Ah see I wasn't aware of going deeper actually restoring hazard protection. When I first played the cave was full of things that hurt me when I got too close to them so I assumed going deep in caves was more dangerous than the surface, which games like Terraria, Starbound, and Minecraft taught me. And I must have missed the notice on sodium.
At any rate just encountered one of the reasons why the game can still be fun after earlygame and why early game needs to let up a bit to keep people from being turned off by it so they can enjoy the actual fun stuff.
I was flying my ship low over a planet, I was trying to scan all the flora and fauna on it, and I decided to go out to the ocean to see if there were some plants I was missing there that weren't in the lakes I searched earlier. Boosting along looking for an island to land on to search. I find an islans and a storm starts, I boost towards the island and smack into some large structure jutting out of the water. I go around it but can't tell what it is because its storming. I park and wait out the storm. Once the storm ends I see its much smaller than I thought, so I figure swim over to check it out, it looks pretty small so I won't need anything special, and the water in the lakes have not been too bad. Then I take a glance underwater.
I changed my mind on exploring it and noped the heck outta there.