Subnautica 2 Base Building Has Been Completely Rebuilt - Here's What the Dev Vlog Showed

If you spent hundreds of hours in Subnautica building underwater bases out of pre-fab corridors and multipurpose rooms, get ready to forget everything you knew about how that worked. Dev Vlog 6 dropped on March 13, 2026, and it's entirely about base building. The short version: the old system is gone. What's replacing it looks like nothing else in the survival genre.

Out with the Old Module System

In the original Subnautica and Below Zero, base building meant selecting pre-defined modules - T-corridors, X-corridors, multipurpose rooms - and snapping them together in fixed configurations. It worked, and players did incredible things with it, but you were always fighting the grid. Every base in the Safe Shallows ended up looking roughly the same because the pieces only fit together in so many ways.

Base design lead Kiel McDonald put it bluntly in the vlog: "This is a brand new system. I don't think we've seen anything like this in any other survival game." That's a bold claim. But after watching the full walkthrough, it's hard to argue with him.

How the New System Actually Works

The new system is tile-based and procedural. You start by placing a room shape, and then you sculpt it freely. Want to carve out a section of wall? Go ahead. Want to add a chunk to extend a room in an odd direction? Done. Decorative pieces, lighting, doors, moonpools, and even growbeds for plants can be placed anywhere inside any room. You can stack growbeds on top of each other, build asymmetrical corridors, and shape rooms that actually look like someone lives in them.

Design Lead Anthony Gallegos framed it well: "With Subnautica 2 we wanted to increase player expression, and leaned into a sculptural base-building system that provides far more flexibility than anything we've done before." The whole thing runs on Unreal Engine 5, and the vlog showed it handling complex structures without any visible performance issues.

The Windows Are a Bigger Deal Than They Sound

I know - getting excited about windows sounds ridiculous. But hear me out. In the original game, windows came in exactly two flavours: the basic reinforced window and the observatory dome. Every base had the same views because the same pieces went in the same spots.

Now windows are fully customisable. Portholes, diamond shapes, large stylized panels, curved glass, bent tubes - you choose the shape, the size, and where it goes. Imagine building a base in one of the new Subnautica 2 biomes and designing a wall-length curved window specifically to frame the view. Or a tiny porthole aimed at a creature patrol route so you can watch from safety - ideally far from anything like the Collector Leviathan.

Building Together in Co-op

The vlog also showed co-op base building for the first time, with multiple players working on the same structure simultaneously. Senior gameplay engineer Milan Singh said the team has "built something pretty flexible that will let players really run wild with their imagination." Seeing two players sculpting different sections of a shared base in real time made it click - co-op isn't just about exploring together, it's about creating together.

What Comes Next

The team confirmed that more room types and structural pieces will be added in future updates during Early Access. Lead hard surface artist Ben Henry and senior engineer Carolyn Lu both appeared in the vlog walking through the technical side, and it's clear the underlying system is built to grow. You can keep up with our latest Subnautica 2 coverage as more details surface, and browse our Subnautica 2 database for everything confirmed so far.

The Subnautica community has always been absurdly creative with base building. People made art galleries, aquarium towers, and glass observation decks on the edge of the void - all within a system that was basically Lego bricks underwater. Give those same players a sculpting tool with no fixed shapes and custom windows in a co-op game? May can't come soon enough.