The Horrifying Subnautica "Iceberg" Explained

Just found this today :) I really like your narration!

The distress signal messages are intercepted from the Warper enemies which is why they hunt you down.

"I'm just messing with you guys" you have no idea how much relief I felt at that. Don't ruin the sacred bladderfish.

Just want to add, the frozen Leviathan that's infected with Khara was confirmed to be dead by the devs, the Khara is still alive because it has been slowly consuming the inside of the leviathan... Similar to the way Margaret was eating the inside of the Reaper Leviathans while simultaneously using it as shelter.

The vents that peepers are circulating through to the emperor's tank were specifically designed to carry the enzyme out. When you see a peeper in the wild that has a glittering trail on it, it has interesting flavor text about carrying the enzyme. This was a small measure to slow the extinction event of the planet's life and most likely would have been a fully functioning distribution system for the cure if the precursors had been able to hatch emperors. If you put one of the glittering peepers into an aquarium with an infected fish, it will get cured. So, Maida was probably eating these enzyme-rich peepers to stave off her infection.

One thing about Tier 2. The whole point of Riley being able to leave was because he was cured. The canon being shut down wouldnt matter if he couldn't survive the virus. But in curing himself, he also released the cure (the baby leviathans) making it accessible to the entire planet. So by the time SubZero happened, the virus would be much less of a threat by then and also I dont really consider Riley leaving selfish, because he technically released the cure out onto the whole planet.

It makes sense that the warpers killed off or ensured all the survivors would die. Considering that our radio/pda can pick up the warpers sending radio messages, the warpers should be able to intercept ours. Riley, the protaganist, never sent a transmission because the radio was damaged and he wasn't awake to fix it untill everyone else was already killed off.

In regards to the whole lifepod thing, you can actually find a PDA entry in the Aurora that details that the lifepods are SUPPOSED to be stocked with much more resources than you actially find in your lifepod (can't remember the exact entry, it said that they must be stocked with multiple first aid kits, tools, etc), so Alterra isn't even stocking their lifepods like they're supposed to

Note: the Void is the actual main landmass of the planet 4546b. The reason why we are on the map at all and not down a couple dozen kilometers or stuck in the middle of the void at the beginning of the game is because the captain stayed behind and guided the Aurora onto a plateau miles above the surface of the planet. The entire map of subnautica is quite literally the top of a colossal mountain. Also, the Ghost Leviathans are bottom feeders at the base of 4546b’s main ecosystem. We haven’t scratched the surface of what this planet originally contained, and we likely never will since many of the original ideas were scrapped. (The Sea Emperor is a normal fish in the void and used to live in schools btw. It also was originally going to be the size of the Aurora.)

I thought it was pretty obvious that the mysterious messages were accidentally intercepted communications between Warpers. The various Lifepods being empty are usually explained by the PDAs you find in or near them or their locations. Several of them are in places with Reapers or Ampeels. One's PDA recording even cuts off with an explosion.

Straight up, the "why has no one found this out about the leviathans yet" point is because there have been like 6 people alive on that planet in the last thousand years, and most of them have been pretty preoccupied with survival lol

12:29 Just a minor note on Ghost leviathan, much like Diablos in monster hunter, they are highly territorial, but not carnivorous. So they wouldn't eat the survivors, just tear them to shreds for existing.

Ah the "all is just a dream" theory, no theory i have ever hated so much

That bladderfish bit actually went so hard, i completely believed you right up until you turned it around. Great vid lad keep it up.

So a few points...Sam and her sister are born and raised on Earth - in the original beta they were even outright from England (still not sure why they made them American in the final release). Margaret may have survived due to her diet and the low frequency of Kharaa in the isolated arctic region (the only real source there is the frozen one). "Transgov" doesn't mean they're government-run, it means they transcend governments - Alterra and their many competitors are pure corporate entities, which is why we get the funny epilogue in the closing credits of the first game. The Emperor leviathans probably aren't gone - we just don't get to explore much beyond the regions we work in. Also, we find out in BZ that the Kharaa is by that point extinct on the planet except for in the frozen leviathan, which suggests the disease doesn't make it off due to human intervention, having been cured by the Emperor's enzyme release (and the babies continuing the job). There is no socialism in the Subnautica future - it's a capitalist dystopia where all major groups are companies and corporations of various sorts, and even the independent ones are dependent on the big transgov corporations. Sol just means our solar system - the Sunbeam is from the Sol system, our system.

The giant peeper thing was in all honesty probably a bug. When Subnautica first went into Early Access, I played it on a really cruddy Dell All-In-One desktop (basically a monitor with a PC in it). It could barely run the game and it took up to 15 minutes to load a save. I played on this for 2 years until it crapped out. Occasionally, I'd have issues with area & model loading, and sometimes I'd see things like giant reefbacks spinning wildly in areas they don't normally spawn in. In the early days, the game's prototype stage coding could just swap the AI and models of some fish, leading to - for example - a reefback in the dunes with the AI and size of a reaper leviathan, and that was back when you needed reefback DNA for depth upgrades! It's still a neat urban legend, but really it's not all that surprising.

This is critical to your theory about Natural Selection and the Kharaa: In the original version of Below Zero, the Kharaa bacterium WAS actually going to get off the planet. They changed producers in the middle of Below Zero’s development and massively altered the storyline when they did so. In the original iteration, the satellite above the planet is actually called Vespa Station, and you have to regularly send supplies and samples to the station while you are working for Alterra (your sister is actually ON Vespa Station and was very much alive when you were there). During the game, you actually send a sample of the Kharaa bacterium secured from the Leviathan to Vespa Station which somehow escapes containment. What happens after this, we’ll never know since the situation was never resolved before the story change.

So as someone who got really into this game, I just want to clarify the subject matter at the beginning of tier 4. The things hunting people and keeping count of targets remaining are the purple teleporting squid creatures. They are hunter/seeker androids built by the aliens to kill survivors from shot down ships. You even encounter a factory where they are assembled inside one of the alien structures.

Subnautica is 100% the scariest game I have ever played. I couldn't even make it out of the starting area. Then again, I have a lifelong fear of deep water and the unknown things that dwell within it.

After years of questioning how Maida is alive we finally got an answer. Last bacon interviewed a dev about it and he said that, basically, since Maida ate a reaper and a reaper has a lot of enzymes from the animals it eats she was able to be alive 10 years later