How to use the scanner station in Subnautica 2

The scanner station is a key piece of kit in Subnautica 2, allowing you to track down some of the rarest resources. It’s an interior piece of base equipment that you must place down in a room inside your base. For that, you’ll need power — check out our Subnautica 2 power management guide for more on that.

Before we go into what it does, let me get across the importance of scanning first. Make the handheld scanner as early in the game as possible and scan literally everything — fish, resources, furniture. Not only will you get useful information added to your datapad, but some of the resources can be tracked on the scanner station once you’ve scanned them.

How to find any resource in Subnautica 2

The scanner station costs the following (use the fabricator for the processed resources:

• One system chip (created from one wiring kit and two quartz).
• One wiring kit (created from one silver and one copper wire).
• Three titanium.

If you’re struggling to find silver, there’s pockets of it 150-ish meters from the landing zone in a cave to the north.

Initially, the scanner station only has a range of 300 meters, but you can build little bases anywhere and pop one down to widen your search.

Once it’s down, interact with the front of the machine and you’ll get a list of nearby resources and points of interest that you’re able to track. Choose one and the holographic display will fill up with dots (you are the large circle in the middle), showing you the locations of that resource in the area around you.

Now, you could just set off in that direction and hope for the best, but the scanner station is way more useful than that. If you interact with one of the resource dots, it’ll highlight green and give you an objective marker on your HUD, allowing you to swim to it straight away.

I used the scanner station in the starting area to get hold of some necrolei cysts so I could make my rebreather early on. You can track down sulfur, salt, lead, and even Alterra bases, Cicada debris, and bloom infestations.