So yesterday you were traveling across space in an intergalactic spaceship, and today you wake up ; alone in a strange lifepod. The AI is spamming you with messages, and you don't know what to do. Don't worry! You came to the right place. We'll hold your hand for the first few days as you get used to this new ocean planet, and even help you set up your own Seabase and build your own Submarine!

Your lifepod is going to be your home for a while, so get comfortable. In front of you is a ladder, which will give you a nice view of the surroundings. Climb and look around! Your spawn is random but not random. You will always spawn in the same map but at a slightly different place. You will probably see something like this :



Yep, welcome to Planet4546B. Beautiful, isn't it? The serene sealine stretching for miles and miles. Oh, and the above image does not include the spaceship near you. Don't bother trying to swim back, lethal radiation is just waiting to claim you for its own. All in good time.

Head back into your pod, there's a lot of cool stuff in there. Affixed to the wall is your survival fabricator. Think of it as your workstation. It's your key to survival in this environment. In front of the ladder is a storage unit, containing few odds and ends to get you started. Open the storage and take a look! You don't want to craft something you already have. Not to mention there could be a lot of cool stuff in there that you won't find for some time now.



There's also an annoying cable that refuses to stay fixed and a chair you can't sit on. Well of course you can't. This is no time to be sitting around, you've got work to do!

And work is exactly what we'll be doing in the next section.

In this section, we'll begin fishing.

Dive right into the ocean. The area around you is called the Safe Shallows. As the name suggests, the area is mostly free of predators and is not very deep. Still deep enough to drown though, so stay careful. Oh, and while we're on the subject of drowning : the grey bar on your HUD is your oxygen meter. Keep an eye on it. The AI will remind you if you're running short of Oxygen, but it never hurts to keep a lookout. The game will also prompt you at times. Catch peeper, break limestone, return to surface, and so on.


The bars below the oxygen meter are your nutrition and hydration levels. You will spawn hydrated but hungry, so let's go catch some fish! Fish are your main food source. To catch fish, swim upto them and click the left mouse button. You're probably best off catching Boomerangs or Airsacks. These fish move very slowly, and provide decent nutrition. Here's a list of all the edible fish you will find in the Safe Shallows, as well as their nutrition and hydration levels:




That fish in the image above is an Airsack. Airsacks are especially good catches because they can be crafted into water as well as food. How? Well, as the AI will tell you : They've developed some kind of filtration system. Airsacks will probably be your only source of water till you manage to find some Salt Deposits. They look like little tiny crystals. Don't worry if you can't find any: they're not necessary at the moment. All we need is food for our first journey. Swim around and catch some Airsacks, Boomerangs, or Garryfish. These are plentiful, make for decent eating, and are easy to catch. When your hand is full of food, return to your pod.

We're now in the Lifepod with a handful of fish. Remember the Fabricator I mentioned earlier?



Head to it and click on it to activate it. This is your workstation. The sheer amount of craftable items can be overwhelming at first, but you'll be fabricating like a pro in no time. Look under the sustenance menu to find the cooked food section. Cooking fish slightly increases their nutritional level, as well as greatly increasing their previously negative hydration value. As a general rule, always cook your food.

Top Tip: Don't cook all your food at once. Cooking food makes it more susceptible to natural degradation, and you don't want food rotting in your inventory. Cook only as much as you can eat.

Cook the fish in your fabricator and press TAB to access your PDA. This is where you store your stuff. Your PDA also comes with a number of other cool functions, more on that later. Click on the cooked food in your inventory to eat it and satisfy your stomach.

Good, now your vitals are stable and you're in no immediate danger. Let's use this time to gather resources. Subnautica, or suvival games in general, are all about the resource collection. Get stuff, build stuff, use what you've built to get better stuff and so on. So let's do just that.

Dive back into the water. Some easily available resources are limestone fragments, quartz and metal salvage. That's well and good, because we'll be needing them a lot throughout the game.

Keep exploring your surroundings, making sure to collect plenty of salvage, copper(from limestone) quartz ( the little shiny crystals on the sea floor), and limestone Once you've filled up your inventory, get back home and get crafting. Some good tools to craft early game are:

• Oxygen Tank : Better turn that quartz into glass, because an oxygen tank is an absolute necessity for survival underwater. You can ever carry more than one!
  
• Flashlight : This tool makes the night a lot less scary. Craft it from titanium and glass made from quartz.
  
• Scanner : This nifty scanner allows you to scan blueprints and life forms, discovering new technology and adding to your knowledge of the world in the process. Make it using a battery and some titanium.
  
• Survival Knife : An invaluable survival tool made from rubber and titanium. Crafting this was made a bit trickier in the farming update, and you need to find some Creepvine seed clusters to make rubber.. These can be found in the Kelp Forest ( the green biome), and look like this :

There are a lot more, so keep exploring and crafting!