Subnautica is a fantastic game straight out of the package, but many can recognize it isn’t perfect.
Thankfully, the game has a pretty big fandom that remains active to this day, and any big PC game is bound to amass a collection of exciting mods.
Subnautica may not have the same staggeringly massive library of mods as Skyrim or Minecraft. Still, there’s a fair share of interesting titles to download that can seriously improve your experience, either by leveling up the game's difficulty, adding in some exciting new content, or just improving players' overall quality of life experience.
This list details some of Subnautica’s most popular mods, giving you a rundown of what they do and why you should swing by Nexus and give them a look.
1. Bag Equipment
Real Subnautica fans know that NOTHING is more satisfying than having plenty of space in your inventory.
If you've been inside the aurora, you know it's full of rare loot, some of which is essential and some of which is… less worth your time.
For example, the 'carry all' luggage bag is an item that works something like a portable storage container that's placeable both on the seafloor and dry land. This extra flexibility doesn't open up new gameplay opportunities since the bag's storage is tiny, and most of your junk will likely stay within your Base, where you can craft much more inventory-efficient storage options.
But thankfully, the artistic work done on these bags doesn't have to go entirely to waste. "Bag equipment" is a relatively popular mod that makes it possible to craft equipable bags which expand your player inventory.
Why it makes the game better:
- You have three types of bags to choose from, each of which expands the rows of inventory at your disposal. The smallest gives you two extra, and the largest gives you six, nearly doubling the inventory space you previously had. These bags come with a dedicated equipment slot, so the bags you craft don't counterintuitively take up space in your inventory.
- This mod offers a hugely lovable quality-of-life upgrade since you can now carry more resources, an integral aspect of playing Subnautica.
- Check out the secondary add-on mod Advanced Bag Equipment by Vinimetal, which reskins bags with some neat new icon art that helps make them feel like advanced tech which fits into the world of Subnautica.
2. More QuickSlots
The toolbelt around this guy's waist must be a sight to behold.
If you’re playing Subnautica, you’re often juggling between a large number of tools. This is annoying since there are only five slots for some reason.
The solution? Just get more, of course. Namely, get more with the More Quickslots mod. It more than doubles your quick slots from 5 to 12.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- With this installed, you can seriously reduce the time you waste frittering with your PDA.
- Twelve slots tracks with the typical amount in your average FPS game for the PC, so it feels very familiar once installed.
- Very simple and easy to use, easy to install, and easy to configure.
3. Alien Rifle
A message to all the fish with the pumped-up kicks: Swim faster.
Let's say you've heard the story that Subnautica is an anti-gun game. You've heard that there are means of defending yourself that all boil down to distracting or scaring off your enemies. Let's say you've also heard the game's ocean is full-to-the-brim with perilous, terrifying alien monsters.
There’s a good chance that right about now, you’re wishing you had a gun.
Never fear. The devs may want you to be running scared from those crab squids, but you can bring the fight to them with the Alien Rifle mod. Once you've installed the mod, all you need to do is scan the gun encased in glass within one of the Alien Ruins around the map, and you'll have unlocked a blueprint that lets you upgrade your Stasis Rifle from a gun that shoots time-slowing bubbles into a gun that shoots Ion Death. Enjoy!
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- Reapers, Warpers, and Crash Fish have terrorized you long enough. It's time to cue the DOOM music and bring the fight to them! Your DPS on this laser is good enough to tackle even the most hostile Leviathans of Subnautica, but most likely, you'll be firing and forgetting at just about anything that tries to show you its teeth.
- Never assume there’s only one use for a space laser. The Alien Rifle also lets you break apart ore deposits by unloading into them, making it a means of mining giant mineral deposits without your PRAWN suite!
- Since the model is taken directly from the devs themselves, it slots into the world’s aesthetic perfectly.
Sure, you using a gun to empty a vibrant oceanic world of all life might be opposite to the game's thematic direction and explicitly against the wishes of the game's director, but hey. It's your game, right? Go off.
4. Warp Shield
A shield against purple-colored jumpscares.
The Warper is a particularly unwelcome sight to most since it’s not content to slice you up with its scythe-like appendages or summon hostile fishes to make your life hell.
They also love to use their strange powers to pluck you from the seat of your smaller vehicles and drag you into their melee range, which can be potentially highly dangerous, sometimes terrifying, and almost always profoundly annoying.
If you’ve had enough of this psionic bullying, try the Warp Shield mod. It adds vehicle modules that can be equipped onto vehicles that block the powers of these creatures, making you safe to flee in your Seamoth or get to pummeling them with your PRAWN Suit.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- The vehicle upgrade is only attainable after killing or scanning a warper, which helps balance the convenience of being immune to them with the challenge of dealing with at least one up close.
- After that, you'll use the Vehicle Upgrade Fabricator to craft a Phasic Stabilizer module, which will make your Seamoth and PRAWN suit immune to warper attacks when equipped in your inventory.
- Considering that module slots are coveted spots that require you to trade one ability for another, this feels like a well-balanced choice that helps a lot when dealing with warper-heavy areas like the late-game zones.
5. Decorations Mod
You'll be here a while. Why not liven things up a little?
A relatively simple mod that gives you a specialized fabricator for crafting decorations that can fill in the blanks around your massive megabase. These items won’t improve your odds of survival on 4546B, but they’ll make sure you do so with style! You have tons of options, ranging from rocks to coral samples to previously ungrowable flora. You can even make some models of your favorite Leviathans!
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- Your Subnautica bases will no longer look barren and empty. With this new deluge of options, you can theme your bases for extra immersion.
- A specialized fabricator for decorating means your craftable list doesn’t get clogged up by too many options.
- The decorations are items borrowed from the main game, meaning they’re all visually consistent with the game’s art style and fit perfectly.
6. SnapBuilder: Snap to Grid for Subnautica
Time to get everything in your base looking snappy.
This mod makes it very easy to get things tidy and organized! When placing objects inside your base, they snap into place just like base compartments do on foundations. Just aim at a wall or the side of an item to snap them in place, and keep the entirety of your base’s interior looking symmetrical and orderly. OCD community, rejoice!
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- SnapBuilder works on all items in the game, so everything from your crafting stations to cabinets will be perfectly aligned.
- Fully compatible with the Decorations Mod! Everything from models to desks and wall items will comply with the Snap-to-Grid function!
- The Mod comes with a settings menu for customizing things like placement range and how rotating objects works.
7. Visible Locker Interior
It's a simple things that often make the biggest difference.
Here’s another simple mod, but not one to sleep on. Visible Locker Interior lets you see through the glass doors of your lockers for a look at what’s inside. This simple little change is a significant quality-of-life improvement, since it lets you tell what’s inside a locker at a glance without having to stop and click on it.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- Organizing items is hard enough, usually requiring you to place items in lockers that you’ve labeled externally to make finding what you want easier. Even then, it’s easy to forget whether you were keeping any salt in the mineral cabinet or if you’re fresh out. Now all you need to do is take a gander at the front of the cabinet, and it’ll tell you precisely what you want to know.
- Each item put inside has its in-game model rendered inside the container, so you can see the object in question as if you just picked it up or put it down.
- If you're a Skyrim fan who loved how bookcase displays worked in that game, this mod will give you a similar sense of satisfaction. All your items feel like they're in the world with you, surrounding you in your Base, making the wealth of resources you've collected feel more ‘real.’
Visible Locker Interior Details
8. Enhanced Spike Plant
Not what I figured having a pet tiger would be like.
With this mod, tiger plants the player grows are now domesticated upon reaching adulthood, letting you can keep a garden of friendly little needle launchers! While Tiger Plants grown by you may still show hostility to wildlife, you’ll enjoy the benefits of a spikey pet plant without worrying about friendly fire.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- Once this mod is installed, you can find them in the world, scratch them with a knife and bring your seeds back to your base for planting. The system works the same way as it does in vanilla Subnautica, meshing well with the game’s overall vibe.
- No longer must you invest in a reinforced dive suit to take advantage of this foliage! It’s highly convenient and feels like something Unknown Worlds should’ve done in the first place. (Sorry, devs. No shade intended!)
- The tiger plants you grow will still be hostile to enemy fish like before, meaning this is still a great way to defend a base that’s set up in hostile surroundings, but now with less hassle!
9. Moonpool Vehicle Repair
Pit stops at your base need not be a hassle.
Another mod making a simple change that goes a long way is the Moonpool repair bay. The original moonpool allowed you to park your vehicle and repair it manually by approaching it from the sides, but now you can invest in a module that lets you automatically use base power to allow the moonpool to fix your ride for you.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- The moonpool works the same way your Cyclops does when given the repair module. Just park and forget. Your repair tool now functions more as a field repair item or as part of your wreck exploration procedure.
- The moonpool repair features are baked into every moon pool you build, so this base part is now substantially more valuable and, thus, more worth the cost of building.
- If you think the moonpool’s repair rate is too low or high, you can edit the config file of this mod to customize how much the moonpool repairs your vehicle so that you can curtail the mod to your personal sense of fairness.
Moonpool Vehicle Repair details
10. Radial Tabs
It looks just lovely. Some might say radiant.
Once you’ve installed a few mods, you may notice that your fabricators' crafting UI is getting crowded and visually unpleasant. Installing this simple mod helps alleviate that by reworking how crafting recipes scroll across the screen. Now, instead of scrolling down like a list, craftable items form circles that make a long list of options much easier to take in all at once.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- Handy as heck if you're going to download many mods since the long list of craftables can make it a pain to find what you want.
- The UI meshes perfectly with the game’s sense of style and design despite being entirely fan-made.
- It comes with a config file to further adjust and customize the experience to your liking. We love the configs in this house.
11. Lifepod Unleashed
Don't let the pretty vista fool you. This is quite the tough place to start.
Ever found an abandoned PDA within one of those life pods stranded in the deepest depths of the Blood Kelp Zone or somewhere in the Mountain Ranges and thought to yourself, "Oh 'pushaw,' I totally would've survived landing here!" Well, how about you prove it then? Lifepod Unleashed makes your life pod crash at a random location upon the start of a new game. Literally anywhere connected to the surface is an option, including the most dangerous areas of the game, like the Dunes.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- It makes each new game feel fresh and like it's a new challenge, since you’ll never be sure where you’ll have to start.
- You can customize the mod to land you exactly where you want, or to limit which of the random options are possible. So if you like randomly arriving in the waters around the Floating Island or the Mushroom Forests but don't want to land in the middle of the Dunes, you can block zones you don't like or even make only one location possible.
- You can even enjoy the feeling of actually landing on 4546B since the mod now simulates the fall! Enjoy the ride!
12. Odyssey Vehicle
Here's your new favorite submarine. Feel free to perfect the look by painting it yellow.
Subnautica is nothing without its underwater vehicles, and fans can't seem to get enough of them since they keep making more. The Odyssey is a celebrated vehicle mod that gives you a smaller alternative to the Cyclops, with significantly less space in the interior but much more agility and the ability to fit into tight spaces.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- Visually, this mod is very well done. The inside may still be a work in progress, but the exterior feels like something the devs could've made for the game's original release.
- The Odyssey is great for exploring some of Subnautica's deeper caves and tighter crevices, previously limited to the Seamoth.
- The sub comes with all the customization options of previous ones and a sleek design reminiscent of ‘ye old-fashioned submarines’ from the past.
13. Better Scanner Room Upgrades
Surveying the deep blue from the comfort of your base just got a lot easier.
Do you ever feel like your Scanner Room is constantly running up against range limitations or just doesn’t feel very efficient? Try Better Scanner Room Upgrades, a mod that significantly improves the efficacy of scanner rooms and makes them even more valuable from an exploration standpoint.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- Power Efficiency Upgrade lets you make it cheaper to power up and run these rooms in any base, so building one is viable no matter where you are.
- More Range Upgrade lets you improve the range of your scans and your remote drones, giving you a better survey of your current biome or the ability to scout neighboring biomes more thoroughly.
- Faster Scanning Upgrade lets you get a lock on all the valuables in your area with significantly less wait time.
Better Scanner Room Upgrades details
14. DeathRun - Roguelike Super-Hard
It's basically 'Subnautica: Prepare to Drown Edition'
Let's say you tried Lifepod Unleashed and found it needed to give you more of a challenge. Sure, having your first and only crafting station floating over dangerous waters might be a challenge, but once you set up a base somewhere safe, that challenge is over. If that’s the case, and you’re craving a real sense of triumph over the odds, try Deathrun.
It turns the game into a brutal roguelike, making it extremely difficult to play. This mod adds a SIGNIFICANT amount of mechanics that punish you for taking anything for granted. On top of your escape pod landing at a random location, you must worry about constant nuclear radiation exposure, poisonous air on the planet’s surface, much more aggressive fauna, and even a bends system that punishes you for changing water depth too fast.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- The new mechanics, like poison air and Nitrogen levels, are comprehensive enough to pick up on, and obtainable blueprints for new gear will help combat these new dilemmas.
- Changes to old mechanics like more expensive recipes, radiation levels, random escape pod landing locations, and the Aurora explosion force you to strategize carefully.
- The mod is highly configurable, letting you determine if you want the ability to respawn, where you want the escape pod to land, and even how murky the waters are.
If you’re over hardcore mode by this point and need some real challenge added back into your Subnautica playthroughs, this is for you.
DeathRun - Rogulike Super-Hard details
15. Realistic Neptune Rocket
You've got some grinding to do.
By the time you’re in the last leg of the game, you might find that Subnautica’s final hurdle of building the Neptune Rocket is somewhat underwhelming. Sure, it takes a bit of time and elbow grease to build it, but by this point, you likely have half the necessary resources sitting around in storage.
Realistic Neptune Rocket adds a new crafting station dedicated to fabricating Neptune Rocket parts, making building your express ticket home much more challenging. If it’s the final hurdle, we may as well make things interesting, right?
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- It makes the world’s resources much more valuable and gives you more reason to grind up those large nodes.
- It gives you several new items to craft, some of which are ported from Below Zero.
- It offers players a challenge without changing too many of the game’s base mechanics.
Realistic Neptune Rocket Details
16. Map
Stranded? Yes. Lost? Not anymore.
This mod is pretty self-explanatory and will likely feel like a godsend to some players. The succinctly named Map mod lets you keep tabs on your current location and anywhere you’ve previously been by giving you a map bound to your ‘M’ key.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- The map fills out as you explore, making it balanced while still being helpful.
- Display signals, player beacons, discovered resource nodes, and base locations can be shown, hidden, or color-coded for your convenience.
- The map includes all various layers of the world, like the Jellyshroom Caves or the Lost River, so the map remains valid even as you splunk deeper into the world.
17. Cyclops Docking
Why park your submarine on the curb like it's your summer car when you can park in style?
One of the big ones, this mod has been highly celebrated by the fandom for painting over one of the game’s most nagging oversights. While smaller vehicles like your PRAWN suit and Seamoth can dock with either a moonpool or your Cyclops, the Cyclops cannot dock with your Base in any way.
No longer must we suffer this way. Cyclops Docking has saved us. It adds a craftable base piece that automatically docks your submarine when it comes into range.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- Docking your Cyclops means you can enjoy boarding your vessel as a real deep-sea adventurer would.
- Charging the Cyclops is now significantly easier so long as your base has enough power to handle the task.
- The Cyclops docks and undocks from this base piece just like your other vehicles do with the moonpool, so the mechanic feels familiar and natural.
18. The Altera Hub Mod Suite
This image alone barely contains a fraction of what the mod offers. Enjoy!
If you want Subnautica to feel new again but are less intrigued by extreme difficulty, the Altera Hub Mod Suite is a good mod to check out. This mod is technically more so a collection of mods, but taken as a whole, they offer an experience that completely reinvents Subnautica from a base-building perspective while leaving most other mechanics alone.
The gist of this mod collection is that it adds a new wreck location on the map, the Altera Hub, which grants you access to a massive array of new base parts that perfectly fit the game’s aesthetic. These base parts aren’t just decoration, though; they’re necessary to power, oxygenate, and automate your bases into perfect survival hubs.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- The mod collection allows you to download each mod at a time, so you can pick and choose which parts of the experience you want and which you’d rather pass over.
- Automation opportunities include more effective farming of plants or animals and continuous extraction of precious minerals. Grinding for parts just got a lot easier.
- With all the new additions come new challenges, like pumping oxygen into your base, which now requires a specialized base part instead of just a working power supply.
The Altera Hub Mod Suite Details
19. De-Extinction
He's not the Big Gulp you were hoping for.
A classic in the modding community, De-Extinction is beloved for adding a ton of fauna to the game that helps make Subnautica even denser with fascinating alien life. The exotic wildlife featured in this mod were conceptualized by the devs but scrapped or never-implemented. Now they’ve been brought to life by some of the fandom’s most creative minds.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- Find 15 new and fascinating aquatic lifeforms across the landscape, all of which lend the world's biomes an even greater sense of diversity and wonder.
- Ten of these new species are edible creatures that will fit in small aquariums across your various bases. Larger lifeforms also have eggs that the player can hatch in Alien Containment.
- A brand new Leviathan, the humorously named “Gulper Leviathan,” is anything but funny when it’s effortlessly crushing your Seamoth in its powerful jaws.
20. Return of the Ancients
Because the void was apparently not scary enough.
Possibly one of the most ambitious yet divisive mods on the list, rivaled only by Altera Hub or De-Extinction. Return of the Ancients is a fascinating mod with a somewhat fraught development cycle with a remarkable claim to fame.
It is the mod responsible for implementing a fan-made hostile Leviathan that has become one of the most recognizable creatures in the Subnautica fandom despite being a fan creation. The Gargantuan Leviathan was only a skeleton when players discovered it, but it's been realized as a jaw-dropping goliath of the ocean by the fans, and has left an undeniable mark on both loyal and casual fans of the game.
The mod is no longer listed on Nexus, but it is still available in a limited capacity via the modding team’s discord/patreon. Development for the mod continues to date, and more information on it can be found via their Wiki pages, or via videos on YouTube.
Why it Makes the Game Better:
- The Gargantuan Leviathan is a sight to behold, painstakingly designed and redesigned by a committed team that has made something extraordinary.
- On top of the main attraction, there are new discoverable locations in your favorite biomes, new story beats, new vehicles, and new craftables.
- The player can now leverage precursor tech by crafting with the Alien Fabricator, which gives you access to upgrades like the much tougher Seamoth Ion Perimeter Defense module or an upgrade to the PRAWN suit that allows for easier vertical travel.
