For the record, I thought No Man’s Sky was fine. It fell way short of my expectations, sure. A combination of developer Hello Games over-promising, and those promises mutating and growing out of control in my own mind. But I managed to squeeze thirty enjoyable hours out of it—especially after Creative mode was added, removing the constant, tedious need to harvest fuel and craft warp cells. It’s a game I turn to when I want to play something placid and undemanding. I love idly hopping between planets, taking photos, and wondering what the procedural generation will throw up next.

But that’s not the experience I wanted. When it was first announced, the idea of taking a starship and exploring a vast galactic frontier was thrilling. My imagination was flooded with visions of landing on uncharted alien worlds that were rich with mystery, intrigue, and discovery. But the reality is a lot of mostly dull, samey landscapes littered with a repeating handful of structures and objects, making this infinite universe feel somehow limited in scope. But with over 18 quintillion randomly generated planets to visit, it’s perhaps unsurprising that none of them really feel that special.

There’s just one planet in Subnautica, home to an expansive ocean teeming with peculiar flora and fauna. Explore its depths and you’ll find fields of dancing kelp, caves illuminated by fluorescent fungi, bubbling thermal vents, and sandy plains sprinkled with glowing plants. It’s a diverse, vibrant setting, and feels truly alien. And while it may be unfair to compare quintillions of procedurally generated planets to a static, hand-crafted one, playing Subnautica gives me exactly what I wanted from No Man’s Sky: landing on another world, exploring it, and being surprised by what I find there.

If you’re only aware of Subnautica in passing, you might have written it off as just another survival game. But what makes this one stand out for me is the story, which hums away in the background and can be dipped into, or ignored, at your leisure. Your ultimate goal is getting off the planet you’ve crash landed on, but along the way there are mysteries to unravel, stories to piece together, and intriguing secrets lurking beneath the waves. And these discoveries contribute to an ongoing narrative, making following signals, poking around in wrecks, and looking for clues in lost PDAs worth your time.

But sometimes it’s better to just pick a direction and swim. Some of the most impressive things I’ve seen, I discovered completely by accident. The hulking silhouette of a wrecked starship, resting precariously on the edge of a shadowy abyss. An underwater volcano spewing fire and ash. Shoals of iridescent fish swimming across the spotlights of my submersible. And it only gets more interesting the deeper you go, which gives you an incentive to craft advanced equipment and vehicles to withstand the crushing pressure of the depths. I usually find harvesting materials and building stuff in survival games a chore, but in Subnautica, every step towards a new invention that’ll let me explore further and deeper is hugely exciting.

Subnautica’s underwater world also feels like it has a functioning ecology. Plants and sealife have distinctive roles and behaviours, and they interact with the environment around them: whether it’s a sand shark bursting out of the silt to grab a passing fish in its jaws, or stalkers scooping up chunks of ship wreckage and taking them for a swim. Compare this to the creatures in No Man’s Sky, who roam in aimless herds and have no real connection to their surroundings, and you can see why Hello’s planets feel so dead. Another benefit of choosing to sculpt rather than generate an ecosystem.

A common misconception about procedural generation is that there’s no real authorship involved—that procedural worlds are soullessly churned out by software. But it takes a creative mind to write the rules of that software in the first place, and artists to create the assets that fuel it. For me, the real problem with No Man’s Sky isn’t that it’s procedurally generated—it’s that it fails to use that impressive technology to create a compelling exploration experience. And in a game that claims to be all about the joy of discovery, that’s a pretty fundamental flaw. A flaw that Subnautica manages to avoid by limiting its scope to a relatively small, more curated space.

Perhaps procedural generation is fundamentally at odds with satisfying exploration. When you find a diary in Subnautica, you hear them specifically talk about the place where you found it, giving that location context—and maybe even leading to a supply cache or secret entrance. But creating that connection with some randomly generated mass of terrain is a lot more difficult. And that’s why, when you find something in No Man’s Sky, it doesn’t actually matter where it is. There are no references to the local geography: that there’s a nearby mountain that may be worth investigating, or a lake abundant with resources. And without those details, exploring feels meaningless.

An infinite universe where every planet is as detailed and bespoke as Subnautica’s ocean world would be great but, crucially, literally impossible. So forget infinity. The hours I’ve spent paddling around in this weird, wonderful alien sea have been more memorable than all the time I spent planet-hopping in No Man’s Sky. And I think that makes a solid case for future sci-fi exploration games to focus on smaller, more detailed settings over an endless, characterless expanse of cosmos. I’d personally rather have one, or a handful, of interesting, hand-crafted planets filled with things that are actually worth discovering than several quintillion random, forgettable landscapes.

We get a little giddy when we open a new game, hit the tilde key, and a console prompt slides down from the top of the screen. Messing with console commands is a PC gaming tradition—mucking about with the passage time is especially fun—and Subnautica includes a thorough library of dev hacks. The console isn't enabled by default, though, so you'll have to do a little prep to use them. Below, learn how to enable Subnautica's console commands and what they are.

Enabling the console

1. Press F3 to open a sub-menu which will appear in the upper-left hand corner of the screen.

2. Press F8 to free the mouse.

3. Uncheck the 'Disable Console' option.

4. Back out by pressing F3 and F8 again. 

5. You should now be able to open the console with the tilde (~) key, though this may vary with keyboards. It will appear as a grey box in the lower-left corner.

Note: The 'Disable Console' option will remain unchecked between sessions, but every time you restart the game you'll need to press F3 to open the menu, then again to close it, before the console will work.

Teleportation

biome [name] — This will teleport you to the biome of your choosing, with [name] being any of the following:

• safe (teleports you to safe shallows, where your lifepod crashed.)
• kelp
• kelp_cave
• grassy
• grassy_cave
• mushroom
• koosh
• koosh_cave
• jelly
• shroom
• sparse
• reef
• grandreef
• dunes
• mountains
• moutains_cave
• deepgrand
• bloodkelp
• underislands
• smokers
• inactivelavart
• islands
• tree
• lostriver
• lavazone

goto [name] — Teleports you to a location. Type 'goto' with no variable for a list of locations. 

warp [x] [y] [z] — Warps to a set of coordinates you provide.

warpforward [meters] — Warps the player forward. Use a number to indicate how many meters forward to warp.

warpme — Teleports you to the last base or vehicle you were in, eg, the Cyclops, the lifepod.

spawn — If you're stuck, just type this to respawn nearby.

randomstart — Plops you onto the lifepod at one of its start locations.

kill — kills you and respawns you back on the lifepod.

Spawning items

item [item] [number] — Adds some number of an item to your inventory. If an item name is two words, write it as one, eg, item copperwire 10.

spawn [item] [number] — Spawns some number of an item or creature in front of the player, eg spawn seaglide 1.

clearinventory — Deletes everything in your inventory.

sub cyclops — Spawn the Cyclops.

sub aurora — Spawn the Aurora (look behind you).

seaglide — Spawns a seaglide.

vehicleupgrades — Gives you all common vehicle modules.

seamothupgrades — Gives you all Seamoth modules.

exosuitupgrades — Gives you all Prawn Suit modules.

exosuitarms — Gives you all Prawn Suit arms.

spawnloot — Spawns quartz, copper ore, magnesium, salt deposit, gold, and four metal salvage.

madloot — Fills your inventory with glass, titanium, computer chips, batteries, a survival knife, a habitat builder, and a scanner.

resourcesfor [item] — Gives you the resources needed to craft a certain item, eg, resourcesfor cyclops.

ency [name] — Unlocks a databank entry. Type ency all to unlock all of them.

unlock [blueprint] — Unlocks a blueprint, eg, unlock cyclops.

unlockall — Unlocks all blueprints.

Cheats and modifications

bobthebuilder — Adds a habitat builder, survival knife, scanner and repair tool to your inventory. Enables fastbuild, unlockall, nocost, fastgrow, fasthatch, radiation.

fastgrow — Plants grow super fast.

nocost — Unlimited use of the fabricator, habitat builder, vehicle bay, and so on, regardless of whether or not you have the resources needed.

noenergy — Turns off or on power usage for vehicles, tools, and seabases.

nosurvival — Disables food and water requirements.

oxygen — Unlimited oxygen.

nitrogen — Adds the potential for decompression sickness, but increases underwater time.

invisible — All creatures ignore you.

fastbuild — Build modules with the habitat builder instantly.

fasthatch — Eggs hatch quickly.

fastscan — Reduces scanning time.

filterfast — Reduces water filtering time.

radiation — Disables radiation.

fixleaks — Seals the Aurora's radiation leaks.

unlockdoors — Unlocks all doors, except those which need to be opened with a laser cutter.

cure [range] — Cures you and all creatures within the specified range (a number in meters) of Kharaa.

infect [range] — Infects you and all creatures within the specified range (a number in meters) with Kharaa.

countdownship — Initiates the Aurora countdown timer.

explodeship — Blows up the Aurora.

restoreship — Un-blows up- the Aurora.

startsunbeamstoryevent — Starts the Sunbeam story event.

sunbeamcountdownstart — Starts the Sunbeam countdown.

precursorgunaim — Bye, Sunbeam.

forcerocketready — Launch the escape rocket without disabling the quarantine enforcement platform.

Debug and system commands

To change your current game mode, just type the name of the mode: creative, freedom, survival, hardcore.

day — Set the time of day to daytime.

night — Set the time of day to nighttime.

daynightspeed [number] — Change the speed of the day/night cycle. 1 is default, so 2 is double, and 0.5 is half.

speed [number] — Sets the game speed multiplier. Using a 2 would double the game speed, while 0.5 would halve it. Good for setting up screenshots.

entreset — Reload all assets, except terrain.

gamereset — Loads last save.

farplane [#] — Sets view distance. Default is 1000.

fog — Toggles fog.

freecam — Toggles free camera. Great to combine with F6 (removes HUD) for screenshots.

fps — Displays FPS and other statistics.

sizeref — Spawns a diver model.

vsync — Toggles vsync.

There's an enticing-looking hole near my main Subnautica base. It's one of the more manageable underwater cave systems in the game as it's not too deep and it consists of tiered concentric circles of terrain with only a few tunnels leading off. The arrangement draws your eye to a plant called a rouge cradle and is ripe for a few screenshots. But this colourful, relatively simple space can still hurt or kill me easily.

This particular segment of Subnautica's ocean-based survival adventure contains Drooping Stingers—poisonous jellyfish-like plants which hang down across tunnel entrances. There is at least one Sand Shark. I can see it throwing up clouds as it burrows along the sea bed below. 

There are mushrooms which I can harvest safely enough (and use to make batteries along with copper ore) but which, if I hit them with my survival knife, will release dangerous chemicals. I also spot a tadpole-shaped Biter which will nibble down my health bar given the opportunity. 

Beyond this there is also the capacity for death in the usual survival game ways. I could run out of food or clean water. I could also, given the underwater setting, run out of air if I spend too long captivated by caves and strange lifeforms. The latter is the most frequent cause of death for my little diver avatar. I just love investigating Subnautica's curated world too much!

Into the deep

The basic premise of Subnautica is that you have crash-landed on an alien planet. You can see the burning hull of your ship, the Aurora, from your lifepod. You have no idea if you are the sole survivor, and you have no idea what lurks beyond the shallows. The first order of business is basic survival, so you start to potter in the vibrant sea outside your pod, seeking out resources to feed into your fabricator and start generating food, water and essential tools. 

You'll break open little lumps of sandstone and limestone to find deposits of titanium, silver, lead and more. A pillowy-looking fish is useful for water filtration, while others are good for eating. There are gigantic coral tubes to harvest bits from, docile creatures with long noses and glowing bums, and clusters of those bright mushrooms you use for making batteries.

Once you've familiarised yourself with the core loops and built up a little toolkit you find yourself able to dive deeper, venture further and survive longer. Subnautica services your increased confidence with beautiful biomes, tempting you with new resources and new creatures. 

You'll likely discover the stunning kelp forests early on, basking in their green splendour for a moment before spotting the accompanying eel/crocodile creatures. They're Stalkers. They might try to take a bite out of you but they prefer to play with the metal of wrecked craft.

As you poke around you start to find (or be fed via radio broadcasts) suggestive snippets which hint at a story beyond your own survival exploits. How you choose to balance pursuit of the written narrative against whatever you fancy doing under the sea is left up to you, though. Several game modes allow you to make that choice more explicit. For instance, Creative mode strips out all the survival and the story, just letting you build and explore. Hardcore gives you only one life and no oxygen warnings so is better for role-play.

I spent around 70 hours in Subnautica a few years ago, before the story was really implemented. I divided the time loosely between building an underwater base and exploring the world, letting the exploration loop back into the habitat crafting by using the trips to gather resources or pick up seeds from the local flora to create a little underwater garden. 

With the 1.0 release I find that even though I was trying to primarily focus on the story in order to deliver a review verdict I kept defaulting to a lovely, restful flow between three things: building up my habitat; exploring different zones; and pursuing the narrative. That's not great time management for a review, but it's such a great quality in the game itself, lulling me back into those patterns and letting the different forms of play lead into one another, depending on what I fancied doing.

I know that undersea exploration isn't everyone's cup of tea, though, so you'll need to take your own comfort level into consideration alongside my recommendation of the game. 

One colleague finds jellyfish to be highly suspicious and discomforting entities and thus is not keen on those Drooping Stingers I mentioned. A former colleague has a phobia of crabs and might struggle with Cave Crawlers. One friend finds the entire idea of being underwater a struggle so I'd never suggest this to him, and another gets really freaked out by the idea of gigantic things lurking in the deep sea so would hate some of the zones. 

I'm at the opposite end of the scale. I find sea life endlessly fascinating. I adore the way the lighting and the art create the sense of each biome as being a distinct underwater creation, both alien and familiar. I love following the creatures around—even the more aggressive ones—and will happily front crawl my way into a curious labyrinthine cave system without remembering to lay a path of glowing markers so I can get back out.

For someone at my end of the spectrum playing on Survival mode, the worst that can happen is you lose a bit of progress when you die in said cave system, or you get a jump scare thanks to an aggressive creature swimming up behind you. I won't spoil it for you but something a lot further out in the water destroyed my little submersible craft in an instant. That sense of being turned around, confused, threatened and suddenly stranded two kilometers from "home" is the closest I've come to panic. 

"Home", by the way, is a gigantic, sprawling base near a thermal vent. You go in via a little hatch and find the main manufacturing and storage facilities. The further you go the more the base errs towards decoration and relaxation. An observatory is in danger of becoming a greenhouse, glass corridors offer a look at the glowing plants in the outdoor grow beds, my bedroom is a repository of scavenged knick-knacks. 

The thermal vent location was initially an aesthetic choice and now it helps generate electricity to keep the lights and fabricators running. I've also got a room full of aquaria—glass cases of swimming fish inside a delicate windowed room inside a vast ocean of swimming fish...

In terms of irritants, there are a few. One is to do with pop-in, both of objects and textures. I don't mind it too much because it feels like a logical casualty of how believable undersea set design has to work. Swimming through clear ocean towards a point means there are none of the usual obscured viewpoint moments you can usually use to swap in more detailed textures or sets of objects. Acquiescing doesn't mean you won't notice it, but I'll take the trade-off if it means the game can run properly, and I still get some truly lovely landscapes to experience once I'm close enough.

Habitat-building can also be finicky. For example, I have absolutely no idea why one of my multipurpose rooms won't let me add glass windows but the rest will. More information when you're placing objects would make it much less frustrating—this room needs this much clear space below, or this interaction is causing a problem.

In the later game I ran into some truly frustrating issues. In one, I left my Seamoth craft to look around and returned to find it had "burrowed" about two meters into the floor. There was no way to extract it so my choices were to abandon it and go through the rigmarole of collecting all the resources to build it (and its upgrades) again, or to bring up the debug console, spawn a deprecated item called a terraformer, and dig the thing back out. 

About six hours later my massive submarine became unable to move in a really deep cave system. I tried everything I could think of, from removing the clinging life forms, to using my forbidden terraformer to try digging it out but to no avail. As such I've had to abandon it. The craft itself is a big resource and time investment, but it also contains the Seamoth at a depth the Seamoth can't survive if I undock, so that's gone too. 

A more flexible save system would have been ideal here. If I had multiple save files for the same playthrough I could have gone back a little and tried to avoid the problem. Unfortunately I had saved after getting into the pickle and you only get one save per version of the world. From a file size point of view it makes sense, but it means glitches can be monumentally costly.

I enjoyed how the story unfolded. The game lets you engage with it as much as you choose and at your own pace, offering information to keep you moving if you want a specific task. The main arc was compelling and had some lovely emotional moments but it struggles to create a meaningful connection with anything off-world. By contrast, you develop a real affection for and familiarity with this alien world, so some story strands put me at odds with my avatar's purpose, or at least just couldn't hit home. 

To put these negatives in context, though, I have spent nearly 50 hours on my current playthrough and my total playtime is over 120 hours. I am actually still playing (although I did indeed rage quite twice because of the vehicular issues). I have more than 2,000 screenshots of the beautiful world and its strange creatures, and now that the review is over I can go back to meandering at my own pace. It is, without doubt, my favourite game of the last five years.