Hello!

Thanks for sharing your frustration with that area. It has been the most challenging place to get right with just audio cues. Although recent updates have made some improvements to the navigational sounds, I’m hoping to include more in future updates. Something else I’ve been considering is a free camera mode which could be used to skip challenging content.

If you haven’t tried it already, then I might recommend toggling off vertical look in the controls settings. When vertical look is enabled while underwater, you move in the direction that you’re looking. Turning it off will lock your movement axes, so forward is always forward, aligned to the world.

Here is a guide shared by Rain from the shiftBacktick Discord server on 2024-08-30:

Okay, so, this explanation is very much a work in progress. if it doesn’t make sense, that’s fine, I might need to have a couple of goes at it. and feel free to ask questions. if it’s not working for you at all just let me know.

you’ve probably figured out by now that you’re supposed to be following the crunchy sounds. each crunch is a possible pathway through the cave system. the sonic characteristics of the crunch tell you the shape of the pathway, which in this context is basically which direction the pathway goes in. e.g. a crunch off to your left that makes a descending noise is a vertical shaft to your left. to travel down this, you’d strafe left until you’re lined up with it and then hold your down control. a crunch that starts in front of you and then gets lower in pitch as it progresses to the right is a wider path which slopes down and to the right. to travel down this one you’d strafe right and move down alternating. a crunch which comes in from the right and descends until its in front of you is again the path you could take. to go down it, move forward and down alternating. to go up it, strafe right and move up. vertical look can be helpful here because the bump of the vertical look tells you where you will go if you travel toward it, and how long it will take before you hit something. e.g. if you float at the bottom of a shaft and look straight up, the bump will play a long time after the shaft sonification completes, which means you can travel all the way up there without hitting something. if you look straight ahead while facing a shaft and here a bump in the middle of the sonification, there’s probably a bend

another thing which helps with vertical navigation is the collision detection system (new in 3.2). if you get used to the sound of hovering just above the floor, you’ll notice that as you move around, you can hear where the floor drops away slightly. because a lot of the paths aren’t straight up and down, it can be a subtle change. but if you’re having trouble finding where exactly to move up and down, try where you hear changes in the floor. depending on which direction you’re facing in, you might technically be listening to the side of one of the tubes

the real challenge is sometimes you’re trying to follow a path, but you also need to take into account the shape of the path you’re already on

Feel free to join us and ask what else has worked for folks. Cheers!