[2026.1] Living Depths
The ocean floor in UBOAT has always been a flat, empty surface. Drop to periscope depth, look down – nothing.
This mod brings the seabed to life.
The North Atlantic floor in 1940 was anything but empty: glacial boulder fields, seagrass meadows, weed, shellfish and fish drifting through the gloom. Living Depths fills it all in, streaming quietly around your boat as you move.
- Rocks & geology – pebbles to 15-metre glacial erratics, gravel plains and dense moraine fields, placed by the bottom type beneath you
- Plant life – seagrass meadows, wrack, red algae, feathery weeds and soft corals (sea pens, sea fans), growing in fields across sandy ground
- Fish – dense schools of herring and sprat, colourful mid-water species (wrasse, red gurnard, redfish, haddock) drifting around you.
Placement is procedural, so no two stretches of seabed look the same.
Safe to enable or disable mid-campaign – nothing is written to your save.
On first launch the mod creates living-depths-config.json in %AppData%..LocalLowDeep Water StudioUBOAT. Open it with any text editor and set density to one of:
- low — lightest. Use this if the seabed is slow to appear or you’re on a weaker PC
- medium — the default; balanced
- high — the richest, most crowded seabed (best on a strong PC)
Save the file and restart the game to apply. Note: the mod only places its rocks and plants where the game’s own ocean floor has loaded – so if the floor ever looks empty or pops in late, lowering the density helps the game keep up.
(Reporting a bug? Set verboseLogging to true in that file for detailed logs.)
Living Depths touches a lot of the seabed at once. If something looks wrong, floats, flickers, or hurts your framerate, please report it in the comments or the Bug Reports discussion — and mention where it happened. It helps enormously.
The plants here are hand-coded billboards. If you own quality 3D models of marine flora – weeds, kelp, soft corals, sponges – and would like to see them in the mod, get in touch. Preferred format: FBX (or OBJ) with PBR textures (albedo + normal map); any real-world scale is fine.
