Before you begin

Coding and writing mods is fun! It’s more fun with the support of a community of brilliant, helpful, fellow modders. This guide wouldn’t have been possible without the help and support of this community. Supporting such a community is as much about giving and sharing as it is about receiving help and support.

Therefore, I would suggest you do two things before you begin:

  • Get yourself onto the Subnautica Modding Discord - lurk, get involved, learn, ask questions, it’s all good!

  • Set yourself up a repository on GitHub – sharing and collaborating on code is one of the best ways to learn and improve. It’s easy to do, just get yourself onto GitHub.com and register. We’ll cover creating your first repository in the next section.

Finally, a few more pointers before we start.

Game installation folders

Where I refer to <game>, this is the folder in which your Subnautica 2 game is installed. For example, for me, it’s:

E:\Games\Steam\steamapps\common\Subnautica2

For you, it may vary.

Tutorial mod source code

You can find the full source code for the sample mods in this repository on GitHub.

Further reading

There is a lot of material online regarding modding Unreal Engine games, as well as tutorials and reference materials cover Lua scripting.

Here are a few of my favourite resources, that have helped me to learn how it’s done:

  • UE4/5 Modding Guides - a curated list of various UE modding guides covering Unreal Engine versions 4 and 5.
  • UE4SS Documentation - official documentation site for the UE4SS Unreal Engine Scripting Engine.
  • Programming in LUA - the original guide to developing in the LUA scripting language, written by the languages chief architect.
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