Trivia / Subnautica

• Colbert Bump: Odds are good, most of the people who've gotten into, or at least heard of, Subnautica have done so because of Jacksepticeye or Markiplier. Both YouTubers are mentioned in the "Special Thanks" portion of the credits, and Jack's eyeball mascot is in the game as a special item.^note In one of Jack's videos, he says that he met the Subnautica devs and they actually credited him for saving the game by rescuing them from the brink of bankruptcy.
• Dummied Out: Occasionally you can see ideas from earlier Early Access builds floating around in the 1.0 release.
  • One of the first major things to be removed, mourned by players and developers alike, was the Terraformer, which could move terrain from one part of the planet to the other. It was removed for both technical and story reasons, as the plot changed from "make the planet inhabitable" to "escape the planet". Players with old Early Access saves will still retain the chunks of land removed or added to their game, although the updated map can make bases inaccessible. ^note  The terraforming feature is also the reason behind the extensive graphical “pop-in” that is cited by many as Subnautica’s biggest flaw; UW hard-coded the terrain in “layers” to make terraforming easier. Sadly, even with the feature removed, the pop-in remains, and UW would have to rewrite the engine from the ground up to fix it.
  • Reefback eggs are fully coded into the game and can be hatched inside alien containment units, but they have the same model as Spadefish eggs and are only obtainable with the debugging console, as they will never naturally spawn anywhere in the game world.
• Easter Egg: The Aurora can be spawned, and every spawned Aurora will explode in sync with the "explodeship" command.
• The Other Marty: In Below Zero, Robin had a different voice actress during early development before Kimberly Brooks became her definitive voice.
• Promoted Fanboy: Neebs and Appsro from Neebs Gaming make a guest appearance in the game as the voices of Alterra HQ reprising their characters from the roleplay series they made of Subnautica. The developers were so tickled about the roleplaying series they created with the characters that they agreed to bring both of them on to do voice acting for the game. It even continues the roleplay story as Appsro promised Neebs a job at Alterra HQ near the conclusion of the series.
• Refitted for Sequel: Below Zero implements a couple of concepts that were planned for the original game, but never realized, such as a female protagonist (originally the developers had plans to allow the player to choose Ryley's gender) and the Rock Puncher and Spike Trap creatures.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: This game is particularly plagued by this. Through development, and up to time of writing, concept art and unused models were regularly milked by YouTube clickbait videos as "confirmations" of future features or even used to claim that they had been added to the actual game. Examples include the Ghost Leviathan long before it was anything more than an untextured model on Trello, and the 100% fan-made "Atlas" submarine model. Another routine claim during development was that some kind of monster (invariably never caught in screenshots) lived in what was then called the Void biome. As of the addition of Ghost Leviathans to that biome, that particular legend has tapered off as somewhat redundant.
  • A particularly popular one was a rumor that when you received and played the unintelligible Warper broadcast on your radio, a Warper would spawn at Life Pod 5.
  • There were mentions of potential sights of the Gargantuan Leviathan alive if a player entered Crater's Edge and successfully killed several Ghost Leviathans. No such content existed until 2021, and only in the form of the Return of the Ancients mod (and the killing of said Leviathans doesn't cause it to spawn, it just does anyways).
• What Could Have Been: Lots. So much that it wouldn't fit on this page. But to highlight a few major ones:
  • The original plan for the game was for the Aurora to be a terraforming vessel. In later versions, the player is part of a mining crew aboard the "Aurora Mining Vessel." This was later changed again to just a "long-distance vessel" assembled to build a phasegate.
  • Lots of upgrades were considered but scrapped, including poisoned knives and knives that chop up your foes into edible chunks, stronger Stasis Rifles, lethal upgrades to the Mobile Vehicle Bay and Lightstick, and more.
  • There were going to be many models of vehicles in the game until it was decided that that would be too much work for barely - if at all - functionally distinct vessels, so the most appropriate model in each category was picked for a total of four different vehicles.
  • Creatures would naturally spawn infused with the DNA of other creatures as if the player had used the Transfuser on them. They'd also spawn with other properties, such as heightened aggression, and larger sizes.
  • Special mention goes to the scrapped "Grabcrab" and "Sandworm," and the ability to dig sand to process into glass. All three were Dummied Out (except for the "digging sand" part), but it took forever (as in, not until 2016) to fully remove all of them from the game. And even then, sand as an item still exists, but can't be obtained and doesn't function. The same applies to a bunch of minerals originally considered for the game, such that they clog the first few parts of the item list.
  • Earlier versions of the game included a tool called the Terraformer, which allowed large chunks of land to be created or removed. This, however, led to many bugs and glitches (and even break the game by means of being used to create shortcuts into the Lost River and Lava Zone) and was ultimately decided to not be necessary for the final build of the game, thus it was removed.
  • There was a plot at the end of the game for the Warpers to fight against the native wildlife in an Enemy Mine situation as the player, upon reaching the Sea Emperor, would be attacked by multiple Warpers at once trying to eliminate all infected life, but this plot fell through. Warpers are now mostly roaming deterrents that, while automatically attacking infected wildlife and getting attacked by territorial creatures, don't really coordinate their efforts.
  • The developers mused with the idea of giving you a shorter, alternate ending if you managed to cure yourself of Kharaa and disable the precursor gun before the Sunbeam arrives. In the final release this just leads to an additional radio broadcast where the Sunbeam regretfully can't land because of the orbiting debris left by the Aurora and has to depart with a promise to tell the proper authorities.
  • So many biomes were ultimately scrapped. The Twisty Bridges are perhaps the most famous, but there were many others. This video gives a nice rundown of some of them. The Twisty Bridges and Lilypad Islands were ultimately Refitted for Sequel and added to Below Zero.
  • In the initial story for Below Zero, Robin was an employee of Alterra stationed on the planet while her sister Sam monitors and relays information back to her on a space station in orbit. The start of the game has her forced to start from scratch and survive on her own when the base she's staying in is buried by an avalanche. The final release instead has Robin as an employee of a company that was bought out by Alterra and goes down to the planet to find Sam, who has gone missing.
• Word of God: The main reason as to why the game doesn't have lethal weaponry^*The knife doesn't count, as it's listed as a survival tool is because the game was first realized around the time of the Sandy Hook shooting. Charlie Cleveland, the game's director, while not a believer of violent video games being a catalyst of violent crime, decided to make Subnautica a game without guns, as explained here.
• Working Title: Descend.

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