And no, I am not being dramatic. Mostly.
I want to start with a confession: six months ago I was the kind of person who bought survival games, played them for nine hours, drifted off, and never touched them again. My Steam library is a graveyard of good intentions. So when Subnautica 2 dropped into early access on May 14th, 2026, I told myself the same lie I always tell myself. “Just a few hours. Just to see the ocean.”
I did not stop at a few hours. I went all the way to 100%, and somewhere along the way the game quietly rearranged how I do almost everything.
The moment it stopped being a game
For the first week I played the way I play everything: aimlessly. I swam in circles, hoarded titanium, drowned twice in the same trench, and felt that familiar boredom creeping in. The problem was not the game. The problem was me. I had no structure, no sense of what “finished” even meant in a world this enormous.
If you are still finding your feet, our Subnautica 2 beginner’s guide covers the early-game priorities that only made sense to me in retrospect.
Then I stumbled onto a 100% completion hub for Subnautica 2 that listed everything, and I mean everything, in one place. Eleven separate checklists. 296 individual items to track down, scan, build, or craft. Seeing the whole mountain laid out in front of me did something strange. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, I felt calm. For the first time I knew exactly what the game was asking of me.
296 items, eleven lists, one very obsessed me
If you have never seen the full scope of Subnautica 2 broken down, here is what 100% actually looks like. This is the breakdown I lived inside for the better part of two weeks:
- Biomes & Locations: 18 items
- Base Elements & Upgrades: 99 items
- Vehicles & Upgrades: 9 items
- Minerals: 14 items
- Materials & Resources: 32 items
- All Scannable Fauna: 37 items
- All Scannable Flora: 29 items
- Food & Consumables: 23 items
- Tools & Equipment: 16 items
- Adaptations: 4 items
- Biomods: 15 items
That is 296 boxes. Ninety-nine of them are base and habitat pieces alone, which tells you everything about how deep the building rabbit hole goes. The 37 scannable fauna entries turned me into an amateur marine biologist who now narrates aquarium trips to strangers.
How progress trackers actually changed my habits
Here is the part I did not expect. Chasing those 296 items rewired how I approach big, messy, intimidating projects in real life. Ticking a box and watching a progress bar climb is a ridiculously powerful feeling, and once you feel it in a game, you start craving it everywhere.
I used the Progress Tracker constantly. Every fauna scan, every biome found, every tool crafted, it all rolled up into one completion score that saved automatically to my account. I could close the laptop, go to work, and come back to find every checked box exactly where I left it. No spreadsheets, no sticky notes, no “wait, did I already scan the Sea Treader?”
You can see the exact dashboard I used here: Subnautica 2 100% Progress Tracker.
Within a few weeks the habit had leaked out of the game entirely. I started breaking my own life into checklists. Cleaning the apartment became eleven small categories instead of one impossible chore. My side projects got progress bars. I finally finished a book I had been ignoring for a year, because I treated the chapters like scannable flora.
The night I hit 100%
The final item was, fittingly, the most annoying one to find. I will not spoil which biome it was hiding in, but I will say I spent an entire evening grid-searching a single end-game ravine with my scanner out, muttering to myself like a hermit. When that last box finally ticked over and the tracker rolled to 100%, I genuinely sat back in my chair and laughed.
Not because the reward was some grand cinematic ending. Early access does not really hand you that yet. I laughed because the version of me from six months ago would never, ever have finished anything this size. The game did not change. I did. And honestly, a glorified set of checkboxes deserves a weird amount of the credit.
If you want to try the same thing
Subnautica 2 is still in early access, and the developers have said that phase could last two to three years, so new biomes and creatures are still being added. That actually makes now the perfect time to start tracking, because you grow your completion alongside the game instead of trying to catch up later.
I am not going to promise that scanning fish will fix your life. But it fixed something in how I finish things, and that turned out to be the part that needed fixing all along.
I've been playing video games for over 20 years, spanning everything from early PC titles to modern open-world games. I started Switchblade Gaming to publish the kind of accurate, well-researched guides I always wanted to find — built on primary sources, tested in-game, and kept up to date after patches. I currently focus on Minecraft and Pokémon GO.