GAMING
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For our first proper AnvilPlays session in Subnautica 2, Mr.Pendragon and I had one fairly straightforward goal: get through enough of the early objectives to establish ourselves, build a decent starting base and make some progress towards the Angel Comb objective.
We had both played before, so this was not a cautious first descent into an unfamiliar ocean. We knew roughly where we were going. We knew what we needed. We knew the early game.
This confidence turned out to be completely unrelated to remembering how oxygen works.
Because we had both been through the opening before, we decided there was very little reason to hang around.
The early NOA objectives were handled quickly, taking us through the tasks needed to unlock the ability to eat the native fauna and get ourselves properly established. We also picked up the speed boost from the building near the starting pod, because apparently travelling through an alien ocean at normal speed was no longer acceptable.
Once you know what you are doing, the opening of Subnautica 2 moves along quite nicely. You already know which early resources matter, which objectives unlock something useful and which detours can probably wait until later.
The important word there is probably.
Our enthusiasm for getting established quickly meant we were constantly moving, gathering resources, heading towards the next objective and assuming that one of us had remembered everything important.
Neither of us had remembered everything important.
That became the word of the session.
Not "careful". Not "danger". Not even the name of whatever horrifying creature was currently somewhere behind us.
Oxygen.
We died multiple times during the session because we were rushing around and repeatedly forgetting to check how much air we had left. One minute everything was fine. The next, somebody would suddenly realise they had been underwater far too long and there was absolutely no chance of reaching safety.
So now we call it out.
"OXYGEN!"
Usually at the point where it would have been considerably more useful to mention it thirty seconds earlier.
Fortunately, Subnautica 2 is fairly forgiving about death. You get reprinted and, while it is still inconvenient, you are not forced into some enormous recovery operation every time your attention span gets the better of your lungs.
Which was fortunate, because otherwise Session 01 would have lasted approximately four hours longer.
It is worth mentioning also that in co-op your friends can also revive you too if they are close by and get to you within the 1 minute countdown.
Our first major project was finding somewhere we wanted to call home.
We eventually settled on a spot near the Angel Comb and, rather than building directly into the terrain, decided to push the base out over the edge of the cliff.
There was no particularly complicated tactical reason for this.
It just looked better.
That was genuinely the main consideration. We wanted the base to feel as free from the surrounding terrain as possible, hanging out over the edge rather than appearing to have been awkwardly shoved into a convenient bit of seabed.
It also gave us exactly the sort of view you want from an underwater home: open water, a dramatic drop and the constant possibility that something unpleasant is swimming around just outside the window.
Practical? Mostly.
Aesthetic? Absolutely.
And when you are building a home at the bottom of an alien ocean, that is enough of a reason.
For a while, it was simply Cliff Edge Base.
A perfectly functional name. Descriptive. Useful. Exactly the sort of thing you might write on a planning document.
Naturally, we stopped using it.
Mr.Pendragon and I have been making rather too many references to Forrest Gump recently, so at some point the obvious thing happened and Cliff Edge Base became Jenny.
There is probably a sensible explanation for this somewhere.
We do not currently have one.
What we do have is an underwater base called Jenny, and I suspect that is simply going to become one of those things that makes increasingly less sense the longer we have to explain it.
Building near the Angel Comb also meant that one of our early objectives was sitting more or less on our doorstep.
We focussed on progressing through the relevant NOA objectives including the Angel Comb objective, so all those that give the additional perks to your character almost immediately in starting area near the landing pod.
It was noted that the Marrowbreach that normally guards the Angel Comb was not present. Perhaps this was removed from this location by the devs, or we just got lucky to not have to distract it with flares on this ocassion.
This likely made - at least myself - lower my sense of danger meaning I was cruising around without any care in the world gathering up as much resources as quickly as I could.
With Jenny established and the Angel Comb objective completed, we continued following NOA's objectives until reaching Camp One.
This was one of those useful co-op moments where we naturally ended up doing different things. Mr.Pendragon headed off to explore the damaged base while I spent my time stocking up on resources we knew we were going to need.
It is one of the things I enjoy most about playing survival games like this with someone else. You do not necessarily have to stay together every second. One person can investigate something interesting while the other quietly deals with the increasingly obvious fact that everybody has somehow run out of useful materials again.
Eventually, I headed over to join him.
This was a mistake.
Camp One is guarded by a large creature called a Marrowbreach, the same creature that we were surprised to see was not present in the Angel Comb cave.
At some point, this creature decided that following me was an excellent use of its time.
I did not notice.
I was presumably busy looking at something else, entirely unaware that the Marrowbreach was behind me quietly closing the distance.
Then I turned around.
It bit me directly in the face.
I jumped.
Mr.Pendragon found this considerably more entertaining than I did.
Apparently, when I reacted, his first assumption was not that I had just been attacked by a large alien creature. His first assumption was that another large house spider had run across the carpet at home.
This is, unfortunately, not an entirely unreasonable conclusion.
The weather changing recently has apparently convinced the local spider population that my house is the place to be, and large house spiders making unexpected appearances has become something of a recurring theme over the last few weeks.
So, from Mr.Pendragon's perspective, there were two possibilities.
He apparently considered the second one more likely.
I am not sure what that says about my house.
By the end of the session, we had made good progress.
The early objectives were largely out of the way, we had unlocked the ability to eat the native fauna, picked up our speed boost, completed the Angel Comb objective and got the perks from a number of biobeds located in the various bases, and built ourselves a proper starting base hanging over the edge of a cliff.
We had also reached Camp One and made enough progress that the next part of the playthrough was waiting for us.
More importantly, just as we were wrapping up, we had an idea involving the room blocks at Jenny.
Rather than quickly throwing something together at the end of the session, we decided to leave it there and save the idea for next time.
Which is probably sensible.
We had already died several times because oxygen apparently needs active monitoring, built a base almost entirely because we liked the view, renamed it after Forrest Gump references and established that Mr.Pendragon cannot always tell the difference between me being attacked by alien wildlife and a spider appearing on my carpet.
That feels like enough for one session.
Session 01 was mostly about getting established.
We knew we wanted Jenny as our starting point, we knew roughly where we wanted the base to be located and we wanted to get far enough through the early objectives that future sessions could spend less time unlocking the basics and more time exploring, building and inevitably getting distracted by something neither of us had planned to investigate.
The next session starts with an idea for the room blocks, and we are fairly excited to give our idea a try and no doubt it will take longer than it appears it should take, so we will be thankful that we held off until the next session before diving straight in.
At least we have learned one thing.
OXYGEN.
Session 03 starts with Mr.Pendragon inside a giant clam and ends with a death by starvation. In between, we reach the Tadpole Pens, go down into the Graveyard Caves, fix Jenny's power, find a face in a rock and crash into our SEED logo for a second time.
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In Subnautica 2 Session 02, our room block idea from the previous session becomes something rather more ambitious: a giant floating SEED logo. Built beside our cliff-edge base, Jenny, the logo pays tribute to the game that inspired AnvilGaming. We also expand Jenny, add a viewing platform, move the moonpool, build two Tadpoles and attempt an underwater fly-by, with the usual amount of accidental crashing.
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