It’s been just shy of two months since Subnautica 2 splashed into early access, and developer Unknown Worlds is celebrating its success on X by sharing some official statistics on what players have achieved during their over 58,000,000 hours of combined playtime.
According to the studio’s data, those achievements include a spectacular number of drownings. I’m talking about truly impressive metrics regarding millions of people forgetting they need to breathe.
Tallying the top causes of reprint (read: death), Unknown Worlds says running out of oxygen is by far the most common source of Subnautica 2 mortality: Players have drowned a total of 15,636,881 times, accounting for 42.6% of all player deaths. By my calculations, that means that—between Subnautica 2’s early access launch at 11 am EDT on May 14, 2026 and the time these statistics were shared at 11 am EDT on July 9, 2026—an average of 192 players have drowned every minute since launch.
For context, the CDC says there was an average of 4,083 yearly unintentional drowning deaths in the US from 2012 to 2021, meaning that in just under two months Subnautica 2 players suffered a number of drownings more than 3,829 times higher than what Americans suffer in an entire year.