Subnautica 2 developer Unknown Worlds has been promising a way to respond to the over-aggressive nature of some of its sealife for a while, with a June hotfix nerfing some of the most irritating creatures, and the promise of something more player-based to come. That’s now appearing today, July 8, with the game’s first titled update, Adaptive Measures. It’ll include the ability to use the Sonic Resonator as a stun gun.
There are two key changes to how the game lets you interact with fighty fishies. The first is when you bop them with the Survival Multitool, which already did cause them to flee but with no tangible feedback—there’s now a recoil animation from the creatures in response to getting hit, and then they’ll scarper. Even more significantly, the Sonic Resonator now works as a weapon that will stun fish, causing them to briefly lose consciousness and float away. This seems an excellent improvement, given how instinctual it was to try this before and how demoralizing it was when it didn’t work. So hooray!
Adaptive Measures isn’t just about knocking out fish, of course. The update also adds a bunch of new abandoned Biomods to the early game for you to discover and plunder, along with more slots in which you can equip these DNA-bending abilities (and the promise that later in the game we’ll get a new scanner to unlock even more). Blight creatures will signal their attack status more clearly, and exploring the game’s wrecks has had a bit of work, adding new puzzles to make them more interesting.
The PDA has had an overhaul and at last you can listen to previous recordings at will, and there’s a new, larger storage option for bases, albeit one that doesn’t automatically link to your fabricators. You can see all these new features briefly detailed in the video below.
Unknown Worlds has also created a roadmap for the game’s Early Access, plugging features to come in 1.2 that will focus on the co-op game. This will introduce voice chat, emotes, and the ability to revive one another, as well as letting players trade with one another. It’ll add better HUD signals, improve the base builder tool, and apparently fix up the pinned recipes UI.
The big update everyone’s hankering for, with a world and story expansion, is still in the mists of the future, but they promise it’s being worked on fast. But at least we can now knock those fish on their fishy noggins.