It’s all fun and games setting deadlines – “Oh sure, we can do all that stuff in one month! One month is forever!” One month sure doesn’t feel like forever anymore. In just a few days, on December 16th, Subnautica will go up on Steam Early Access (SEA). This is the big leagues kids. They don’t take prisoners here.

Fortunately, Subnautica has leapt forward over the past month. It has changed and developed so much that it is almost unrecognisable. We’re proud of how far the game has come and we’re thrilled so many of you have joined us in the journey. This is the last dev update before SEA What have we been up to?

Subnautica now has a screenshot mode. This is terribly exciting, because we need to take screenshots for the Steam Store. We had a screenshot mode in the past, but it was garbage: The new one kicks butt! Press F6 to clear the screen of everything, and F6 again to restore just the view model.

Big progress has been made on the Subnautica Early Access trailer. It’s a snazzy pre-rendered using in-game assets, and is shaping up nicely. The trailer will premiere on December 16th, and will go up on the Steam Store.

Oculus Rifts are apparently the future of life, the universe, and everything – So it’s a good thing that Subnautica works with them. Well, sort of. There’s a bit more work to do, but progress in the last few days has been huge, and playing Subnautica wearing a Rift is an absolute blast.

Speaking of Oculus – Supporting the Rift is, in many ways, a subset of supporting ‘performance.’ Rifts need 75fps for optimal performance. Dropping below that threshold can cause all sorts of pain. Fortunately, Steve is all over performance. He is hungry for gainz. He makes framerates race and GPUs bleed. If you can decipher the graph above, then you can share in some of the excitement we had this week when Steve made a major optimisation involving the unification of various cameras.

Possibly the best looking thing this week is the Subnautica ‘Small Capsule Image’ – This is the image that will be used all over Steam to represent Subnautica. It’s the most important image a game has on Steam, and Cory has made sure it looks utterly gorgeous.

Jake has been quietly smashing out some gorgeous geography North-West of the starting zone, in the Mushroom Forest biome. Next time you craft a seamoth, be sure to head on over and check it out!

Stalkers look a bit different now…

The original Stalker model was actually intended for a ‘Lava Zone’ – This new model is more consistent with the Stalker’s Kelp Forest habitat.

I’m about to start to sound like a broken record: This isn’t everything. As usual, so much more has changed than what I have gathered up here in the blog post. Be sure to check out the Trello board, the checkin and changes list to see everything that has happened in the past week. There are now only a few days left before Subnautica hits Early Access. I’d say we’re going in hot, but this is an underwater game, so we’re probably pretty cool.