Tip: If you want a multipurpose room on each pillar and want them all joined up, you might have to mess around constructing, deconstructing and realigning them until you get them all in the right place --connected base pieces must all align to a grid, and the alignment of that grid is set by the alignment of the first piece you place. Good luck!

great location imo. tips? reinforcements are much better than foundations for hull integrity. try to keep things like the fabricator and storage all in one place. seen so many run back and forth wasting time. build a lot of solar panels. then the bioreactor. I usually put down a foundation and make 6 of them. scanner and hud chip asap.

Watch your structural integrity. That is one of the most important things to remember. Go negative and your base will flood. Foundations made with lead and reinforcements made with lithium are pretty much mandatory

For power, unless I am deep in a cave I use solar power and nothing else. Nothing else is needed. You can run everything you need, including multiple water purifiers. 2 purifiers make more than I can drink.

Start growing food plants as soon as possible. Once you start growing the right foods you won't need water. You will get all the water you need from the juicy food you eat.

If you find the alien containment throw a couple of bladderfish in there and you will have limitless water. Same goes with the reginald or peeper. Throw a pair of those in and you will have limitless food. I prefer being a vegitarian in game though, it's simpler.

One trick with bases is that once you put down the first room (or component), the orientation and height of your base is set. I'm not sure which of those rock pillars is taller, but you should probably start your first room on the taller pillar, so that by the time you extend your base to the second pillar, what happens is just that the legs underneath are slightly longer.

Doing the opposite, starting on the lower pillar, may mean that you can't build because the taller pillar's rocks collide with the position where the room needs to be.

If you want to obtain maximum fun out of Subnautica and have one of a kind gaming experience, shut your internet off and play the game completely blind until the end.

You can play it however you wish or think that it would be fun for you. There's no one correct way to play.

Incidentally, you must/should/have to scan everything and read every PDA entry.

Beacons definitely help you find your way around. Make sure to name them. I upgrade my air tank as quickly as possible too

Make yourself an air bladder, super useful for rapid surfacing, avoiding those exploding fish, and a little emergency air. Also eating bladder fish raw gives you a little oxygen also.

Beacons are good.

Also, be brave. I gave a up on my first run or two because I was super worried about dying and ended up dragging out the early game enough that I got bored before going more than a few hundred meters deep. Dying isn’t super punishing so take risks and explore.

Stockpile copper and silver. Crack every limestone and sandstone node you see, you need an annoying amount of both.

Inventory tip? It sucks losing out on space, but carrying an extra oxygen tank (upgraded) means you can switch out underwater and drastically increase the time you can spend away from air.

Also, (I didn't figure this out til like my fourth run through) you can eat raw bladder fish for 12 units of oxygen. Need to get something that's really deep and cant get down there yet? An extra oxygen tank and a bunch of bladder fish in your inventory and you can do anything. They do dehydrate you a little, so be careful with your water.

I HIGHLY recommend going into Creative and playing around with base construction in the different areas you want to build in. Not only does it help you get a visual of what you want without having to worry about oxygen or battery/material consumption, you can also get used to being in whatever biome you choose and find ways to navigate around all our aquatic "friends"

You should build a base in the lost river. That way, you have a safe place nearby to help you feel safer about exploring. Plus, it has great spots for thermal plants.

You could make the moonpool your whole main base if you wanted and just put all your lockers, fabricator and stuff on the walls in it. The only thing you can’t put in there and would need a large room for is a Bio or Nuclear Reactor if you were using that for power, or an Alien Containment if you wanted an aquarium for feeshies. If you’re using solar or thermal power you can just put everything in the moonpool if you wanted. You could also have a few corridors on the moonpool walls to give yourself additional room for storage or whatever else.

Ok so start by building out foundation maybe 6 to 8 to make a big enough space then go from there . Start with the X Compartment  and do 1 multipurpose room, 1 for the scanner and 1 for your moon pool

play it in the creation mode. explore at your rythm. no death, no oxygen, no food.

this helped me with my thalassophobia. just don't forget about the oxygen when retuning in normal mode

Spend less time on building a base right now, and more time looking for wreckages and things to scan in the world.

There are many blueprints that will make building much, much easier, and they are only found by scanning parts or wreckages. If you need more storage space, just build a couple tubes in a line and fill them with storage and essentials, to act as a storage unit.

You said "life pod". If that's what you meant, then you should know that you can't add or build onto the starter life pod. You need to find and scan other base parts (like the basic room or large room) and build a base from that.

Try building in the red grass biome, its open its beautiful its safe, all you need is a tube a hatch and a solar panel and you are ready to go

Keep it simple. Don’t overthink stuff. A simple base is a happy base.

There’s a base piece you can find and scan that makes building much better. Pretty rough to do much of anything when you just have the tubes

I think that leviathans should be able to attack bases, but if that will be the case there should also be a sort of a repellent. Maybe a base compartment which creates a sort of safe space around the base at the cost of some piwer.

Make it a setting. Toggle between "vanilla basebuilding" and "difficult basebuilding"

Ye, especially the airlock idea, I forgot some random material so often and had to quickly head back and I think I'd have lost it if I had to go through a lengthy airlock sequence every time.

As a long term fan of project zomboid, keep it there, please, do not bring these kinds of mechanics for those games to ones that do not reflect them. People do not play Subnautica for realism.

A lot of your complaints can be implemented into SN1 by simply roleplaying choices.

Hardcore is pretty difficult and tedious if you avoid using vehicles completely.

You can put “airlocks” in your base via the bulkhead door.

No bulkhead door yet? Your base is then restricted to being build above water level.

Well, oxygen production systems were built into the frame of the structure pieces you fabricate, it required external power to function. You have to remember that Subnautica is not a base building sim, it's operation is simplified to keep the flow of the game pleasant for most people.

I normally build in the sw grassy plateaus or the nw mushroom forest

I usually just make a cyclops into my base.

Edge of the BK Trench is my favorite spot.

Very easy access to all resources. Lost River and thermal power nearby.

Just… don’t go too far north.

Blood kelp trench (option 3) ftw

I’ve built at spot 2! Near the blood Kelp and those two mountains near the floating islands is a good outpost imo, but I struggled with materials a small bit. My main base was elsewhere. The locals are nice, you’re not far from the shallows, not far from the deep end.

It’s a good spot for later game play with quick access to relevant areas. >!The cyclops has a path into the LR!< near that area, but I’ve never personally >!driven my cyclops into the lost river through that tunnel thanks to the Friend outside it!<

Good post. The tip about splitting bases but still having energy is very neat

>Scanner Rooms actually aren't very useful in your main base. Treat them like a bulky, clunky Mineral Detector that requires an entire Seatruck Storage Compartment to lug around. They were more useful in Subnautica than Below Zero, to be honest.

They're a bit less useful because they suck on land, but they're fine in the water. They're about equally useful for finding particular resources, lead, nickel, lithium. The fragment scan can help you find sea monkey nests, light up parallel processor parts, etc. If your main base is in the twisty bridges, but near the vent zone/island, a long scan can pick up most resources in game game.

I'd say about one-third of the question posts on this subreddit could be fixed by the player just building some scanning rooms.

That said, the Command Room is useless lol

Good post! You kinda mentioned it but I like stacking an empty multi purpose room below my multi purpose rooms, it’s then easy to add reinforcements to every side of the empty room and windows to the real room. Looks nice ��

> You don't really need a Moonpool, just a Power Cell Charger. I know that lengthy dock/undock animation can get old.

But popping power cells out of a vehicle and lugging them to a charger won't get old? I don't think this particular tip has been thought out very well. :D

Important thing to add: power connectors are broken and don't work. To establish a working Power line you need to set the source and then move from the source to the base. If you want to add a second source on the same line you need to re-do the whole process.

Great tips, OP. I honestly didn't know about a few of them, like #2, and I was already starting to realize #1 as well. Foundations were important in Subnautica, but seem irrelevant in BelowZero, or worse, a pain point. Once you have bulkheads, that is a much easier way to go.

I would like to add that I know a lot of people recommend two water filtration units, but I found that as time went by, I really only needed one. Although I have a well-stocked greenhouse.

• with a hatch on the underside and some solar panels on top will last you for a bit. Build some wall lockers and a fabricator and a radio and whatever else on the walls. Follow thru the story normally following the locations you get from the radio and the PDAs and make sure you explore the surrounding areas thoroughly and Scan Everything and by the time you have a need for the bigger rooms you’ll have found the blueprints for them.

You don't need the big rooms to make a starter base, almost everything can be built in the corridors

You have to scan the structures first in order to be able to build them. Explore the map to find them, or just follow the storyline and it will eventually lead you to them.

The first base I ever built was a 4-way with a hatch. It's all I needed for a while.