in caves). Getting these can be a bit tricky, but the fins really help with evading their attacks.

- There's a balance between how many (and what kinds) of air tanks you carry and how quickly you swim. While it might be tempting to just stack up on air tanks for maximum air it's often more useful to only have one so you don't slow down your swimming speed too much and giving you extra inventory space. Once you have the Seamoth air will hardly be an issue, as you can always restock on air inside it, you can store extra air tanks in its storage compartment if you need to explore some tighter space for extended periods. You swim faster while not holding a tool, swimming at the surface of the water also makes you swim faster (even applies to the Seamoth).

- Once you get a base going and find the blueprint for the "Alien containment chamber" (Can be found in one of the wrecks) most of your food/water needs should be taken care off. Just put 2 Peepers(Reginalds)/Bladerfish in there and they will breed, giving you pretty much unlimited (and easy to farm) food+water. Probably best to make a separate chamber for each of them, you can stack them multiple levels, each level has room for 10 fish, so a two stories chamber means you will pretty much always have 20 Peepers/Reginalds and 20 Bladderfish, meaning that you won't have to hunt for food and water anymore.

- Afaik the fish do not breed in the Aquarium, it's only good for visual fluff.

- Another option for food+water is growing plants, like lantern fruits or Chinese potatoes, as seen in the QL. But these are really big (taking up lots of inventory space) and also go bad rather quickly. They are mostly good for stocking up hunger+thirst when you get back to your base/before you leave to explore. When going out to scavenge/explore rather take along some cured fish and water, as those don't go bad and don't take up as much inventory space.

- You can find plenty of metal salvage (for Titanium)+batteries around the Aurora wreck, just don't venture too far to the deep sides of it, scary stuff swimming around there. In the beginning just stick to the side towards Safe Shallows (where you spawn).

The beginning is a bit of a struggle, but once you get your own fish farm going food+water pretty much become a non-issue, so just try to bear with it. It's also really rewarding to get there, giving you a real sense of accomplishment and freeing up most of your time for doing the cool stuff like exploring or farming resources for awesome base building.

Oh and a last one I forgot but that's really helpful: Brain Corals (purple brainy looking ones, duh!) produce air bubbles at regular intervals. You can use these to refill your air tank without resurfacing, just hover above the coral and collect the air bubbles.

Sorry for the double post, but editing posts always mess up the formatting for me and I already had to redo all the formatting for the previous post like 3 times, not gonna do it a 4th time.

Some people say things like, "Don't read anything about this game, just discover everything yourself." OR "I wish I could start over knowing nothing."

That's not great advice for Subnautica or really any other survival game, because you're just asking people to be frustrated. I think the less frustrating way to play is to read a few basic Subnautica Wiki articles, like for Bladderfish, and Peeper. Then you've got food and water covered, and have time to explore without dying. Then when you get stuck again, or feel aimless, read more of the Wiki. Just don't overdo it or you'll spoil things unnecessarily.

I absolutely loved the game, but wouldn't have if not for the Wiki. I would have bounced off hard. Some of the later crafting and vehicles are EPIC! And make you feel like a 3d printing badass from the future, who's going to science the !$%& out of this whole stranded on an alien planet thing.

@nethlem: Thank you so much for taking the time to write that stuff up! Excellent early-game hints. I hope anyone who else in my position finds this.

I will say I am very keen to give the game another go now that I feel like I won't bounce off it.

@pappafost: It's a really difficult balance, on one hand, many things can be really frustrating without looking them up on the Wiki (for me it as figuring out where to get Cave Sulfur), but on the other hand that can easily spoil really cool late-game stuff which is much more appreciated when discovering on your own. Really takes some restraint to look up stuff on the Wiki and not just spoil everything for yourself.

@bladededge: You are welcome, always glad to share some knowledge! If you dive back in and run into any problems feel free to hit me up on this thread, will try my best to help out without spoiling too much. Imho the game is a quite a trip, mid to late game takes you to some seriously awesome (and creepy) places, I don't scare easily in games but some of the fauna in this game is real nightmare stuff that made scared getting anywhere close to it.