GAMING
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At the end of Session 02, I said the SEED logo deserved to stay exactly where it was, at least until I crashed into it again.
It did not take long.
It was not even the first thing to go wrong. Before we had properly got going, Mr.Pendragon had been eaten by a giant clam and I had been sent on a rescue mission. By the end of the session we had been down into the Graveyard Caves, read about ten people who never came back up, and found a completely new way to die.
In Session 01, the word was oxygen.
This time, nobody had mentioned food.
Session 03 did not start with a plan. It started with a joy ride and an incident report.
Mr.Pendragon had been eaten by a Great Jaw. If you have not seen it, it is essentially an enormous clam, and it behaves exactly the way something called a Great Jaw would be expected to behave.
He had also managed to destroy a Tadpole within about two minutes of starting our session due to his spontaneous joyride.
So I went to get him back. In his words, I accomplished what he could not. I have decided to take that as a compliment and not ask any follow-up questions.
The rescue came with a bonus. Inside the clam, we found the Portable Oxygen Generator.
After two sessions of shouting "OXYGEN!" at each other, one of the most useful answers to our favourite problem had been sitting inside the thing that had just eaten Mr.Pendragon.
We probably should have looked in there sooner.
Back at Jenny, we worked out what to do next.
There were three candidates. The Tadpole Pens. Zip's Blackbox. And Mr.Pendragon's body, still lying where he had left it after an earlier trip to the Tadpole Pens, which he had made by swimming, without a Tadpole, before running out of oxygen on arrival.
I am going to let that one speak for itself.
First, some housekeeping. We emptied our pockets into storage and agreed that you get a very good view of the SEED logo from Jenny's window.
Mr.Pendragon was also down to 34 health. Mine was at 100. I mention this purely for the record.
With the logo right there, we decided to film another fly-by.
Setting that up was its own small adventure. The Steam pop-up on my side offered no useful options whatsoever, so Mr.Pendragon handled the recording with Xbox's built-in capture while I got into position behind the lettering.
The plan was the same as last time. He would film. I would come through the letters from the other side, where he couldn't see me, and make an entrance.
I was trying to show off. I went to press one key and a different finger went down.
The Tadpole went left.
The SEED logo stayed exactly where it was.
At this point, we decided to stop messing about and just stick with the original clip we made. That is two crashes into the SEED logo in two sessions, from the person who helped build it.
Getting there was a reminder that this ocean does not particularly enjoy visitors.
I was chased by a hammerhead, and then by two smaller things that had apparently decided to join in. Mr.Pendragon, meanwhile, was describing a giant circular, tubular thing that looked like a flower. Neither of us knew what it was, and neither of us went closer to find out. Yet.
Then there were the big bad fish. First one. Then two. One of them eventually got itself stuck, and we took full advantage by swimming straight over the top of it.
At the Tadpole Pens there is a clue on the wall, and reading it, I got the impression the game expected some people to turn up without a Tadpole.
Mr.Pendragon's view was "not a chance". Since his body was lying nearby, he was speaking with some authority.
This time he made it to the bottom and found the next step up for our vehicles: the Tadpole Scout Ray Chassis. When I read the blueprint out later, the short version was that it makes the Tadpole faster.
It has wings, basically.
The Tadpole Pens are not a relaxing place. There is a sound there that makes the hair stand up on the back of your neck, so when something bumped into me, I announced that I was under attack.
It was Mr.Pendragon.
He did eventually track down what we had been hearing. He also found something considerably bigger outside: a giant octopus with shrimp like features which we know is the Collector Leviathan. He took screenshots. I was literally outside in this area seconds before this, looking in at him through a window while it could have come my way, which would not have been how I'd choose to meet such a giant.
And then came the reunion.
"That's my body," said Mr.Pendragon, having finally located himself.
From there we headed down through Tailings Village into the Graveyard Caves. We had been calling them the hot caves, which turned out to be accurate.
On the way, Mr.Pendragon found a Thermal Plant. That is the sort of discovery you get excited about for a moment, before remembering that Jenny is nowhere near anything hot.
The deeper we went, the stranger it got. At almost 250 metres, we knew we couldn't go much further down as we would reach the limit of our Tadpoles' safe depth.
Then we found the monitoring notice. It said there were ten colonist Blackboxes in the cave below, and it described the place as a high mortality work site.
Mr.Pendragon's response was to start recording.
Not for the atmosphere. In case something stupid happened.
He kept recording for a while after that, fully convinced that the moment he stopped, something would.
You can watch a short clip of when we were exploring the Graveyard below:
The Graveyard has earned its name. As I understood it, Zip died down there, nine more people went down to recover her Blackbox, and all nine died as well.
I explained all of this to Mr.Pendragon in some detail.
"Did you hear any of that?"
"No, it was pretty broken up."
So I explained it again. The short version is that a lot of people went down into these caves, and none of them came back up.
We found several of those Blackboxes, including Eddy's. One of the voices sounded, in my opinion, stoned. Mr.Pendragon went with possessed. Neither of us found that particularly reassuring.
Mr.Pendragon then had a scare of his own, and not in the game. By his account, he bumped his chair, thought it was one of the dogs, and got goosebumps anyway. After the house spiders in Session 01, I am starting to think our houses are the most dangerous biome in this playthrough.
Moving through the caves takes some care, because some of the tunnels are tight. I got stuck in one, couldn't fit through the gap, tried another route that turned out to be even smaller, and eventually squeezed out to a quiet "he's made it" from Mr.Pendragon. He had simply taken a different tunnel that led to the same room.
Deeper in, there is a big purple structure. Mr.Pendragon's first thought was that it was a lobster. It looks considerably more like a root than a lobster. It seems to be connected to the same sort of life form as the Angel Comb, and it also appeared to be infected. Further down, there looked to be another Angel Comb of some kind.
We could not get down there yet. That is going to need the Tadpole, and probably a better Tadpole than the one we have.
The caves are dangerous in a few new ways, so a handful of things worth knowing if you are heading down there yourself.
The red thermal vents hurt. Mr.Pendragon went through one and reported, in fairly quick succession, that he was burning up, that he was on fire and that nobody should do that again. His advice afterwards was simple: don't fly through the red vents.
The Water Slugs on the cave floor are worth collecting, because they give you water. They are also, if our experience is anything to go by, one of the few things in the Graveyard that is not trying to hurt you.
Not everything that looks alive is. A big crab thing with its claws out gave me a proper fright when it appeared initially on my screen. The scan told me it was a Dead Coral Crab. Mr.Pendragon decided ramming it with his Tadpole was good for... science?
Storage caches down there hold food, medical supplies and water.
Your inventory will fill up. We ended up swapping titanium for lithium, which was the sensible call.
And keep an eye on the Tadpole's power. Mr.Pendragon was down to 50% at depth, which is the kind of number that becomes very interesting on the way home.
On the way home, we spotted those flower-like creatures, which we now know are Jelly Rings. I decided to try to go through the inside of the ring on the way past and to Mr.Pendragon's delight the creature started moving with a pulsating shrinking motion that made it closed up, open and close up again behind me. I still do not know whether that was a feature or a warning.
The rest of the journey was lively. I was starving, and neither of us had any food left. A hammerhead took an interest in Mr.Pendragon, who handled it with all the calm you would expect, which is to say very little. It then got into a fight with a Coral Crab, and we were more than happy to leave them to it. At one point there was even talk of playing chicken with it.
Mr.Pendragon also tried to bring his Tadpole up to Jenny's front door, which is not, it turns out, how front doors work. We did at least collect some crab faeces on the way. Yep, you read that right. We discovered that I returned to base with a pocket full of poop.
Back home, the power problem was waiting for us. Jenny can only charge one battery at a time. One battery, one charger.
The obvious fix was Power Storage, which needs germanium. We had not found any germanium.
So we built a Hydroelectric Turbine instead: three titanium, three copper and three silver. After a brief rummage through the lockers for copper, the verdict was "lots of power".
Mr.Pendragon also turned out to have a Power Cell, which is not the same thing as a basic battery, plus an extra one he could not account for.
The Tadpole Scout Ray Chassis had to wait, because we were short of the materials to build it.
We did spend some time browsing what we could currently build, then realising that germanium was craftable in the processor. We did not revisit the Tadpole Scout Ray Chassis again at this time. A Thermal Plant would also be an option, if Jenny were anywhere near a thermal area.
It is not.
I put a storage cabinet in the middle of the hallway as we were low on free slots in our wall cabinets. Mr.Pendragon informed me that this broke several of his rules about how things should be arranged. I apologised. He let it go.
Just about.
Our scanner could not find any salt, and we needed some. So the plan became very simple: go and look for salt, and explore.
Salt went about as well as you would expect. Mr.Pendragon later admitted he had forgotten to look for it.
We found plenty of other things.
The juvenile Angel Comb we had saved earlier was, according to the game, full of parasites. We thought we had already dealt with that, but it turned out we had never scanned it, so the objective had simply been waiting for us. It also asked us to fix it, and fixing it potentially means going somewhere hot and deep.
I found a cave with something in it. I could hear it. I did not stay to be introduced.
Past the giant glowing pink/purple fauna, in water I had never ventured into before, a scan told us the area was dominated by a single species of branch jelly, and that simple ecosystems are often a sign of ecological crisis.
Then we found the end of the world.
Mr.Pendragon found the edge of the Early Access map the direct way. He swam into an area with a big red wall and red lines across his screen, and the game told him the area is still in development.
The chase music started. Somebody said "Leviathan". Mr.Pendragon was convinced there had to be something down there.
There was nothing down there.
And then there was the face.
There was gooey liquid coming out of the rock, and it was moving. Mr.Pendragon told me to back up a bit and look at it properly.
It was a face.
An eye. A nose. In the rock. The screenshot I got is fairly dark, a shame. The one with the gooey stuff came out better though.
Then the music changed again, and I realised I had drifted into the out of bounds area. Then there was the roar. A roar form something very big. We fled the scene.
I was not being dramatic about needing to get back earlier when we were out of food. I was starving, again. This time a long way from Jenny, and still we had nothing to eat on us.
What followed was a revival against the clock on our way home again.
A Marrowbreach broke my Tadpole, and I died. Mr.Pendragon had the countdown, a very large fish for company and some zapping to do, and he got me back on my feet with seconds to spare.
That bought us some time. It did not solve anything, because I was still starving and we were still nowhere near home.
Then I died of starvation.
I told Mr.Pendragon I thought he could not revive me, because I had died of starvation, and surely that is the kind of death that sticks.
I was wrong. He revived me anyway.
"Thank you, sir."
"You're welcome."
We called it there.
For a session that started with a clam eating Mr.Pendragon, Session 03 covered a lot of water.
We found the Portable Oxygen Generator, reached the Tadpole Pens, found the Tadpole Scout Ray Chassis, went down into the Graveyard Caves, found several Blackboxes, fixed Jenny's power with a Hydroelectric Turbine, found the edge of the map, found a face in a rock and crashed into the SEED logo for the second time in two sessions.
I also died of starvation, which I do not think either of us had on the list.
I'd still call that a good session. Mostly.
The Graveyard isn't finished with us. There are more Blackboxes further down, the infected Angel Comb wants fixing, and getting deeper means sorting out the Tadpoles first.
We also still need salt, some germanium and the materials for the Scout Ray Chassis.
And we need to pack lunch.
Session 01 taught us one word.
Session 03 has added a second.
FOOD.
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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In our first AnvilPlays session of Subnautica 2, we race through the early objectives, build our cliff edge base before reaching Camp One. There are resources to gather, alien creatures to investigate, a surprisingly effective face-chomping and several completely avoidable deaths caused by forgetting that oxygen is rather important underwater.
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