All Leviathans in Subnautica Explained in 24 Minutes

追加: 2026-05-19

[00:00:00]The Reaper Leviathan. It is one of the most recognizable creatures in Subnotica and for most players, the first genuine encounter with something that makes the ocean feel dangerous. The Reaper Leviathan is 55 m in length, [music] roughly the height of a 15-story building laid flat and moving through the water toward you. It has [music] a long tapered body with two large mandibles flanking its face, which it uses to grab vehicles and hold them in place [music] while dealing damage. The Reaper does not idle in one corner of the map. It actively patrols its territory across the crash zone and the dunes surrounding the aurora, and it responds to sound. Running a vehicle engine near one draws its attention.

[00:00:41]Most players learn its behavioral patterns the hard way after losing a seaothth and respawning considerably poorer. Its design draws loosely from the realworld orfish, a deep sea fish that grows up to around 3 m and likely inspired numerous sea monster legends throughout history given its unusual elongated shape. The reaper takes that profile and multiplies it by 18, then gives it mandibles and a territorial aggression that the orfish decidedly lacks. The ghost leviathan.

[00:01:10]The ghost leviathan's life cycle begins in the Lost River as juveniles, consuming ghost rays and river prowlers as they grow, and potentially even other juveniles. Juvenile specimens reach around 67 m in length. The ghost leviathan has a soft bioluminescent transparent outer membrane covering a muscular blue inner body, which features darker blue stripes and 12 yellow bioluminescent eyes. That transparent membrane is the creature's most immediately [music] distinctive characteristic in the lost river. As ghost leviathans mature and become too large for the lost river, they migrate to surface biomes such as the Grand Reef and blood kelp zone, consuming ampules and crab squids in the northern blood kelp and shos of fish in the Grand Reef and possibly even sea tredder leviathans. They eventually migrate to the crater edge, roaming freely in open water and continuing to grow larger until they die. Adult specimens reach around 110 m. Three adults are fixed in the Grand [music] Reef and northern blood kelp zone. A separate population exists in the crater edge, the game's boundary zone, where a single ghost leviathan spawns when the player enters the area. They pursue the player until they return to the playable area, at which point all three retreat. The crater edge ghost leviathans function as the ocean's boundary [music] enforcement. Despite being much smaller than the sea emperor Leviathan, the ghost leviathan's eggs can grow to sizes far too large for the creature to lay, suggesting the eggs continue growing significantly after being laid. Sea dragon leviathan. The seadragon leviathan is an aggressive species residing near the core of planet [music] 4546b.

[00:02:44]Two live in the inactive lava zone and [music] one lives in the lava lakes.

[00:02:48]Only three exist in the game, and it is unknown whether more exist elsewhere on the planet. At 112 [music] m, it is the largest aggressive creature in the first game. Its body shares the fundamental architecture of the sea emperor, armored with seven bioluminescent tentacles, [music] and two forlims. But the resemblance ends there. The sea dragon has a more reptilian head, a wide tooththed mouth, webbed forlims, a prominent dorsal sail, and deeper coloring accentuated with purple bioluminescence.

[00:03:19]The architects captured a sea dragon egg [music] and brought it to their disease research facility to study Leviathan egg hatching conditions. The parent seadragon tracked the egg down and rammed into the facility, destroying it.

[00:03:31]But the sea dragon was killed in the collision shortly afterward. The ruins of that facility are [music] present in the inactive lava zone. The sea dragon encountered there is not the parent. It is a territorial inhabitant of the deepest accessible biome in the game.

[00:03:46]and the practical recommendation for encountering one remains consistent across all documented runs. Leave immediately.

[00:03:54]Sea Emperor Leviathan.

[00:03:56]The Sea Emperor Leviathan is the largest known living Leviathan class fauna found within [music] the crater. It is sapient and telepathic, but unlike most Leviathans, it is not [music] aggressive. Its length sits between 160 and 200 m. The body is armored, predominantly [music] pale brown with shades of blue and green, featuring two striped antenni with glowing green lures, four cyan glowing binocular eyes, large mandibles, and seven long posterior tentacles adorned with cyan bioluminescent bulbs. Despite its size, its diet consists solely of microorganisms filtered from the water, much like baine whales. It is suggested that in the past these creatures traveled in small herds in the bottom of the trenches, occasionally rising to the surface to feast on microorganisms in shallower water. The Kurab bacterium eliminated their food source, killing the entire species except the single specimen held in the primary containment facility. The architects captured a 1600year-old sea emperor and her seven eggs and placed them in the primary containment facility. After testing, they discovered she was too old to produce enzyme 42 potent enough to work as a permanent cure. They then dissected a Sea Emperor egg to study the fetus, a process that killed it. The Sea Emperor's telepathic attempts to communicate to the architects that forcefully hatching the eggs would not work [music] when unheard. The Sea Emperor communicates with the player through telepathy using distorted imagery rather than direct language at multiple locations across the map. It is the only entity in both games that addresses the player with something that can be described as emotional weight.

[00:05:29]Reefback Leviathan.

[00:05:31]The Reefback Leviathan is a passive Leviathan class fauna species. Most of its body is comprised of a thick dark blue carrapase with a rounded triangular front, [music] a relatively small body concentrated at the posterior, and three long whip-like tentacles. An adult reefback [music] has patches of teal coral and brown grass growing across its carropase. Beneath the carrapase, it is dark green with light blue bioluminescent stripes and eight [music] yellow bioluminescent bulbs on either side, the purpose of which is unknown.

[00:06:02]Adults reach around 70 m. Adult reefbacks support full mini ecosystems on their backs, including flora, [music] coral, and small fauna swimming nearby.

[00:06:12]Tiger plants occasionally make their homes on reefback [music] carropaces and will launch projectile thorns at anything that approaches. Barnacles growing [music] on adult backs function as harvesting nodes yielding silver and copper ore. The reefback emits a range of echoing low-frequency calls, but only when other reefbacks are nearby, [music] suggesting these calls are a form of communication rather than echolocation.

[00:06:33]Juvenile reefbacks are [music] found infected with kar while adults are not, suggesting either natural immunity or a resistance that develops with age. No explanation is provided in the datab bank.

[00:06:44]Sea treader leviathan.

[00:06:46]The sea treader leviathan is a passive leviathan class creature found in small herds on the seafloor, primarily in the sea tredder's path, but also in the Grand Reef. It is the smallest leviathan in Subnotica. At around 20 m, it is the only leviathan in either game that walks rather than swims. Its body consists of a large [music] torso with long double-jointed back legs. Its front leg is in fact the creature's elongated snout, segmented [music] and foldable for movement. Its carrapase is mostly blue, decorated with bright bioluminescent [music] orange patterns. The sea treader has compound eyes, as shown in the datab bank [music] entries concept art. Each time the sea tredder takes a step, it may spawn zero to three shale outcrops that slowly sink [music] back into the ground. This makes the path behind a moving herd one of the more reliable locations for finding raw materials in the Midame, providing players follow at a safe distance. The Sea Treader and the Reaper Leviathan are the only two Leviathan class organisms on the planet whose eggs have never been found, even with console commands, suggesting alternative reproductive biology.

[00:07:53]Squid [music] shark. The squid shark is approximately 11 m in length and described by its datab bank [music] entry as a Leviathan class predator at the smaller end of the scale. It is excluded from the datab bank's Leviathan tab. It is the only Leviathan in the franchise formally acknowledged as such by its own datab bank entry while simultaneously being left out of the official category listing. An administrative inconsistency that reflects how the classification [music] works in practice. Size is the qualifier, not a formal registry. The squid shark merges shark body structure with sephalopod four parts, producing a fast, aggressive predator suited to the complex terrain of mid-depth biomes. It is encountered relatively early in the game before most players have adequate tools for Leviathan class threats and responds to proximity with immediate aggression. Nothing in the game explains why two recognizable Earth body plans [music] were combined into a single organism on a planet that has never had contact with Earth fauna. The classification just notes that it is big enough.

[00:08:54]The ancient skeleton. The ancient skeleton is a massive well-int [music] skeletal structure approximately 1 million years old, consisting of a head attached [music] to a unique armored carrapase. Its size surpasses that of the living leviathans and gaps in the teeth are large enough for Riley Robinson to swim through comfortably.

[00:09:15]The exposed skeleton is around [music] 100 m in length, but the full size of the living animal cannot be determined.

[00:09:21]The armor on the carrapase is substantial enough to suggest the living animal faced threats large enough to require it, implying that 1 million years ago, the ocean [music] hosted predators capable of threatening something of this size. The Lost River Laboratory cache constructed by the architects around this same fossil suggests the alien civilization found it scientifically significant. Because the totality of the skeleton is unknown, its locomotion and original size cannot be pinpointed. What portion of the animal is missing and where the rest went is not addressed anywhere in the available documentation. The gargantuan leviathan.

[00:09:57]The gargantuan fossil is approximately 3 million years old and at full length is estimated to be 6 to 8 times longer [music] than an adult sea emperor Leviathan specimen. The exposed fossil measures around 1,100 to,300 m. [music] The sea emperor reaches up to 200 m. A conservative application of that multiplier produces a living animal exceeding 1 kilometer in length. Players can swim through the rib cage of this creature as a navigable interior space.

[00:10:27]To support a predator of such titanic proportions, many of the other creatures of that time period must also have been of colossal proportions. 3 million years ago, the ocean of planet 4546b was a different category of environment entirely. What the gargantuan ate, [music] what might have eaten it, and what ecological collapse reduced the planet's fauna to the current scale [music] are questions the game poses through the fossil's existence without providing answers. The datab bank offers dimensions. It offers no explanation for the absence.

[00:11:00]The Chelstrate.

[00:11:01]The Chelstrate is 40 m in length with its head making up approximately a third of that total. It is the smallest aggressive Leviathan in the franchise.

[00:11:11]Its name derives from the cheliseri, the paired mouth part appendages found in arachnids and horseshoe crabs, reflected in the four mandibles the creature's jaw splits into during an attack, gripping prey before delivering damage. It inhabits the purple vents biome and areas near the mercury 2 wreck. Void Chelstrate is 65 m long and found in the void beyond the playable boundary. After the player spends 30 seconds in the void, one spawns. This continues until [music] three void chestrates have spawned or the player has left the area.

[00:11:44]It is larger than the standard chestrate and deals slightly less damage per hit, but the escalating spawn pattern makes any extended stay in the void functionally unservivable.

[00:11:54]Like the ghost leviathans guarding the crater edge in the first game, the void telstrate exists as a mechanical boundary marker. Shadow Leviathan.

[00:12:04]The shadow leviathan is 60 m in length and found in the crystal caverns and fabricator caverns with two specimens in each biome. Its coloring is predominantly dark, making detection against cavern walls difficult until the creature is already moving. Located on the underside of its body is a glowing blue rib cage-like mouth surrounded by mandibles which it uses to grasp prey.

[00:12:27]It will often drool blue saliva on prey.

[00:12:30]Though the biological function of this is unknown, it occupies the same structural role in Below Zero that the reaper plays in the original, the creature guarding the areas the player most needs to access. The crystal caverns contain resources and story critical locations that cannot [music] be avoided during a complete playthrough. The Shadow Leviathan patrols those spaces without patrol boundaries that favor the player's navigation. It is unknown what the Shadow Leviathan feeds on, though it presumably hunts the rock punchers and schools of fish found in its region.

[00:13:01]Glow Whale. The Glow Whale is 30 m in length and considerably broad in size.

[00:13:07]It is the smallest Leviathan in Subnautica below zero. Its body supports barnacles and vegetation. It is a passive creature that lacks any defensive [music] capabilities. It produces bioluminescent light from antenna-like structures near its head and emits sounds as it moves through the lily pad islands and east arctic biomes.

[00:13:26]Players can pet it and ride on its back for a short period. Its ecological role appears to be that of a filter feeder or surface grazer, moving through productive biomes and consuming in volume. Witnessing glow whales breach the surface or consume schools of fish has been noted by players as among the more memorable passive experiences in the franchise. More than any other Leviathan in either game, the glow whale demonstrates the breadth of what the classification actually covers. It is the same category as the seadragon, the ghost leviathan, and the gargantuan fossil. It simply reached the size threshold and offered no threat in return.

[00:14:03]Vent garden. The vent garden is a living organism that takes in nutrients expelled from geothermal vents and feeds the parasitic plant life growing inside it. At 110 m in height, it is completely docile. It is doubtful it is even aware of the player entering and exiting its body. Two adults are found in the tree spires biome. The interior of the adult vent garden contains a developed ecosystem of flora that produces harvestable resources accessible by swimming through an opening near the base. The juvenile form is around 22 m tall and found in the same biome circling near adults without apparent purpose. If positioned and anchored correctly, a player can attach a base to the underside of an adult vent garden.

[00:14:45]The creature does not respond to this.

[00:14:47]It continues its nutrient cycle, supporting its interior garden in complete indifference to the structure attached to its exterior. Of all the Leviathans in both games, the vent garden is the one whose classification as a Leviathan most thoroughly challenges any assumption that the term implies danger. It is simply large enough to qualify, and it is never needed to be anything more.

[00:15:10]The ice worm. The ice worm is an aggressive leviathan found in the glacial basin. Multiple employees were lost to icew worms during mining at the polar spire and the creature's tunnel boring capability was such that even Altera Corporation [music] could not replicate it. The alien AI Alan specifically warned the protagonist [music] about a ravenous creature burrowing through the tunnel when approaching the polar spire. It measures 95 [music] m and moves underground rather than through water, surfacing to strike before burrowing again. It detects vibration through the ice and responds to movement above its [music] territory. The primary tool for traversal in its zone is the Snow Fox hover bike, which reduces ground contact and vibration signature. The crew of the Mercury 2, which crash landed decades before the game's events, also documented the danger of the Iceworm across multiple log entries. It has occupied this territory long enough that every human expedition to the [music] area over multiple decades treated it as established context rather than discovery.

[00:16:16]The frozen Leviathan. The frozen Leviathan is the body of a deceased Leviathan class creature located within a large wall of ice at the Fi excavation site. The body was first discovered by Fred Lance who reported back to Altera about his findings. Following discovery, corridors were cut into the ice and walkways erected to study the creature and its infection. The frozen Leviathan is a heavily built creature with a broad body and four muscular limbs capable on land. Due to its considerable bulk, however, it is unlikely to have hunted on land. It possibly came ashore only to rest. [music] And scanning the creature states that it fell through the ice, suggesting it had come to sleep and tumbled through. There is little webbing between its digits, meaning limb propulsion in water would have been inefficient. Its body measures around 70 m excluding the tail, and approximately 150 m total. The specimen species and age are currently unknown, but to have been infected with kra, it must have been active any time in the last 1,000 [music] years. The player's task in Below Zero is not to study the creature, but to administer an [music] enzyme cure to the preserved kar infection inside it, preventing the bacterium from being released if the excavation continues.

[00:17:27]The frozen leviathan is not a creature that can be fought or saved. It is evidence. What it tells the player frozen into a wall at a research site surrounded by altera catwalks is that something large enough to be classified alongside sea emperors and sea dragons once walked on land above this ocean, then fell through the [music] ice and died. and the bacteria it carried is still viable a millennium later. The collector leviathan tentatively classified tyrannotus phobcois the tyrant squid of fearful curiosity. The collector is an enormous sephalopod-like predator with a squid-like body plan, a long armored mantle, four hunting tentacles with dextrous claws, and eight shorter arms grouped around a hard beak.

[00:18:10]Its body is largely turquoise accented with red, topped by a huge bioluminescent structure capable of emitting light of various colors. It has amber eyes with horizontal pupils, three pairs of siphons around the head, and swims facing forward, unlike Earth squid, propelling itself with those siphons after emitting a sonar pulse [music] to locate prey. It feeds on hardshelled, heavily defended prey, with evidence suggesting its diet includes juvenile great jaw. The datab bank warns that hunters with difficult [music] diets tend to be intelligent and inquisitive and that any small submersible or habitat is likely to draw its interest.

[00:18:48]The shiver leviathan. Its scientific name is [music] skyopter region at tropos, the scythe finned fate ender. It is a sexually dorphic pack predator of the open void. Classified among fish rather than seephalopods, its ancestors diverged from other protein fish early, developing an armor-plated skull, [music] enormous wing-like pectoral fins resembling those of lobe finned fish, and jointed forlims with pointed tooththed second segments reminiscent of mantis shrimp. The armored skull is interpreted by the datab bank as evidence that [music] its prey fights back.

[00:19:24]Females are significantly larger than males and carry distinctive tail organs functioning as long range towedaway sonar. Males ride the female during open ocean cruises, depending on her for guidance and nourishment, detaching to attack when a hunt begins.

[00:19:40]The great jaw. Its scientific name is Megaaya Sudakna, the great clam that bites you. It is cesile, enormous, and classified as a mollisk. The shell takes decades or centuries to reach adult size and no upper size limit has been established. The interior is lined with motion sensitive eyes and at the center of the body is a stalk topped with sensory tendrils. When those tendons are disturbed, the adductor muscles snap the shells shut, trapping prey inside. The creature then secretes domoic acid neurotoxin. Projected symptoms: nerve damage, short-term memory loss, death.

[00:20:18]Despite this, the majority of its nutrition likely comes not [music] from prey, but from photosynthesis. Coral polyps lining the interior feed on sunlight via photosynthetic [music] bacteria. The great jaw is an omnivore that kills opportunistically and grows on light. It also bioaccumulates [music] lithium during growth, expelling nodules to prevent nerve interference. The datab banks assessment critical source of lithium, but dangerous to dive. Avoid touching the tendons. Ensure you have an up-to-date body scan. The creature's [music] internal file name in the game's files is Clamthulu.

[00:20:53]The deepwing Bruder. Its scientific name is Titano Tagmataptor Amulia, the Titanic wing segmented cup of plenty. It is a migratory arthropod leviathan that travels in groups of three, moving in a line across the map. Its enormous beak is built for cracking and tearing. Yet, its throat is lined with plankton traps and filters water through gill openings at the rear of its thoracic [music] keel. A creature that evolved both a filter feeder's infrastructure and a predator's jaw and apparently uses both.

[00:21:24]Its ancestors, the tagmatapa, evolved early in protein arthropod history.

[00:21:29]Their limbs became paddles. The thorax developed a deep keel [music] and pressure from competing fish selected for enormous size and thick armor over time. Whether all tagmatapter reached the deepwing bruder scale or exceeded it is unknown. Droplets alongside its eggs as decoys for predators. [music] The true eggs are difficult to distinguish from the decoys. [snorts] As a strangulant, the bruder must mol. Its shed exoskeletons fall to the seafloor lined with lipid-rich grease, feeding whatever lives in the abyss below. The datab bank's assessment. Egg broods provide a valuable food supply if you can locate the true eggs and survive the competition. Its attitude and home biome are not [music] yet documented. The appearance section of its wiki page contains no confirmed information at the time of writing. The creature was first revealed through a fan art competition called Leviathan Awakens, where participants designed its appearance from a silhouette. The winning design is scheduled to be added as a craftable in-game poster. What it actually looks like in the game remains for now unconfirmed.

[00:22:29]>> Bonus. The world tree. The world tree is classified not as a Leviathan, but as a Titan class life form, a designation that appears nowhere else in the game.

[00:22:40]The visible structure rises more than 2 km above the ocean surface and spans nearly 3 km wide. The PDA's datab bank addresses it entirely through negatives.

[00:22:50]It is not a tree. Surface analysis is inconclusive. It is not reasonably sized. It is among the largest living things ever cataloged on a planetary surface. It is not exclusively photosynthetic. Sunlight alone cannot feed its mass and it is not well.

[00:23:07]Spectral analysis shows little internal activity. Organic offging indicates the onset of decomposition.

[00:23:14]The PDA concludes that an unknown [music] energy source and a subsurface root network of enormous scale must exist. Then the autogeneration of the datab bank entry stops. A script hook executes. Archived data unpacks. A single line appears that does not belong [music] to the PDA. The only thing you need to do is go towards that tree. If you're ever lost, look for a way to get closer. That tree is the whole world, the only thing that matters.

[00:23:42]The current early access ending implies there are multiple trees across the planet, that they feed on the world as the world feeds on their roots, and that an alien hibernation crypt lies beneath at least one of them. The roots are rotting, the tree is dying. The source of the archived message has no identified author. The datab bank does not continue past it.