Unlike every other update Unknown Worlds has ever released, today’s Crash Site update appears to have experienced occasional technical difficulties in the wild. Some proportion of players are loading into the world only to discover there is no terrain, no seabed, no where for them to go. This is not good!

Fortunately, we have identified the cause of the problem. When Subnautica is installed, it is supposed to include something called the ‘Microsoft Visual Studio C++ Redistributable,’ or MVSC++. If this dooverwhacky is not installed, Subnautica’s voxel terrain will not function. For some reason MVSC++ is not being installed for some players.

To solve this problem, go to Microsoft’s website, download, and install MSVC++. You will likely need administrative privileges on your system to complete this installation. After the installation completes, restart the machine and try running Subnautica again.

If that did not solve the problem, the next step is to verify Subnautica’s local files. Right click on Subnautica in the Steam Library, select ‘properties,’ go to the ‘Local Files’ tab and select ‘Verify Game Cache.’ To check if this worked, go to [Your Steam install path] /Steam/steamapps/common/Subnautica/Subnautica_Data/Plugins, and check that a file called UnityUWE.dll exists in that directory and that it is 42kb in size.

Can’t see that file, and terrain not streaming in? The next step is to again fully restart your machine, open Steam, and try verification a second time. If Subnautica’s terrain still fails to show up, please send us a log file, and we will seek out a solution to the problem.