Subnautica Resource Guide: Where to Find Titanium, Silver, and Rare Ores

Titanium runs out embarrassingly fast in Subnautica. So does silver, the second you start cranking out wiring kits. The map is huge, and a lot of the metal you need is sitting in plain sight once you know which rock to crack open and which biome to swim toward.

This is a walk through the whole material ladder, from the limestone right outside your lifepod down to the blue kyanite crystals in the lava zone. Every drop rate and yield number here comes straight from the wiki, so you can plan around them instead of guessing.

Shallow-Water Resources Near the Lifepod

The Safe Shallows around Lifepod 5 will carry your first couple hours almost by themselves. Limestone outcrops sit all over the sand, tucked against coral, and inside the big hollow coral tubes. Crack one open and you get either copper ore or titanium, and the split is a flat 50/50 roll every time. So ten limestone gets you roughly five of each, give or take the luck of the run.

Metal salvage is the other early win, and a lot of new players swim right past it. Those bent gray hull chunks on the seabed break down into 4 titanium apiece at any fabricator. Four. One piece of trash equals four limestone worth of titanium, with zero gambling. Grab every scrap you see on the way anywhere.

A few other things worth pocketing while you're down there:

• Quartz glitters on the sand in little white clusters. Glass comes from it, and glass goes into tanks, observatories, and enameled glass later.
• Salt deposits are the chalky white lumps. You need them for cured fish and bleach, and bleach makes more water.
• Acid mushrooms and table coral samples feed a bunch of early recipes. Table coral especially, since electronics want it.
• Barnacles, the spiky white pods you can knife off a surface, pop out copper and silver. You'll mostly find them on the shells of Reefbacks drifting through the grassy plateaus.

One sneaky detail about the shallows. The sandstone outcrop, which is your first real source of silver and gold, shows up only "rarely at the end of particularly deep Safe Shallows caves" per the wiki. So if you find one of those twisty little caves that drops down farther than you'd expect, push to the back wall before you leave. Nine times out of ten there's nothing, but the tenth time saves you a trip to the kelp forest.

There's a cheap farming trick here too. Stalkers in the kelp forest pick up metal salvage and carry it around. If a stalker grabs a piece, there's a 25% chance it drops a tooth instead, and stalker teeth are their own annoying crafting ingredient. Some players dump spare salvage near a stalker pack just to farm teeth. Slow, but it works, and the stalkers mostly leave you alone while they're busy chewing.

Titanium and Copper Farming Routes

Titanium is the backbone of the whole game. Bases, vehicles, upgrades, titanium ingots for plasteel, all of it drains your titanium pile. Copper is the quieter one that suddenly becomes a wall when you need wiring kits, batteries, and computer chips in bulk.

Route 1: The Lifepod Loop

Swim a big circle around Lifepod 5, maybe 100 to 150 meters out, and break every limestone you cross. The shallows respawn resources on a timer, so this same loop pays out again in maybe fifteen or twenty minutes. Two laps usually nets around 20 limestone, which is ten titanium and ten copper if the rolls go even.

Don't skip the giant coral tubes. The wiki gallery specifically calls them out as a common limestone spot, and most players never look inside them. Swim through the middle of each one and you'll pick up two or three outcrops per tube.

Route 2: Kelp Forest Edge

The kelp forest has limestone plus loose metal salvage plus sandstone all in the same band of water. That's three resources in one swim. Work the border where kelp meets shallows, stay near the top of the stalks, and keep an ear out. Stalkers are curious more than deadly, but three of them nibbling on you at once adds up.

Grab any salvage you see, even if your inventory is full-ish. The conversion rate is too good to leave on the floor.

Route 3: Grassy Plateaus

Head to the red grass plateaus when you want sandstone in quantity. The sandstone there sits in the trenches and along the rock walls. You'll also pull limestone from the same area, so the trips stack nicely. Sand hovering around, watch for sandsharks, and clear the trenches one at a time.

A Storage Trick That Saves Runs

Titanium takes up space fast. Ten titanium crafts into one titanium ingot, and one ingot plus two lithium makes a plasteel ingot. If you're base-adjacent and have a fabricator handy, convert your overflow into ingots before you store it. Your lockers will hold ten times the actual material that way.

Drop a couple of plain lockers next to the lifepod early on. Two or three of them, labeled by material, keeps you from making constant trips to a base you haven't built yet. Cheap as dirt to make too.

One thing the game never tells you: the scanner room can't see inside outcrops. Limestone looks like limestone on the scan, but the scanner has no idea whether that particular rock holds titanium or copper. For limestone farming you just have to swim and smash. The scanner shines on loose items and big deposits instead, which we'll get to at the end.

Locating Lithium, Silver, and Gold

This is the tier where the game starts slowing you down. Silver especially, because a wiring kit costs 2 silver ore, and wiring kits go into nearly every advanced circuit in the game. The medical kit fabricator wants a silver. The high capacity O2 tank wants a silver. Even the scanner room speed upgrade needs 1 silver and 1 gold.

All three of these come out of the sandstone outcrop. Here's the exact table from the wiki:

| Drop | Chance | |---|---| | Lead | 37.5% | | Silver Ore | 37.5% | | Gold | 25% |

That 25% gold rate is why gold always feels scarce. It's not your imagination, the roll is just against you.

Where Sandstone Actually Spawns

The wiki lists sandstone in the kelp forest (both the main area and its caves), the grassy plateaus and their caves, and rarely at the deep end of Safe Shallows caves. Beyond the early zones you'll find it in the Bulb Zone, Crag Field, Crash Zone, Deep Sparse Reef, Dunes, Grand Reef, the Lost River sections, the Mountains, the Mushroom Forest, and along the Sea Treader's Path.

For a first serious silver run, the kelp forest caves are the easiest mark. Shallow, close to home, and you can bail to the surface anytime. Bring a flashlight. Those caves are dark enough that you'll walk past half the outcrops without one.

Silver Without the Dice Game

There are two ways to skip the sandstone lottery entirely.

Barnacles. Knife them off Reefback shells and out pops copper or silver, no percentages involved. Reefbacks are peaceful, so you can hover next to one and clean its whole back. It's slow but it's steady.

Large resource deposits. Big silver deposits yield 9 to 18 ore from a single node, and they show up in the Crag Field, the Dunes and Dunes Caves, the Underwater Islands, the Inactive Lava Zone, and several Lost River sections. You need a Prawn Suit drill arm to harvest them, which makes this a mid-game option, but one deposit equals a whole inventory of sandstone cracking.

Lithium, the Easy One

Lithium is way less painful than silver, mostly because it lies loose on the seabed in single pieces. The wiki calls out the Deep Sparse Reef near Officer Keen's lifepod as a spot with "lots of item form lithium," and that's not overselling it. You can fill a locker in one visit.

Your other lithium sources:

• Shale outcrops, which hold gold, lithium, and diamond
• Large deposits yielding 8 to 16 apiece, common in the Lost River, the Mountains, the Mountain Island caves, and sometimes the Mushroom Forest

Shale is worth learning because it's a three-for-one. The roll is 38.5% diamond, 31.5% lithium, 30% gold, so you're pulling cutting materials and precious metal from the same rock. Shale shows up almost everywhere except the shallows, kelp forest, and grassy plateaus, meaning you have to push out a bit. The Blood Kelp caves, Bone Fields, Mountain Island caves, and Underwater Islands all carry it.

Fun bonus: Sea Treader leviathans kick shale loose behind them as they walk the Sea Treader's Path. Park behind a walking herd (at a respectful distance) and sweep up what they unearth.

What Lithium Is Even For

Plasteel. That's the big one. Plasteel ingots build your depth modules, hull reinforcements, and a stack of Prawn Suit arms. Every "go deeper" upgrade in the mid-game leans on lithium, so a big pile of it is basically a depth progression meter. The ultra high capacity tank alone eats 4 lithium.

Deep Biome Ores: Kyanite and Nickel Ore

Past the Lost River, the game splits into two rare ores that gate the endgame. Both live in places that want to kill you, so it's worth knowing exactly what you're going down for before you commit the swim.

Nickel Ore: Lost River Country

Nickel shows up only in the Lost River and parts of the Inactive Lava Zone. The wiki breaks the Lost River spots down by section: Bone Fields, Ghost Canyon, Ghost Forest, Tree Cove, and the Junction. Loose chunks lie right on the seabed, and large deposits (8 to 16 ore each) sit around the same areas.

What nickel buys you is depth. The Prawn Suit depth module MK1 takes 3 nickel, the Cyclops depth module MK2 takes 3, jump jets take 2, and the orange tablet takes 2. It's the metal that lets your vehicles survive the trip to the bottom, which is why you can't skip it.

Practical route: come in through the Blood Kelp entrance or the Deep Grand Reef entrance, and work the Bone Fields first. It's the roomy, relatively open section, and loose nickel is easy to spot against the pale ground. Ghost Canyon has more, but the walls close in and things live in there.

Kyanite: the Lava Zone

Kyanite exists in exactly three places: the Inactive Lava Zone, the Lava Lakes, and inside the Lava Castle. That's it. The Inactive Lava Zone sits roughly 960 to 1390 meters down, making it the second deepest biome in the game, so this is firmly an endgame trip.

You'll know it when you see it. Blue angular crystals growing in clusters, glowing against all that red rock and lava. They stand out hard, so spotting them isn't the problem. Getting to them alive is the problem.

Yields per the wiki: short kyanite deposits give 6 to 12, tall ones give 11 to 22. There are also loose single pieces near the Alien Thermal Plant, which is a nice consolation prize if you're not set up to drill yet.

The Annoying Catch

Here's the loop the game puts you in. The deepest depth modules want kyanite, but the kyanite is deep. The standard answer is to take a Prawn Suit with a MK1 depth module down through the Lost River, enter the lava zone from the Tree Cove side (past the big glowing Cove Tree), and drill what you can reach from the safer upper shelves of the Inactive Lava Zone. That first haul then funds the MK2 module and the Cyclops MK3, which open the rest of the zone.

Budget for the trip before you leave:

• 3 kyanite for the Prawn MK2 module (plus titanium and lithium)
• 3 kyanite for the Cyclops MK3 (plus a plasteel ingot)
• 2 kyanite for the Prawn thermal reactor
• 4 kyanite for the Cyclops thermal reactor
• 4 kyanite for the Neptune fuel reserve, if you're finishing the rocket

That's roughly 16 total for a full endgame kit, so two or three good deposits will cover you with room to spare. Bring a thermal reactor or park near a heat source, because running power cells dry at 1200 meters is a genuinely bad afternoon.

Mind the locals down there. Sea Dragon leviathans patrol the lava zone, and warpers can show up around the entrances. A Prawn Suit takes the hits a lot better than you do, so stay in the suit whenever anything with teeth is nearby.

Efficient Scanner Room and Prawn Suit Mining

Once you're farming in volume instead of scraping by, two tools change everything. One finds the ore, the other pulls it out of the ground in bulk.

Setting Up the Scanner Room

The scanner room needs 3 fragments to unlock, and they scatter across the Crag Field and Grassy Plateaus seabeds plus the Sea Treader's Path, along with a bunch of wrecks. Build one at your main base first to learn it, then drop small outposts near your farming biomes later.

Numbers worth knowing:

| Stat | Base | Fully Upgraded | |---|---|---| | Scan range | 300m | 500m | | Scan time | 14 seconds | 2 seconds | | Idle power draw | 0.15 energy/sec | same | | Power use while scanning | 30 energy/min | less per scan, more range |

Upgrades stack, and four slots is the max. Four speed upgrades drop a scan to 2 seconds, and four range upgrades push detection out to 500 meters. For a mining outpost, most people go all speed. You already know roughly where the biome is, you just want the blips refreshed instantly.

Two details that make the room sing:

The scan menu only lists what's actually inside range when you build it. So if lithium isn't on the list, there's no lithium nearby, and you can rule the area out without ever turning the scanner on. That trick alone saves a lot of empty swimming.

Build the HUD chip at the room's mini-fabricator and equip it on your person. That puts the orange detection circles right on your visor while you swim, instead of forcing you to run back inside and read the hologram. Cheap to make and honestly the single best quality-of-life item in the game for resource runs.

Camera drones come two to a room and are great for scoping a cave before you commit your body to it. Just know the feed gets staticky past about 300 meters and goes fully blank near 600, and stalkers will absolutely steal a drone if you park it carelessly in their front yard.

Remember the limitation from earlier: no seeing inside outcrops. The scanner is for loose lithium, nickel, quartz, kyanite, metal salvage, and large deposits. Limestone and sandstone farming stays a manual job forever.

The Prawn Suit Drill Arm

The drill arm blueprint wants 2 fragments, found in wrecks plus the Blood Kelp Trench, Dunes, Grand Reef, and Underwater Islands. Crafting it takes 5 titanium, 1 lithium, and 4 diamond at the vehicle upgrade console. Diamonds come out of shale outcrops at that 38.5% rate, so a shale run or two covers you.

What the drill does is simple and beautiful. Point it at a large deposit, hold the button, and the ore goes straight into the Prawn's back storage automatically. No picking anything up, no inventory tetris at the seabed. One tall kyanite deposit at up to 22 ore, one nickel deposit at up to 16, one silver at up to 18, and you're hauling hundreds of units in a single trip.

Pair the drill with a grapple arm. Drilling is stationary work, and the grapple gets you up and down cliff faces fast between nodes. If something aggressive shows up, the drill arm itself averages 30 damage a second (28 the first second, 32 the second), which is enough to make most fauna reconsider.

The Full Workflow

Here's how it all snaps together on a real run.

Drop a minimal outpost, meaning a scanner room, a hatch, and a power source, at the edge of your target biome. Solar works fine if you're shallow; below about 100 meters you'll want bioreactors or thermal. Scan for your ore, slap on the HUD chip, and follow the circles to each node. Drill everything in range, load the Prawn, and either haul it home or build a second outpost one biome deeper.

For the endgame kyanite run, that outpost goes near your Lost River entrance. Scan from there handles nickel, lithium, and quartz for the build-up. Then you take the Prawn through to the lava zone for kyanite with a vehicle that can actually survive the trip and a storage bay that brings home 100+ ore instead of the 12 you could carry by hand.