CICADA
Alterra's colony ship in Subnautica 2. Confirmed by Unknown Worlds and Xbox Wire pre-launch coverage: you are part of the CICADA crew, tasked with creating a home for yourself and the other 40,000 souls aboard, on the alien ocean planet Luca.
What's confirmed
Same megacorporation series fans know from the original Subnautica's PDA database.
Officially repeated across the Subnautica 2 store page and Xbox Wire coverage.
Your job is to make Luca livable for the colony. Whether that translates to a survival-mode framing similar to the original game's "rescue or be rescued" is one of the things Early Access will surface.
A 4-player co-op session is implicitly a small CICADA crew working together. There is no PvP and there are no enforced roles.
Why the CICADA matters for narrative
In Subnautica 1, the Aurora's crash was framed almost entirely after the fact — you woke up alone, and the rest of the story was assembled out of audio logs and wreck salvage. The CICADA reframes that loop. You start as part of a known crew of 40,000, in a known mission, on a planet that has been chosen rather than crashed into. That changes what kinds of stakes the story can carry.
It also lines up with the new co-op design: four players from one ship, with a shared inventory and shared scan logs in the same world. The "team from the colony ship" framing is doing more design work than it might look like at first.