Subnautica 2: update 1.2 repairs base power — Hydroturbines dying at 120 minutes, Solar Panels at 45, and Metal Farm chains finally usable

The 1.2 "Buddy System" update for Subnautica 2 has been live since 19 August 2026. We covered proximity voice chat, reviving, item trading and base building. What every summary left out is an entire block, and it may be the most important one if you have laid down more than one base: 1.2 repairs the whole power chain.

Around twenty fixes, nine of them marked with the 🤿 symbol Unknown Worlds reserves for changes that came "directly from community feedback". In other words: players were living with these bugs and reporting them. If your bases were shutting themselves down, you had not built anything wrong.

Two invisible timers that were killing your generators

These are the two most striking fixes of the batch, because they describe timed failures — and therefore perfectly reproducible ones, which is why they eventually surfaced.

Hydroturbines: dead between 120 and 160 minutes

"🤿 Fixed Hydroturbines stopping their power production after 120-160 mins of gameplay, after the player swam away from them, and for their turbines to stop spinning, even when producing power."

Two distinct symptoms in a single line, and they need separating. First: after two to two hours forty, a turbine you had swum away from stopped producing. Second, the mirror image: a motionless propeller did not necessarily mean a stopped turbine — it could be producing power without spinning. The game's most intuitive visual indicator was, in both directions, a bad indicator.

Solar Panels: dead between 45 and 60 minutes, but only with several bases

"🤿 Fixed an issue where Solar Panels would stop providing power after 45-60 mins if there were multiple bases constructed at different locations in the save file."

The condition is decisive: one base, no bug. The fault only triggered once your save held several sites spread apart. That is exactly the kind of playthrough where nothing gets noticed: you do not see a base going dark on the other side of the map.

Three quarters of an hour is not long. A player dropping in on their secondary base every hour and a half found it flat every single time, without ever understanding why.

Metal Farms: five fixes, one logic

This is the most heavily reworked area of the update. Five lines that together describe a power system lying in both directions.

The third point is the one that changes the most in play. Chaining Metal Farms was in fact unusable: as soon as the first one finished its cycle, everything wired behind it went down. Anyone who had abandoned that layout through experience can pick it back up.

And the fourth cuts the other way: if you had got into the habit of moving a Farm out of range to keep it running "for free", that is over. It was not a trick, it was a bug, and Unknown Worlds calls it an exploit.

Bases that stayed lit on empty

"🤿 Fixed an issue where bases would remain powered after their Power Storage ran out of energy."

This one deserves a warning, because it works against the player. Before 1.2, a base whose reserves hit zero kept running. Since then, it does not. If you had tuned your production to the bone by relying on that tolerance, your base will now go dark where it used to hold. The sums need redoing.

In the same vein: "Fixed an issue where bases remain unpowered after a Solar Panel from a different base is moved to connect to the unpowered base." Salvaging a panel from one base to install it elsewhere is a safe operation again.

Power Transmitters: phantom beams and a performance cost

Four lines concern Power Transmitters, and they share one trait: the player could not trust what they were seeing.

• Beams could appear and disappear at random.
• In multiplayer, clients saw extra beams, or missed ones that should have been there. The redundant beams have been removed.
• Building many Transmitters close together caused performance drops, now fixed.

That last point is worth remembering for anyone building dense networks: tight meshing was not just hard to read, it cost frames per second.

Bioreactor, terminals, display: the rest of the job

• Bioreactor: Algae Blocks and Nutrient Blocks could not be used as fuel. That is fixed — two more fuels. Another fix: the Bioreactor consumed its fuel immediately, even when set to Off.
• Power Cell Terminals: construction was limited to "the lower part of a base or in the middle of a room". That placement constraint is gone.
• Creative Mode: Battery and Power Cell Terminals would charge and drain, "where power is not required".
• Base energy HUD: it was showing decimal values. The readout is legible again.
• Hydroelectric Turbines, two more visual faults: the propeller span on turbines outside a current, and a turbine built outside a current then moved into one did not play its spin animation, at least for multiplayer clients.
• Tadpole: oxygen consumption stopped for players sitting in an exterior or interior seat of the FORT chassis of an unpowered Tadpole.

What to redo in your save

1. Swing back past your secondary bases: the solar-powered ones were probably dark without your knowing.
2. Recalculate your power margin: a base at zero now shuts down for good.
3. Pick Metal Farm chaining back up if you had given up on it: it works.
4. Stop trusting a turbine's propeller to judge its output — the animation was decoupled from the actual state.
5. Thin out Power Transmitter clusters built too tightly together.