Last week, Subnautica was released on Steam Early Access. Since then, over 11,000 games of Subnautica have been played. That’s crazy! Subnautica’s development was already pretty open before December 16th, but now the flood gates have opened.

We’re absolutely swimming in ideas and feedback. Treading water is boring, so naturally we’ve been diving into all sorts of stuff in the days since release, and a new development build is available on Steam. If you have Subnautica in your Steam library (get it here), you will receive the update automatically.

Here’s a quick summary of some of the changes and additions that have been made. We can never fit everything in these updates, so please check out the Subnautica Trello Board and Checkin & Changes list for all the goods.

Charlie had a bit of fun, and created a new craftable item called the ‘Gravsphere.’ When deployed, it sucks small objects and creatures towards it. It effectively allows some serious loot-hoovering!

It’s now possible to store loot in the life pod, using the storage locker found behind the ladder. Left click to open the storage, and then drag items between your personal inventory and the locker.

Got an Oculus DK2? We’ve got a present for you. VR-integration has proceeded pretty well, and while the game does have significant issues in VR, it is a great experience. We’ve written up a comprehensive Steam Guide to get you started.

Back to storage: it gets better for loot-hoarders. You can now use ‘storage cubes’ to store even more stuff, anywhere in the world! Storage cubes can be made at the fabricator (costing 3 metal each), and then place anywhere by dropping them from your inventory.

Gasopods are now more flatulent, and it’s harder to just swim around them without copping a nasty serve to the face.

Those with Nvidia SLI setups had a slightly sub-optimal introduction to Subnautica – The oxygen bar was not showing up! This now fixed, and those with intense GPU set ups can now receive some warnings before they suffocate!

The Beacon will no longer stream out when you swim very far from it. This is good, because a homing beacon that stops working when you need it most is not a very good homing beacon!

Oxygen now replenishes at twice the previous rate when you visit the surface. This means you can get back to being eaten by Stalkers exploring more quickly!

Large creatures will now spend a lot less time shoving their faces into rock walls and the sea floor. You be judge as to whether this is a good thing. Some of them have been known to eat players, and if they’re not running into walls, they’re probably swimming near you…

That’s it for this update, but remember: We don’t include everything in these summaries! To see everything that was changed, added, improved in this update check out the Changes & Checkins list and Subnautica Trello Board. Sign up to the Subnautica dev mailing list to get notified when new updates go live. And stay away from the Stalkers…