Subnautica 2 Early Access 1.2 update out now alongside patch notes, dev donates $100,000 to Ocean Cleanup. Thumbs up. Subnautica 2 Early Access 1.2 is out now, adding the Buddy System to the underwater survival and crafting game. Developer Unknown Worlds has also announced a $100,000 donation to the appropriately named ocean cleanup non-profit The Ocean Cleanup. Unknown Worlds previously donated a portion of proceeds from the original Subnautica to The Ocean Cleanup on World Environment Day in 2019, and has continued to support ocean conservation efforts since. "Subnautica began with a love for the ocean, and it means a great deal to continue the conservation work we started with the original game through this donation to The Ocean Cleanup," said executive producer Fernando Melo. "We will keep doing our part to protect the ocean we have spent so long bringing to life." Unknown Worlds spoke about what to expect from Subnautica 1.2 yesterday, but today's release of the update brings with it detailed patch notes, below, which include a long list of changes and fixes. 1.2 includes the first iteration of Subnautica 2 proximity chat via an in-game voice chat option that you can use with your friends to talk locally with each other. As you get farther away it will switch to a radio-sounding voice that will progressively break up to a point where you can almost not hear your friend. Also added is player emotes via a small menu that lets players cheer on their friends, clap, or tell them you're a little annoyed or frustrated. Inventory sharing lets players walk up to another player, access their inventory and quickly swap items between one another, rather than having to drop inventory items out in the world and have them pick them up. Player revives are also added, so if your friend is downed for whatever reason, you'll have some time to share some oxygen with them and bring them back to life. Two additional player characters (Grace and Jegna) are added alongside two new suit colors. Also included is the tracking tag, a short-range beacon you can throw out in the environment or put inside an inventory such as a portable locker, so if you ever leave it in a cave you can find your way back to it. If you die holding a tracking tag or have one in your inventory, it will extend your black box signal to help you find the stuff you left behind. Improved HUD icons means all the icons will not be at full scale by default, but when you mouse over them after a half second or so they will scale up and give you the full details. Alongside that, there are improved pinned recipes, which means the UI should feel a little less confusing, and improvements to the base builder tool that should help make it clearer when you can and can't build something. The Subnautica 2 Early Access 1.2 update patch notes, courtesy of Steam, are below: Subnautica 2 Early Access 1.2 patch notes. Gameplay. * | Added Cross-Platform Voice Chat. Multiplayer host can choose between Global and Proximity Voice Chat (as players get further away, they become harder to hear). Voice Chat is available as "always on," "push to talk," or "always off." * Tracking Tag added to the game. Can be placed in carryables (like a locker) as a short-range beacon. If present in hand or inventory when reprinting, will increase black box range. * Players can now revive each other before reprinting. Revived players will keep their equipment and regain a small amount of oxygen. Downed players can also choose to immediately reprint and respawn back at their assigned Biobed. * Added Wave, Clap, Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, and Frustrated emotes. Emotes are selectable from a new radial menu. Triggerable in water or on land, and can be interrupted by gameplay input. * | Players can now interact with each other to directly exchange inventory items. * Added Jegna and Grace character options in Character Customization, as well as two new color schemes for characters. * Interaction text on Upgrade Biobeds changed to clarify their use. * Added a distinct beep to player upgrade spots within a small radius. * Added a small flash to screen on Upgrade Biobeds. Fauna & flora. * Added flinch animations and VFX to Marrowbreach, Hammerhead, Nibbler, Needlershark, Epicurean, and Twin Eel. * Adjusted Bulletheads so they deal more damage but can now be dodged (...sometimes). * Added more Coral Crab animations. * Revised model and animations for the Bloom Parasite. * Improved Jelly Ring tentacles. Resources. * More Carryable Racks added to early game wrecks and human-made sites. Base building. * | Improvements made to the base building system's placement UI, including alignment guide lines. * Improvements made to how the game handles Move mode for clients in a multiplayer session. * Updated Tadpole Dock icon to reflect updated model. * Base edits now account for size snapping, such that it's possible to fully deconstruct a room with Shrink (among other things). * Trashcan is now functional as a trashcan. Items added to trashcan will be destroyed one by one after a short, five second delay. * Bases can no longer be built inside of Great Jaw. * Items that are preventing an object from being built are displayed in a list. Vehicles, tools & equipment. * Changed Feedback Resonator's interaction with creatures to stun them instead of causing them to flee. * Extended duration of the Sonic Resonator creature stun to 10 seconds. * Sources for Acid now appear as green dots in the Scanner HUD. * Repair Tool now unlocks after two scans. * Tadpoles that are destroyed outside of the Early Access fence teleport inside of the Early Access fence so that they can be recovered. Menus & UI. * Signals adjusted to increase clarity and reduce HUD clutter. Icons get larger as player gets closer, and text will appear on hover for signals further away. * Save Codes can now be directly pasted into the Cloud Save Download input box. * Builder menu's scroll position persists when closing and re-opening the menu. * Pinned recipes highlight when the player acquires resources relevant to those recipes. * Items shown in Pinned Recipes are no longer dimmed, to improve readability. * Improved error language for errors specific to non-Game Pass Microsoft users. * Audiologs show elapsed and remaining playback time. Art & visual FX. * VFX performance improvements to the Graveyard and its Water Slugs, for the players who collect hundreds of Water Slugs. * Tallshrooms now have an icon in the Scanner HUD. * Added impact VFX for Tongue Thief. * Light poles connecting Observatory and Rosetta Stone added. * Removed odd blue outline that was sometimes visible on Collector Leviathan. * Improved consistency of sparks VFX across the game. * Improved consistency of electricity VFX across the game. * Added shock VFX for Hammerheads impacting objects. * Added more environmental effects to abandoned outposts and wrecks. Voice & narrative. * Previously unlocalized lines are now localized. * Naming of Carryable Racks is now consistent across the game, instead of sometimes being "Wall Rack" or "Hardpoint." * Reduced frequency of NOA alerts. * Adjusted Welcome Center message in Spanish and Italian. * Adjusted pacing of dialog to better match the actions occurring during the recordings. * Added Databank entry for Mod Station. * Added Databank entries for audiologs that were missing them. * Further refinements to voice over prioritization, so the most important lines are heard. Music & SFX. * Music added to Tufa Zona, Thermal Area, and North Coral Gardens. Miscellaneous. * New Privacy Policy additions from July 15th will pop up on first play. * New Frame Generation modes 5x and 6x (RTX 5000 series) added. * New Dynamic Frame Generation added. Will automatically select the appropriate Frame Generation mode to get a good performance (RTX 5000 series). * VSync and DLSS Frame Generation can be turned on at the same time. * Added description for Nvidia Reflex in Settings. * Reorganized order of volume sliders. * The in-game Feedback Tool now allows attaching a save file. Bug fixes. Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected]. Get IGN's Biggest Stories FIRST. Set Us as Your Source. Add Source Get the tools to beat your game. IGN Plus members get full access to all of IGN's maps and wikis, get to browse IGN ad free, and more. Try it today for as low at $2.49 a month.

Gamescom Dev 2026 will look into the "perils and freedom" of creating Subnautica 2. Subnautica 2 is headed to Gamescom Dev 2026, but Pocket Tactics is still waiting on a Switch 2 port. Updated: 9 days ago The ocean can be your friend or foe, and that premise is taken to the max in Subnautica 2. Unknown Worlds' aquatic survival game launched earlier this year, with over four million copies sold. If you're curious about how it came to fruition, this year's Gamescom Dev 2026 panel is set to uncover what lurks beneath the waters. Unknown Worlds creative director Anthony Gallegos will deliver the second keynote at Gamescom Dev 2026, titled 'The Perils and Freedom of Making a Sequel to Subnautica'. Drawing from his work on the sequel, Gallegos will discuss the challenges of evolving a beloved franchise, covering creative risks, player expectations, and the balance between innovation and the elements that made the original Subnautica so successful. 00:00/00:56 Subnautica takes place on the oceanic planet of 4546B, where you spend your days exploring vast underwater biomes, crafting equipment, and uncovering the mystery behind the Kharaa bacterium. Its blend of exploration, base building, and encounters with terrifying leviathan creatures helped establish it as a survival genre staple. While the first entry has since been released on Nintendo Switch, there's no word on whether Subnautica 2 will join the Nintendo Switch 2's roster. For now, you can get your fill of spooky sea creatures on handheld gaming PCs or on Xbox. The event will also introduce the Gamescom Dev Awards, celebrating creativity, innovation, and talent across the indie games scene. Awards will recognize achievements in categories including Visual Excellence, Most Innovative Game, Most Promising Game, Best Sound Design, Ambassador of the Year, and Excellence in Game Design. Gamescom Dev 2026 will also shine a light on the changing world of game development with two new sessions. Gearbox Entertainment executive producer Fleur Marty will share advice on building stronger development teams in 'Be the Tank: The Leadership Dev Teams Deserve'. Creative Assembly R&D director Duygu Cakmak will also look at the growing role of AI in game creation, discussing how studios can use coding tools while avoiding potential risks. Additional speakers, sessions, and program updates for Gamescom Dev 2026 will be announced in the coming weeks ahead of the event, which takes place from August 23-25 at the Confex Center in Cologne, Germany. If you're in the mood for a deep-sea dive, then its list of the best ocean games is worth jumping into. You can also check out its Subnautica: Below Zero review, too.

Subnautica 2 Early Access 1.1 update improves creature flinches so you'll know when you've hit them with the Survival Multitool - but no, you still can't kill fish. We're stunned. Subnautica 2 developer Unknown Worlds will release the game's Early Access 1.1 update today, July 8 - and no, it won't let you kill fish. In a new video, creative director Anthony Gallegos said the 1.1 update, dubbed Adaptive Measures, focuses on expanding the biomods system, adding new biolabs to the early game so you'll be able to find and swap out more biomods as you play from the start. Later in the game you'll be able to scan creatures and unlock more passive biomod slots, so can take multiple passive biomods at the same time. Perhaps of most interest are improvements to creature flinches. Most of the creatures in the game now have good flinches, so if you hit them with the Survival Multitool you'll get a reaction out of them before they flee, which in turn means you can see and understand the impact you're having on them. Unknown Worlds has also improved the Sonic Resonator, which ties into creatures now having stunned states. This means when you hit them with the Sonic Resonator they will clearly communicate that they've been stunned. "This is all in the effort to make you feel like you're having the mitigation on creatures that we want you to feel, which has also been a major part of your feedback," Gallegos explained. That's a reference to complaints from some Subnautica 2 players about the lack of an ability to kill the predators in the game. Not being able to directly kill fish in Subnautica 2 is perhaps the game's hottest topic, and while Unknown Worlds has promised to add "mitigation" to the game so you can better deal with predators, it will never allow you to kill them. Gallegos has spoken about this in the past, countering the narrative that Unknown Worlds set out to create a "pacifism game." That, Gallegos told MinnMax, just isn't true. Meanwhile, 1.1 makes improvements to blight encounters so there's a better transition from passive to aggressive, which will hopefully mean players won't be quite as surprised by creature attacks. There are gameplay improvements around wrecks so there is a little more puzzle solving and gameplay and better visual cohesion of the wrecks. The PDA is improved to add clarity. And players will have a new personal storage option in your base. This is not connected to the fabricators and processors by default. Expect 1.1 patch notes later today. Moving on, the 1.2 update, due out "some weeks" after today's update, will add multiplayer features such as proximity chat and player revive. And even later in the year is the big Early Access 2 update. This adds a new region, new creatures, new vehicle chassis, new progression, and new story. "It takes us a while to work on that and we are working really hard on it, but we are a small team, and so we're doing that while also integrating all your feedback," Gallegos explained. Subnautica 2 is a huge hit, and earlier this month it was confirmed that the entire Unknown Worlds staff will get their bonuses after parent company Krafton reached a settlement with studio leadership. Bloomberg reported that as part of the settlement, Unknown Worlds CEO Ted Gill had stepped down, leaving the company to look for a new boss. In a statement provided to IGN, Krafton confirmed the settlement, insisting its focus now was on the future of Subnautica 2, which Unknown Worlds will continue to develop. "Krafton, Inc., Unknown Worlds Entertainment and Ted Gill, Charlie Cleveland, and Max McGuire have reached a mutual settlement and agreed to dismiss all pending legal proceedings," Krafton said. "Unknown Worlds and Krafton are focused on supporting Subnautica 2, its Early Access journey to the full 1.0 release and the global community that has made the franchise so special. Unknown Worlds will continue leading development, with Krafton providing support for the success of the game." Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at [email protected] or confidentially at [email protected]. Get IGN's Biggest Stories FIRST. Set Us as Your Source. Add Source Recommends. Get the tools to beat your game. IGN Plus members get full access to all of IGN's maps and wikis, get to browse IGN ad free, and more. Try it today for as low at $2.49 a month.