Subnautica 2 Early Access 1.2 Buddy System Adds Proximity Chat, Revives, and Trading

The four headline co-op features are live

• Proximity voice chat: players become harder to hear as they move away. The official modes are always on, push to talk, and always off.
• Player revives: a teammate can revive a downed player before reprinting. A revived player keeps their equipment and returns with a small amount of oxygen; the downed player can still choose to reprint immediately at their assigned Biobed.
• Direct item trading: players can interact with each other to exchange inventory items instead of dropping everything on the ground.
• Emotes: Wave, Clap, Thumbs Up, Thumbs Down, and Frustrated are available from a radial menu in water or on land.

These are current public-build features, not Experimental-only values. If the free update does not appear, Unknown Worlds recommends restarting Steam before treating it as an install problem.

Tracking Tags make recovery less painful

The new Tracking Tag can be placed inside a carryable object such as a locker and acts as a short-range beacon. Carrying one in your hand or inventory when you reprint also increases the range of the black-box recovery signal. This is a practical co-op addition: tag a shared carryable before moving a work site, and keep one on you before a risky deep route.

Character Customization also gains Jegna and Grace, plus two new character color schemes. Upgrade Biobeds now have clearer interaction text, a nearby audio cue, and a brief screen flash at upgrade spots.

Base building and tools got meaningful changes

• Base placement UI now has alignment guide lines, and multiplayer clients get better Move-mode handling.
• The Trashcan now destroys inserted items one at a time after a five-second delay.
• Blocked construction lists the items preventing placement, and bases can no longer be built inside a Great Jaw.
• The Feedback Resonator now stuns creatures instead of making them flee; the Sonic Resonator stun lasts 10 seconds.
• Acid sources appear as green dots in the Scanner HUD, and the Repair Tool now unlocks after two scans.
• Save Codes can be pasted directly into the Cloud Save download field.

The fix list is larger than the feature list

Buddy System closes a wide set of state and persistence problems. Notable official fixes include crashes creating the appearance of a deleted save, multiplayer clients becoming severely desynchronized when moving some Growbed items, Hydroturbines and Solar Panels stopping after long sessions, bases showing incorrect power states, Tadpoles getting stuck or receiving offset collision, clients missing Camp One and Old Habitat signals, and several routes under the map.

It also fixes multiple crashes and performance problems, Nvidia Reflex / DLSS Frame Generation conflicts, controller and UI issues, resource nodes that could not be interacted with, and a long list of base-building and multiplayer edge cases. The patch adds Dynamic Frame Generation plus 5x and 6x modes for RTX 5000-series hardware. Treat those modes as hardware-specific options, not a promise of the same performance on older GPUs.

What remains on the roadmap

Adaptive Measures and Buddy System have now delivered the first two named Early Access update buckets. The larger expansion remains future work: Unknown Worlds previously pointed toward the Collector Leviathan's permanent habitat, the next story chapter, and a new vehicle chassis. Buddy System does not announce a date for that expansion.

Source and site update

This summary is based on the official August 19 Buddy System patch note. Sub2Wiki moved EA 1.2 from roadmap status to the public-build baseline, added the co-op features to Multiplayer, refreshed Crossplay and troubleshooting language, updated the roadmap and update tracker, and kept the Experimental branch separate because its saves and risk profile still differ from the public build.