About the Game
Dive Into a Vast Underwater World
You have crash-landed on an alien ocean world, and the only way to go is down. Subnautica's oceans range from sun drenched shallow coral reefs to treacherous deep-sea trenches, lava fields, and bio-luminescent underwater rivers. Manage your oxygen supply as you explore kelp forests, plateaus, reefs, and winding cave systems. The water teems with life: Some of it helpful, much of it harmful.
Scavenge, Craft, and Survive
After crash landing in your Life Pod, the clock is ticking to find water, food, and to develop the equipment you need to explore. Collect resources from the ocean around you. Craft diving gear, lights, habitat modules, and submersibles. Venture deeper and further form to find rarer resources, allowing you to craft more advanced items.
Construct Underwater Habitats
Build bases on the sea floor. Choose layouts and components, and manage hull-integrity as depth and pressure increase. Use your base to store resources, park vehicles, and replenish oxygen supplies as you explore the vast ocean.
Unravel the Mystery
What happened to this planet? Signs abound that something is not right. What caused you to crash? What is infecting the sea life? Who built the mysterious structures scattered around the ocean? Can you find a way to make it off the planet alive?
Disrupt the Food Chain
The ocean teems with life: Use the ecosystem to help you. Lure and distract a threatening creature with a fresh fish, or simply swim as fast as you can to avoid gnashing jaws of roaming predators.
Handle the Pressure
Build a Pressure Re-Active Waterproof Nanosuit, or PRAWN Suit, and explore extreme depth and heat. Modify the suit with mining drills, torpedo launchers, propulsion cannons, grappling hooks and more.
Fear the Night
As the sun goes down, the predators come out. The ocean is unforgiving of those caught unprepared in the darkness. Areas that are safe to explore during the day become treacherous at night, but also reveal a beauty that those who hide from the darkness will never see.
Dive Below the Ocean Floor
Cave systems wind below the sea bed, from dark claustrophobic passages to caverns lit by bio-luminescent life and burning-hot lava flows. Explore the world below the ocean floor, but watch your oxygen levels, and take care to avoid the threats lurking in the darkness.
About the Development Team
Subnautica is being created by Unknown Worlds, a small studio founded by Charlie Cleveland and Max McGuire that traces its roots back to the 2003 Half-Life mod Natural Selection. The team is scattered around the globe, from the United States to the United Kingdom, France, the Czech Republic, Russia, Thailand, Australia, and many more places. There is a central office in San Francisco, California that serves as home base for the whole team.
Warning
This game contains flashing lights that may make it unsuitable for people with photosensitive epilepsy or other photosensitive conditions. Player discretion is advised.
Screenshots
10 images
Version Information
Steam Patch Notes
Official update history
We have released a hotfix that addresses a security-related concern raised to us by Unity. You can read more about the specific issue here: https://unity.com/security/sept-2025-01/
While the update patches out the flaw, Unity has said that, to their knowledge, no one has exploited the issue to date, and no players have been at risk.
To help ensure that this security flaw can never be exploited on Subnautica or Below Zero, we have updated Unity following the guidelines provided. We have also had to make the difficult decision to disable all legacy and alternative branches of Subnautica and Below Zero, as there is no way for us to patch out the security issue on each of those branches individually.
If you play Subnautica or Below Zero with any mods on our legacy or alternative branches, you should disable or remove them before launching the game after the update to preserve your save files. You will need to check that the mods you want to play are updated to work with the most recent version of the game.
For our speedrunning community, this also means that the speedrunners branch has been disabled. We understand that this will affect speedruns moving forward, but the security and safety of all our players is our highest priority.
Thank you for all your continued support for Subnautica and Below Zero!
Keep Diving.
We’re excited today to release a new patch for Subnautica!
Thanks to some of the incredible development done on the mobile version of Subnautica, we were able to port that work across to other versions of the game.
This update will roll out worldwide and might take some time to appear across the globe.
Change Log
PC & Console
Added a pop-up newsfeed that can be used for one-time-only announcements.
Fixed an issue where passing through the Alien Arch portals (e.g. in the Primary Containment Facility) in your PRAWN suit freezes stats like oxygen or hunger, if you exited the suit.
Fixed the PRAWN suit sometimes falling through the map or getting stuck when the player returns from an Alien Arch portal.
Fixed Leviathans having a tendency to fly above the ocean surface when grabbing the Seamoth or PRAWN suit in certain cases.
Fixed having a permanent player view rotation offset upon respawning, if the player died while piloting the Scanner Room Camera Drone.
Fixed the game freezing if a player managed to construct a SeaBase piece inside of the Cyclops. It is now recognized as an obstacle for base building.
Fixed a bug where the Repulsion Cannon could displace objects built inside the Cyclops, causing them to fall outside of it and sometimes disappearing into the sea floor.
PC Only (Excluding Windows Store)
Changed from legacy Unity input to the new “com.unity.inputsystem” to accommodate controller improvements.
Fixed a bunch of controller related issues.
Reworked input options.
Various InputSystem related fixes and performance optimizations.
The game now properly supports the following controllers in both wired and wireless modes: Xbox 360, Xbox Series, PS4, PS5, PS5 Edge, Nintendo Switch Pro.
Changed to the new Unity Sprite Atlas packer (backport from Below Zero).
Changed from baked InputSymbols.ttf to SDF sprites for displaying inline control icons in text.
Updated control icons.
Fixed game falling back to text representation of controls instead of control icons for some input bindings when no controller is connected.
Fixed navigation icons in PDA and Builder Menu not updating bindings dynamically when they change (e.g. when controller type changes).
Fixed an issue where the user cannot toggle the 'auto move' setting to On while cycling through Cyclops' cameras.
Made Cyclops steering wheel animations gamepad-friendly.
We’re thrilled to release an update today for Subnautica on Steam to improve compatibility with the Steam Deck.
You’ll notice that Subnautica is now marked as ‘Verified’ on the Steam Store, which means that the game should work seamlessly when you play it on the Steam Deck.
Here are some of the improvements the team made to bring the Steam Deck compatibility update to life!
Patch Notes
- Steam SDK upgrade
- Steamworks .NET upgraded to 20.1.0
- Virtual Keyboard support for Steam Big Picture mode
- Fixed wrong controller stick dead zones handling (now should be easier to aim using controller)
- Fixed occasional black screen on game start
- Refactoring, other fixes and UX improvements (mostly related to controllers)
- Fixed black screen in VR after resolution change
We hope these changes will make your Subnautica experience on Steam and the Steam Deck even better than ever!
Keep diving,
Unknown Worlds
We’re delighted to bring you the long-awaited 2.0 update to Subnautica across all platforms.
This update has been a labor of love for the entire Subnautica team. As you might have seen in some of our previous blog posts, a lot of time has been spent addressing a ton of tech debt and bringing across some improved code from Below Zero.
Our goal was always to bring both Subnautica and Below Zero onto unified versions of Unity, and with today’s update, that goal has been achieved. By doing this, we’ve been able to implement several quality of life features, fix many outstanding bugs, and introduce some performance improvements that were already available in Below Zero.
We’ve also added some base pieces to Subnautica that were previously only available in Below Zero, specifically the Large Room, Glass Dome, and surface hatches. Now you can make your bases even more epic than before!
On top of these changes, we’ve also refactored and optimized our save system, which means it’s now even faster and more reliable to save and retrieve your save.
Other additions include:
- Adding the TextMeshPro plugin, to improve UI readability and visual quality
- Adding an ‘Unstuck’ button to the menu to help get you out of some sticky situations
- Bringing over PDA pause, the ability to disable light flashes, and item bars from Below Zero
As for bug fixes, we’ve closed out over 800 in total, including multiple issues related to base building (server clipping, deconstructing buildings whilst inside them), vehicle navigation and piloting.
If you’re not quite ready to move to the new update, because you’re using mods on your save file or otherwise, you can also roll back to the ‘legacy’ beta on Steam to continue playing. Just head to ‘Properties,’ then ‘Betas,’ and choose ‘legacy’ from the drop down. You should do this before you open your save file to play.
We really hope that all of these changes make your Subnautica experience even better than ever! And as some eagle-eyed fans might have spotted, we might have some more exciting news for you in the new year.
But for now, enjoy, and happy diving!
Unknown Worlds
PATCH NOTES
All Platforms
- Improved font rendering to increase UI readability and visual quality
- Adds accessibility features: UI scaling, PDA pause, option to disable light flashes
- Item bars
- Adds pinned recipes
- Adds run mode
- Improved Air Bladder functionality
- Adds the Large Room and Glass Dome base pieces from Subnautica: Below Zero
- Adds Land Hatches from Subnautica: Below Zero
- Pings are now visible when piloting the Cyclops
- Save system improvements
- Improved performance
- Improved subtitles sync
- Loading screen improvements
- Intro skipping improvements
- Various performance optimizations
- Improved control mapping, for things like transferring items between inventory and storage
- Fixed some creatures not spawning properly
- Fixes for some VFX issues
- Fixed multiple terrain streaming issues (vehicles/items falling through)
- Fixed multiple issues related to base-building, vehicles
- Fixes for many possible photosensitive issues
- …And many more various bug fixes!
PC
- Changed how the dev menu is accessed to SHIFT + `
- Fixed jittery movement on land
- Less likely to get stuck in Alien Bases while operating the Prawn
- Added an option to limit FPS
- Added Cloud Save Support
- Legacy Steam branch for Mod Integrity
- Fixed VR frame lag in PDA UI screen movement
- Fixed a VR issue with player orientation being slanted in some scenarios
- Fixed Sunbeam countdown timer not showing up in VR
- Fixed VR Main Menu prompts on selecting and interacting with the menu
Curious about our plans for Subnautica? Read our blog "What's Next for the Subnautica Series?"
Sign up to the Development Newsletter to receive word every time an update is released. You can also:
- See update sneak peaks by following @Subnautica on Twitter
- Get live source code changes by following @SubnauticaSCM on Twitter
- See update news on Facebook
- Watch update summary videos on YouTube
- Satisfy underwater Instagram craving by following @Subnautica
- See our task lists & milestones on Favro
- Chat with fellow divers in the Subnautica Discord server
Happy diving!
- Unknown Worlds
To make the soundtrack more readily available, we've moved the soundtrack from the game itself to additional content. If you already own a copy of Subnautica on Steam, you will automatically be credited with a free copy of the soundtrack to download. You can find and download this directly from the game listing in your Steam Library.
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Additionally, for the next seven days, any purchase of Subnautica on Steam will also come with the soundtrack. After that, it will be available to purchase for $9.99.
Enjoy, and happy diving!
- Unknown Worlds
Current Release
20241558
Uploaded May 24, 2026
System Requirements
How to Install
Subnautica.exe to play
Troubleshooting tips
• Run Redist/_CommonRedist installers if game won't start
• Add folder to Windows Defender exclusions
• Run as administrator
Download
Direct link available
8.4 GB
20241558
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Download Subnautica for PC with a direct link or via torrent. Get the full version of Subnautica for free. Subnautica is a Adventure released by Unknown Worlds Entertainment.