After a long and legally tumultuous development, Subnautica 2 made its splashdown into early access yesterday with an impressive launch, drawing hundreds of thousands of players in its first 30 minutes and selling more than 2 million copies before 12 hours were up. Today, Unknown Worlds is following up that triumphant launch day with its first early access roadmap, giving us a glimpse at its plans for Subnautica 2's first few updates—albeit a fairly vague one.
"Updates will vary from focused improvements that address systems and smaller features, to hot fixes when needed, and then our larger expansions," Unknown Worlds says in its roadmap announcement. "So, as we build towards the next big drop that expands on the world, biomes, creatures, resources, tools, vehicles, and brings you the next chapter of the story, we’ll be planning on adding several improvement updates in the meantime!"
The first of those incremental updates will be focused on quality-of-life and general usability, featuring planned improvements for the biomods system that provides active and passive perks through the exciting application of fish DNA, a tune-up for taking care of blight infestations, better spaceship wrecks, smoother vehicle docking and fabrication at bases, and adjustments to PDA memos and voicelog audio priority. It'll add some new features, too. Like a sprint button. You know, like landwalkers do.
Incremental update number two will be aimed at polishing up co-op play, with improvements planned for HUD signals, base-building, and pinning recipes. That's also when we can expect in-game voice chat, player emotes, trading, additional player customization, and—crucially—the ability to revive your friend after they've been savaged by a large predatory eel.
After those arrive, Unknown Worlds says we can expect major updates with more substantial additions like new world regions and biomes, more creatures, additional resources to collect and tools to craft, and best of all: more submersibles.
"And, of course, we will continue to roll out bug fixes, balance tuning, optimizations, and other related updates throughout Early Access," Unknown Worlds says. "We’ll be monitoring your feedback very closely to help guide those ongoing improvements!"
Somewhat frustratingly, the roadmap doesn't include any timeframe for when we might expect any of these minor or major updates. But rest assured, once there's a more accurate forecast for how Subnautica 2's tides are changing, we'll have it for you here.
