Unknown Worlds has pushed Early Access update 1.2 for Subnautica 2, and its name tells you exactly where the studio's attention has been. The Buddy System update is almost entirely about the four-player co-op that has defined the sequel since launch — and the single most-requested feature since May is finally in: cross-platform proximity voice chat.
Alongside it come player revives, an emote set, direct player-to-player trading, a new tracking tag item, two new playable avatars, extra suit colours and a substantial bug-fix pass. It went live on August 19, 2026.
Proximity chat that actually uses the water
This is the part worth dwelling on, because Unknown Worlds did not simply bolt a voice channel onto the lobby. Proximity voice chat in Subnautica 2 is distance-aware in a way that feeds directly into the game's atmosphere. Up close, you hear each other normally. As you swim apart, the audio hands over to a radio-style transmission that progressively degrades and breaks up the further you get from your dive buddy.
Anyone who has played Subnautica knows why that is a smart design choice rather than a gimmick. This is a game built on isolation, oxygen anxiety and the sound of something very large moving somewhere behind you. Hearing a friend's voice thin out into static as they descend past a thermal layer is not just a feature — it is the entire emotional register of the series, expressed through a comms system.
The implementation is properly configurable, too: always on, push to talk, or always off. And crucially it is cross-platform, so a PC player and a console player in the same session are on the same voice channel rather than being told to go set up something external.
Revives change how co-op runs feel
The second big addition is player revives. Previously, a downed player's route back into the run was reprinting at their assigned Biobed — functional, but it meant every death was a hard reset of your position and a long swim back to wherever the group had got to.
Now a teammate can revive you before you reprint. A revived player keeps their equipment and gets back a small amount of oxygen, which is a deliberately tight margin: enough to get you moving, not enough to make going down consequence-free. Downed players can still choose to reprint immediately if nobody is close enough, so the option is additive rather than a forced wait.
That equipment-retention detail is the important one. In a survival game where a death used to mean potentially losing a loadout you had spent an hour assembling, having a friend reach you in time now genuinely matters. It converts co-op from "four people surviving in parallel" into "four people who have a reason to keep track of each other" — which is, again, exactly what a feature called the Buddy System should be doing.
Tracking tags, trading and emotes
Update 1.2 also adds a Tracking Tag, a short-range beacon you can drop into carryables to mark locations or flag where you have stashed something. It has a second function that co-op groups will appreciate: if you have a tracking tag in hand or in your inventory when you reprint, it extends your black box range — the mechanic that helps you find your way back to where you died and recover what you left behind.
Direct player trading is in as well, which removes a genuinely annoying friction point. Handing off a spare oxygen tank or a stack of crafting materials previously meant dropping items and hoping the physics cooperated. Now it is a transaction.
Then there are emotes: thumbs up, thumbs down, clapping and fists. Small, but in a game where you are often 200 metres down with a degraded radio signal, a visible thumbs-up is a real communication tool rather than decoration. Rounding out the personalisation side are two new playable avatars and additional suit colours, which helps a four-player group tell each other apart at distance in murky water — a more practical benefit than it sounds.
Where Subnautica 2 stands now
Subnautica 2 entered Early Access on May 14, 2026 and had an enormous opening, peaking north of 460,000 concurrent players and clearing a million sales quickly. That kind of launch buys a studio goodwill, but it also sets a pace expectation — and the run of updates since has been reasonably brisk, with movement and tooling passes landing before this co-op-focused one.
What Buddy System signals is that Unknown Worlds has identified co-op as the sequel's central pitch rather than a bonus mode. The original Subnautica was a fundamentally solitary game; the sequel's headline difference is that up to four people share one alien ocean. Building out proximity chat, revives and trading is the studio investing in that difference instead of treating multiplayer as a checkbox.
Still Early Access, and still worth remembering that
Subnautica 2 remains in Early Access, and the roadmap ahead of it is substantial — more biomes, more story content and more vehicles are all still to come. Unknown Worlds has been open about the game being a work in progress, and the "ton of bug fixes" framing in this patch's notes is a reminder that a launch of that size surfaces a lot of edge cases.
But 1.2 is the kind of update that changes how a game plays rather than how much of it there is. If you bounced off co-op in the first few weeks because coordinating four divers without in-game voice was a chore, this is the patch that fixes that specific complaint. Grab a friend, set proximity chat to push-to-talk, and go find out how far you can swim before their voice turns to static.
