What Happens When You Die in Subnautica 2? Explained

Subnautica 2 blends underwater exploration with survival mechanics, requiring you to balance your need for crafting materials with keeping your health, hunger, thirst, and oxygen meters from running empty. While running out of oxygen might be an issue early on, as you progress, hostile creatures will become a greater threat. There are many ways that you can die in Subnautica 2, but the impact of dying in the game remains the same regardless. If you're wondering exactly what happens when you die and how it affects the gameplay, you're in the right place. Let's dive into it.

Check our Subnautica 2 survival tips and tricks for more early-game help.

Players exploring a colorful underwater biome together in Subnautica 2 co-op multiplayer

Subnautica 2 Buyer’s Guide for Early Access

Subnautica 2 launches in early access on May 14 with co-op multiplayer, Game Pass support, leviathans, vehicles, and years of planned updates.

Posts

By William Parks

What Happens When You Die in Subnautica 2?

Dying in Subnautica 2 will cause you to respawn at the last biobed that you interacted with and set as your 'respawn point,' and items in your inventory at the time of your death will be left where you died.

Both of these can become an issue if you've ventured far from your base or last selected respawn point. First, it means that you might need to spend a long time traveling back to where you were in order to carry on scouring for resources or working towards completing an objective.

Second, you might also need to travel back quite a way to get the items you were carrying, which could be rare resources or other valuable items. The good news is that you'll still be able to get these items if you return to your place of death, look for the small yellow container floating around in the water, and pick it up with a hologram of a human outline above it. This will re-add the items to your inventory.

where to find dropped items after you die in subnautica 2

At the time of writing, the game doesn't mark on your compass or elsewhere where you died. As such, you'll need to remember where abouts it was if you want to go and reclaim the items you dropped.

However, if you've died due to a hostile creature that lurks around that area, or you strayed into an area you generally weren't prepared for, trying to retrieve the items can be incredibly difficult, if not entirely impossible. If you do find yourself in one of these situations, I highly recommend using adaptive and passive biomods that enable you to swim faster so you can get in and out quickly.

If you haven't already, I recommend getting the Basic Flippers to slightly improve your swimming speed. It might not sound like a big upgrade, but it feels noticeable compared to your starting swimming speed.

In the first 30 minutes or so, I lost track of my oxygen levels and drowned trying to get past some of the poison-spewing plants. Fortunately, I was right next to the lifepod that you start out with as your base, so recovering my items wasn't too much trouble.

Outside of respawning and losing items in your inventory, nothing else happens when you die in Subnautica 2. It's just more of an inconvenience when it happens, rather than something that sets your progress back significantly.