Article by Joshua Waddles
15 May 2021
That’s a pretty kickin’ pad you set up, there! You’ve got your Moonpool to park that pink Seamoth, a sweet observatory so you can just chillax and watch that Reaper Leviathan swimming around (it almost got you while you were building that! Get that image out of your head while you’re going to bed tonight), a Scanner Room to scope out wrecks and resources, and a bedroom with a desk.
Looks a little Spartan, though, doesn’t it? Lots of things you can do about that. The Aurora has a lot of fun posters (and one incredibly freaky looking doll) with some nice toys. Can build an aquarium. Or just something as simple as hanging up a few pictures to make the place feel like home.
Getting the Picture Frames
If you want the frames, the first step is to find one and scan it (because even though your avatar has the wherewithal to gather resources and avoid terrifying predators on an alien world, he still needs a computer to explain to him how to make a picture frame.
You find picture frames in wrecks just like all of the other interesting tidbits in the game. You could search the Grassy Plateaus, the Mountains, the Northwester Mushroom Forest, the Sea Treader’s Path or the Underwater Islands. They’re easy to overlook if you don’t know what you’re looking for .I even completed an entire play-through without knowing this feature even existed. But once I did, it took all of ten minutes for me to find a picture frame at one of the wrecks in the Grassy Plateaus. Unlike with the Seamoth and other more complicated bits, you only have to scan one picture frame to get the full recipe, and then you can create it with one copper wire by using the good old Habitat Builder.
Importing and Selecting the Pictures
Next you want to frame something. Easy peasy. The standard way is to use the in-game screengrab button. Just press F11 on your keyboard and this will save a screen grab of whatever you’re looking at to that particular game’s screenshots folder. Next, just select the picture frame. This will open the Photo Manager tab on your PDA and you can just select that screen capture or whichever others you took during the game.
But here’s the fun part. You can put any picture into that folder and it’ll appear in the Photo Manager tab. Miss long walks on dry land? Just upload a relaxing picture of the beach (or better yet, somewhere inland far, far, faaaar away from the water. I mean, just imagine this happened to you in real life, would you ever want to look at the ocean again?) Or you could upload a picture of your family. Or, if you’re like me, you could upload something super dorky, like a screen grab of Bojack Horseman underwater or fan art of Twilight Sparkle asleep on a swim float.
You’ll want to only use pictures in the 16:9 aspect ratio if you want them to fit. And finding the folder isn’t too hard. In the save folder for your current game, simply drag and drop all pictures you want to save into the screenshots folder. For Steam, you’ll find this by opening your Subnautica folder, then going to SNAppData\SavedGames which contains all of your game-save folders. Or, for other systems, you’ll find it in in the Steam folder by opening Steam\userdata\182852304\700\remote\264710.
If you got Subnautica on the Epic Games store, there’s a little bit of a longer path to the correct folder. On your user profile, go to AppData\LocalLow\Unknown Worlds\Subnautica\SavedGames
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