Subnautica 2 Guide: How to Find and Build the Scanner Station
Stop wasting your oxygen swimming in circles hoping to stumble across a single piece of silver.
The early hours of surviving on an alien ocean world involve a lot of aimless wandering. You need specific ores to upgrade your gear, but the ocean floor is massive and visually overwhelming. Before you frustrate yourself to the point of quitting, you need to prioritize building the Scanner Station. This base module acts as a massive radar, pinpointing the exact location of ores, wrecks, and habitats within a 300-meter radius. I am going to walk you through exactly where to find the blueprint and what you need to get it running.
Locating the Scanner Station Fragment
You cannot just magically construct this radar out of thin air. You have to venture out and find a broken piece of Alterra technology to scan first.
The Camp One Coordinates
There are a few fragments scattered around the map, but the absolute easiest one to grab is located at Camp One. This is a rundown colonist camp made of connected corridors, and it sits roughly 240 meters northeast of your Lifepod.
Float directly under your Lifepod and align your compass HUD so the arrow sits exactly on the 60 marker. Swim in a straight line for 240 meters and look down. You will spot the abandoned camp on the sea floor. Enter through the hatch near the bottom, then swim upward through the vertical corridor. You will pop out into a room tilted at an 80-degree angle. The Scanner Station fragment is bolted to the floor in this tilted room. Pull out your hand scanner, scan the fragment, and the blueprint is yours.
Crafting the Scanner Station
Now that your database knows how to build the station, you have to gather the materials and use your Habitat Builder to construct it.
Sourcing the Materials
You need a mix of raw and fabricated materials to build the module. You will need three Titanium, one System Chip, and one Wiring Kit.
Titanium and Copper are incredibly easy to find scattered in the shallow waters near your Lifepod. You will need Quartz for the System Chip, which you can harvest from the inside of the large Coral Domes in the starting zone. The only tricky resource is Silver, which you need for the Wiring Kit. You can find Silver nodes inside the caves that start appearing roughly 200 meters north of your Lifepod.
Here is the exact breakdown of what you need to run through your fabricator before you pull out the Habitat Builder.
Tracking Resources and Managing Power
Slapping the station down inside your base is only half the battle. You have to know how to operate the console and keep the power grid from collapsing.
Operating the Console
Walk up to the podium and select the "Use Scanner Station" prompt. You will see a list of everything the station can currently detect. It picks up ores, Alterra Bases, Cicada Wrecks, Bloom Infestations, and Anomalies within a massive 600-meter sphere of influence.
Select the resource you want to track. The station will project a 3D hologram showing all the available nodes of that specific item around you. Simply click on one of the glowing orbs in the hologram, and a waypoint signal will immediately attach to your HUD. You can freely toggle these markers on and off from your main Signals menu while exploring.
The Power Drain Warning
Before you leave the station running indefinitely, be aware that this piece of equipment is incredibly power-hungry. It draws a constant 10 energy per second while active. If your base is running on a few basic solar panels, turning this on will crash your grid and cut your oxygen supply. Ensure you have a solid power surplus before firing it up.
Also, keep in mind that a single station can only track one type of resource at a time. If you change your target, the previous tracking signals vanish. You can theoretically build multiple stations in the same base to track different things simultaneously, but that massive energy drain makes it a terrible idea early on. Stick to one station and hunt your resources one at a time.
