You still can’t kill fish in Subnautica 2, but starting tomorrow you’ll at least be able to ‘stun’ them

Everyone likes Subnautica 2. We sure do: after all that drama, it turns out the early access survival sequel is quite good, actually. Players also dig it: it’s got smashing reviews on Steam and it sold a million copies in its first hour on its way to more than four million in its first week.

One little point of contention: Subnautica 2 is home to a collection of large, angry alien fish that love to bite you and endlessly headbutt your submarines—and unlike the first Subnautica, players didn’t have a knife to fight back with.

And so the controversy arose. Players (some of them, anyway) want to be able to kill these angry, annoying, dangerous fish, but the developers have remained steadfast in their no-killing policy. Modders came up with their own solution, a Subnautica 2 mod where you can kill all the fish you want, but today the game’s creative director Anthony Gallegos revealed a new solution: a stun system.

You can already discourage fish from biting by using the sonic resonator, but in tomorrow’s 1.1 update, you’ll really be able to knock them for a loop.

“We’ve done some work on the sonic resonator, where a bunch of the creatures now have stun states, so when you hit them with the sonic resonator, you’ll see them clearly communicate that they’ve become stunned,” Gallegos said in a Subnautica 2 update vlog.

It’s demonstrated in the video, showing a marrowbreach taking a sonic blast to the face and, instead of just turning and swimming away, it goes limp and slowly sinks to the bottom of the sea. Hell yeah. It might not be as satisfying as gutting one with a knife, but it’ll still be plenty cathartic to scramble its brains for a bit—though there’s no word on how long the stun state lasts.

You can also see more clearly the results of bonking fish with your cute little hammer. “We’ve done some work around creature flinches, so most of the creatures in the game now have good flinches,” Gallegos said. “So, if you smack them with the survival multi-tool, you’ll get that reaction out of them before they flee, to really let you see and understand the impact you’re having on them.”

Another enemy, the blight creatures (which you can kill with the resonator) have been modified a bit, too.

“We’re trying to make it that when you encounter the blight creatures around the angel combs, there’s a better transition from when they go from a passive to aggressive, and so that you can really feel that and not be as surprised of where creature attacks are coming from, which was a problem we had definitely heard in feedback,” Gallegos said.

“That’s all in an effort to make you feel like you’re having the mitigation of creatures that we want you to feel, which has also been a major part of your feedback,” he said.

You can watch the full vlog below, in which Gallegos mentions that new multiplayer features, like proximity chat and a player revive system, won’t be in tomorrow’s 1.1 update but will come “some weeks after that.” Later this year, the “big content drop” will add a new region, vehicles, and story.