UBOAT – Startup and Troubleshooting Frustration Guide

A basic compilation of different annoying and confusing points when first starting Uboat, things that have frustrated or confused me or other players. This is not a strategy guide, rather it simply addresses certain mechanics that, as of the build at the time of writing, can be incredibly frustrating or confusing.

Guide to Troubleshooting Frustration and Startup Problems

All credit goes to starkwolf!

Before Leaving Port

Before leaving port, a lot of problems can start right here. It can also be very easy to miss some things because you didn’t know how to do them.

• Until you have unlocked “freeroam” in the reputation menu, you will have to get a mission before you will be allowed to leave port. This can be done via the officer standing next to the staff car.
• Food management has a lot of things that can go wrong, be sure to check that section of my guide, and apply everything I mentioned there.
• Same goes for officer management, that too I have given its own section.
• If your crew is sick, they cannot get better by “sending them home.” You have to heal them with your radioman afaict. Hopefully this changes in a future build.
• Supplies are bought from the guy in the shack on the right. Iirc, this is covered in the tutorial. But don’t forget, because you are not putting supplies directly into the components that will use them (food in the galley, ammunition in the guns, torpedoes in the torpedo tube), you might want to load these things and then come back for more.
• Just because you don’t see space in some areas, doesn’t mean you can’t buy more! Don’t forget stuff stacks, and you can see the max stacks in the information blip on the bottom of the resupply menu.

Food Problems?

Until recently, I kept running out of food on my trips. There are a few things to keep in mind with food management:

• Don’t forget, food of the same type stacks to 100! So when you don’t see room in storage, if you have food of the same type for sale at port, you can drag it over the same food and it will load it onto your sub.
• If you want more room for things other than food, some of your food stores can be moved directly to the galley to open up storage slots. You can do this manually with any of your officers in first person mode by finding the storage compartment (see my “finding stuff” section) and moving it to the galley, which is directly opposite. I believe this is also covered in the tutorial.
• If you are still having problems, you might just have a lot of crew on board. Even one or two more or less crew can greatly influence food consumption, so you can check with that crew officer and board or unboard crew if needed.

Mission Woes: AA Finding and More

A lot of people get frustrated on the AA finding mission, as there is a very specific way it has to be done, and no info except online on what those details are.

• You must spot the AA guns manually! If you are in map mode or thinking that it just needs to come into visual range of the vessel, it will not happen.
• Although I have not tested this yet, I suspect you may have to use a specific periscope to find them. A lot of people have been complaining about looking directly at them and nothing. If it doesn’t work with the observation periscope, try the attack periscope and vice versa.
• If you are not close enough, it will not register the spotting. Make sure you are close enough to the AA guns.

One extra note: for any mission where you have to send a crew off of your sub, I strongly recommend turning the engines off. I had a bug with one mission where on his return trip the game could not load the officer onto the correct position, so due to a bug I could not use that officer until I reloaded and redid the mission. Turning the engines off and being at a complete stop when he returned fixed the problem.

Where Is Stuff Located and I Can’t Get Out!

This baffles a lot of people. Although it would be very long to describe where everything is (and I may yet do it) I will just outline some general patterns, exceptions to those patterns, and some strange cases:

General patterns:

• The bow torpedo room houses your first 4 torpedoes, and crew working on it. You won’t really find anything else there.
• Just behind the bow torpedo room is essentially your officer’s quarters, sortof a “living room.” Here’s where the bunks are, some game tables for improving morale, a cabinet for crew items, and the like.
• In the middle of the ship we have the control room. This is basically the command center (or “brain”) of your sub, and so most things that would be important for commanding a battle like periscopes, diving equipment, etc, would be here.
• Behind the control room, we have the crew quarters. That’s literally all that’s there.
• Behind the crew quarters, we have a tiny room which is basically your kitchen and storage area. Besides some electrical stuff that’s literally all that’s in here.
• Towards the back of the ship we have the engine room. This is where most things regarding the diesel engines are going to be managed.
• In the far back of the sub, we have the stern torpedo (tube 5) and also a lot of engineering stuff. Many activities you will be sending your engineers to do, like making parts out of scrap metal and turning on the air compressor are going to be done back here.
• In the interior of the tower, we have one of the periscopes, and maybe a few other things.
• On the top of the sub, we have the equipment one would expect to see used when the sub is surfaced, like searchlight, guns, and targetting sight. No real surprises here, but don’t forget to close that hatch in rough seas or rain!

Some surprises / variations from the pattern:

• The snorkel is actually not located back with the diesel engines, but actually in the control room (the center room). It looks like a filing cabinet.
• The decoy launcher is not visible at all until after you have decoys equipped to your engineer. It is, however, where one would expect it to be in the far back next to the stern torpedo launcher. Must be activated by the engineer that has the decoys equipped afaik. I do not believe you will see it until you have that engineer selected. Although I guess now I see it that I hold down alt? It’s weird.
• Your radio room and listening room are in front of the control room, in the “living room.”
• Based on my description the pump could go either way, but in reality it is in the control room.
• Ventilation is by the diesel engines.

“I can’t get out of the sub!”

Panicked about this the first time I played, when the hatch is closed it will not open automatically. You have to look up and open the hatch, then get out.

More Officers Please!

Extra officers can be very helpful for headquarters missions (i.e. your research tree). However, you will often get a message at first that you have no unboarded officers to assign. There are some different things you can possibly do to fix that.

• On a rare occasion, your recruitment officer (the one in the center, closest to your sub that has all the men running to and away from him) will have officers available to recruit at the beginning of the game. Idk if that is the case anymore though, I haven’t had it happen to me since the beginning of the last update. Officers will not show up for a long time if they don’t show up right away. A lot of people reload the game until they get this before their first mission, but idk if it works anymore.
• Note the rewards for your secondary objectives for the mission you choose. You will often see an officer will be awarded (radio being the most common, then engineer, and I have yet to see a leader awarded) for completing the secondary mission, usually to sink X tons of ships. They will not be boarded by default, and so they are best used for research if awarded.
• Reputation points can be used to promote officers from your regular sailors. I have not done this yet and so can’t give more details.

Where are my officers?

• By default, your sub will be at its officer limit, and all new officers will not be boarded. Unboarded officers can only be used for research as far as I know.
• You can increase the number of officers your sub can have boarded through the reputation menu, it costs 1 rep point.
• You can change which officers (and in general which and how many sailors) are boarded on your ship by talking to the crew guy right in the middle by the docks, the first guy you see when you step out of the sub.

Other Notes

Parking your submarine: to park your submarine, you are going to aim to get alongside the same area you left from, even if this isn’t the pens. The strategy of parking a submarine is outside the scope of this guide, but I could make a guide on that on request.

There is no autosave as of the writing of this guide! Save multiple files and save often. Bugs are less common than they were but they still happen. And sometimes a small mechanic that you didn’t know about or understand, or works differently in game than in real life can wreck your game.