Subnautica 2 Guide: Locating Salt Efficiently

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In Subnautica 2, the ocean is full of resources, but some essential materials can be surprisingly hard to find, especially in the early stages of the game while exploring Protea. While you can usually gather plenty of titanium, coral shavings, and fibrous pulp without much trouble, other key ingredients might be rare and tricky to locate.

One such item is salt. Fortunately, you don’t need it for your initial upgrades, but at some point, you’ll need to craft a recipe that requires salt. That’s when you’ll realize you haven’t seen any in the past hour of gameplay, even as you venture farther from your lifepod. Adding to the confusion, the game’s own Databank entry on salt is actually incorrect.

So, let’s clarify how to find and use salt in Subnautica 2.

What Can You Do with Salt in Subnautica 2?

Besides powering your habitats—especially useful if you rely on solar energy—salt plays a role in cooking recipes and building materials. For example, you can make Biofuel Blocks in your Processor using fibrous pulp, or convert salt into Nutrient Blocks, which restore about 40 food points in this game (a lower amount than in the first Subnautica, where it provided 75).

Salt can also be combined with lead to produce two doses of Sugar of Saturn, an ingredient in many advanced foods. You’ll need Sugar of Saturn to craft dishes like Coral Mash (+65 food) and Pavlova (+80 food, +70 water, and +10 health).

Most importantly, salt is essential for creating Power Cells, which power the vehicles in the game. If you want to build large windows or a glass habitat, you can load salt into your base’s Processor, transforming 2 salt into 1 piece of glass. You can set up to seven pieces to be crafted automatically, and you don’t need to watch the machine while it works.

Where to Actually Find Salt

The game’s PDA Databank suggests searching for salt on sandy sea floors or near dead coral domes. However, after spending an hour exploring dead coral structures, I never found any salt, and sandy floors are everywhere in the game, making this advice ineffective.

Instead, salt deposits are mostly found near the heat vents where the water warms up. These spots are close to the thermal vents, and you can gather salt without much trouble, even without the heat-tolerance upgrade, which increases your ability to withstand hotter waters.

Here’s how to locate salt deposits:

From the lifepod, swim roughly 300 meters east along the surface, keeping safe from deep waters.
You’ll come across a rocky area with a slight green tint to the water.
Watch for large orange domes of coral crabs, which are generally harmless.
In this area, you’ll find large salt deposits, which look like greyish blobs from a distance.

To extract salt from these large deposits, you’ll need a Sonic Resonator. Once cracked, each deposit yields five salt resources. If you haven’t crafted the Resonator yet, don’t worry—you can still find smaller salt deposits that can be scooped up by hand, though these are typically limited to a few at a time.

As you progress and get better equipment, more salt deposits can be found deeper down, but for now, the shallow areas should meet your needs.

Note: Subnautica 2 is currently available in Early Access on PC and Xbox Series X|S.