Last updated: 5 September 2026

Subnautica 2 Best Early Resources — Where to Find What You Need

Running out of a specific resource halfway through crafting is one of the most frustrating early-game experiences in Subnautica 2. The ocean is full of materials, but knowing which ones matter first — and roughly where each one turns up — turns frantic searching into deliberate farming. This guide covers the key resources you'll need in the first few hours, how the game's node-and-deposit system works, and how the Scanner Station can automate finding them once you have one built. Subnautica 2 is still in Early Access, so exact node placements can shift between patches — treat locations here as reliable starting points, not guaranteed spawns.

01Titanium — Your Most-Used Material

Titanium is the most common raw material in the game and goes into a huge share of early crafting recipes. You will never have enough Titanium in the first two hours, so always be collecting it.

Where to find it:

• Resource Nodes — ordinary rock and mineral clusters scattered across every biome. Break them with your bare hands or any tool; each yields 3 Titanium.
• Resource Deposits — larger, tougher formations that require the Sonic Resonator to break; each yields 5 Titanium. You won't have a Sonic Resonator in your first hour, so these are more of a mid-game top-up.
• Metal Salvage — loose wreckage debris found around the Shallows and scattered near Wrecks. Picking it up doesn't give you Titanium directly — carry it to a Fabricator and process it there, where 1 Metal Salvage converts into 4 Titanium.
• Loose individual Titanium pieces also turn up occasionally and give 1 Titanium each when picked up by hand.

What you'll need it for: Titanium underpins a large share of early Habitat Builder modules and tool recipes. Prioritise Metal Salvage and ordinary Resource Nodes in your first minutes — neither requires a special tool.

02Copper — Wiring and Batteries

Copper is the second resource you'll be chasing constantly. It's the base ingredient for Copper Wire, which in turn feeds into the Wiring Kit used by most powered tools and base modules.

Where to find it:

• Copper follows the same Resource Node / Resource Deposit split as Titanium: ordinary nodes (hand or any tool) yield 3 Copper, while tougher deposits that require the Sonic Resonator yield 5.
• Copper tends to cluster on cave walls, ceilings, and the underside of overhangs rather than the open seafloor — look up and into crevices, not just down.
• Confirmed spawn biomes include the Shallows (your starting biome) as well as Dolerite Spires, Plateaus, Graveyard, Necrolei Hills, and several biomes further out.

Patch 1.1 ('Adaptive Measures') fixed a bug where two Copper nodes near the Old Habitat overlapped and only one could be harvested — both are now individually collectable.

What you'll need it for: Copper Wire (2 Copper), which feeds into the Wiring Kit (Copper Wire + 1 Silver) — required for most powered tools, the Scanner Station, and the System Chip line. It's also half of the Basic Battery recipe (2 Copper + 1 Acidic Raion Pouch). Carry a healthy stack of Copper before building your first base.

03Quartz — Electronics and Base Components

Quartz feeds into several mid-tier electronics recipes, including the System Chip used by scanning and vehicle equipment. It's less immediately common than Titanium or Copper, but concentrated in a few reliable spots.

Where to find it:

• Quartz follows the same node/deposit split — ordinary Resource Nodes yield 3, Sonic Resonator-only Resource Deposits yield 5.
• It's described as highly abundant in and around the Coral Domes in the Shallows, and can otherwise be found in almost every biome.
• Patch 1.1 fixed a placement bug on a broken Coral Dome in the Shallows that had made one Quartz Crystal node unharvestable — it's fully accessible now.

What you'll need it for: the System Chip (1 Wiring Kit + 2 Quartz), which unlocks several important tools and upgrade modules. Grab Quartz whenever you pass a Coral Dome — you'll need it for mid-game electronics sooner than you'd expect.

04Silver and Gold — Mid-Tier Electronics

Silver and Gold sit a tier above Titanium, Copper, and Quartz — you need them for the Wiring Kit chain and other electronics, but they don't spawn as densely near the Lifepod.

Silver:

• Ordinary Resource Nodes yield 2–3 Silver; Sonic Resonator-only Resource Deposits yield 5.
• Confirmed spawn biomes include Plateaus, Necrolei Hills, Graveyard, Dolerite Spires, and the aptly-named Silver Mines.
• Patch 1.1 added extra Silver placements in the Coral Gardens area, plus a proximity hint dialogue that triggers when you're near a Silver-rich spot there.

Gold:

• Also split between ordinary nodes and Sonic Resonator deposits, though official sources don't list exact per-node yields for Gold the way they do for the other ores.
• Confirmed spawn biomes include Graveyard, Graveyard Caves, Root Canyon, and Thermal Vent Clusters — including deposits near the Karakorum Power Plant and Karakorum Metal Farms further from the Lifepod.

What you'll need them for: Silver is a direct ingredient in the Wiring Kit (Copper Wire + 1 Silver). Gold's main early use is in later electronics and vehicle-tier recipes rather than your first-hour crafting — don't go out of your way for it until you've got the basics covered.

05Fiber and Acidic Raion Pouch — Key Non-Ore Materials

Two non-mineral materials are easy to overlook but block basic crafting if you run out.

Fiber: crafted at the Fabricator from 2× Fibrous Pulp, and used in Fiber Mesh (2 Fiber + 1 Strong Acid), fins, first aid kits, and several habitat items like beds and storage containers. Exactly which plants yield Fibrous Pulp has shifted between Early Access patches — if the game's own crafting screen shows you a different source than expected, trust the in-game tooltip over any guide, including this one.

Acidic Raion Pouch: harvested with the Survival Multitool from Acid Raion plants — purple, brain-like growths found in caves in the Shallows. Each plant regrows its pouches (and a separate medical gel sac) over time, so a known patch is worth revisiting. Pouches are the second ingredient in the Basic Battery (2 Copper + 1 Acidic Raion Pouch) — without Batteries you can't craft any powered tool — and in bulk they're also a solid Bioreactor fuel source once you have one built.

• Tip: Acid Raion plants are easy to miss on a first dive — they don't look like typical harvestable flora, so scan anything unfamiliar rather than swimming past it.

06Using the Scanner Station to Find Resources

Once you've built a Scanner Station (a mid-early base module, not the handheld Scanner tool), resource hunting gets a lot more efficient. It locates resources, wrecks, and anomalies within a fixed 300-metre spherical radius and displays them as a holographic map inside the station, using 10 energy per second while active.

• Crafting it requires 1 System Chip, 3 Titanium, and 1 Wiring Kit — realistically a mid-early rather than first-hour goal, since the System Chip itself needs Silver, Copper, and Quartz.
• Its base scan radius is fixed at 300 metres. The upgrades it takes are filter upgrades (Anomaly, Biohacking Chamber, Cicada Debris, Bloom Infestation) that unlock additional categories of things it can detect, rather than upgrades that extend its range.
• You can select which resource type it actively highlights, and a detected signal disappears once you've harvested that node. Multiple Scanner Stations can run at once if you want coverage across several biomes.

Before you have a Scanner Station, the most reliable manual approach is still to sweep a biome systematically — the Shallows first, since it's the most Copper- and Titanium-dense area near the Lifepod — rather than diving at random.