Are you wondering where to find silver in Subnautica? If you’re reading this, then you probably already know that silver is one of the most valuable resources you’ll come across in the world of Subnautica. You’ll need plenty of it to fabricate wiring kits, high-capacity oxygen tanks, medical kit fabricators, ion batteries, etc.
Unfortunately, silver ores are rare and relatively hard to find, especially in the early parts of the game. This can be frustrating as you could spend hours wandering aimlessly throughout the game because you’re unable to fabricate or upgrade the electronic components that you need.
Don’t worry though; in this article, we’ll show you how to farm silver in Subnautica and progress smoothly throughout the game. As you’ll later learn, many of the strategies I’ll show can be applied for sourcing other materials as well.
Let’s get right to it!
Finding Silver in Subnautica: The Basics
As you may already know, you can get silver ore by breaking sandstone chunks throughout the game. This is the first and most straightforward method available to you at the start of the game.
In case you’re wondering, this is what a sandstone chunk looks like:
There are only a few sandstone chunks in the Safe Shallows (the location of your Lifepod and starting point of the game). You might be able to find a few of them hiding in the safe shallow caves. If you’re lucky, you might be able to find a few silver ores, which you can use to create a wiring kit to fabricate a high-capacity oxygen tank or habitat builder. Both are extremely useful in the early part of the game.
If you’re wondering where to find more sandstone chunks in Subnautica, you’ll need to explore other biomes — the Grassy Plateaus, Kelp Forest, Dunes, Mushroom Forest, etc. I’d recommend starting your search at the Grassy Plateaus as there tends to be a lot of sandstone chunks there and located only a few hundred meters West of your Lifepod.
In case you’re wondering, this is what the Grassy Plateaus look like:
There is no map in Subnautica, so it can be difficult for new players to track the different biomes throughout the game. A good trick to find out which biome you’re at is to press “F1” on your keyboard. Doing so opens a console on the right-hand side of your screen, which shows your current location (Player Biome), among other things.
You can find sandstone chunks hidden in the red grass (blood grass) or the outlying perimeter of the biome. You can also find some nestled around the large stone pillars located at the center of the biome. Just watch out for Sandsharks that stalk the area.
Another good source of silver ore you may want to take advantage of during the early part of the game is the Reefback Leviathan that wanders the Grassy Plateaus.
As you can see above, the Reefback is a massive, slow-moving creature that glides effortlessly near the surface of the water. It’s the first leviathan creature you’ll encounter in the game and might give you quite a scare when you first see it due to its humungous size. Fortunately, the Reefback is harmless, although it might carry a few Tiger Plants on its back that lodge spikes at you if you get too close.
What you’d want to look for are the blue-green barnacles located on the Reefback’s back. Similar to sandstone chunks, you can break them for a chance to find silver ores.
Step up your game with a scanner room
So just break a few sandstone chunks and barnacles, and you should be good, right? Well, unfortunately, it’s not the most efficient way to farm for silver in Subnautica. As you may have already realized, it’s not guaranteed that you will find a silver ore with every sandstone chunk you break.
There’s only about a 50% chance of doing so since sandstone chunks also yield gold or lead. Reefback barnacles, on the other hand, only offer a 10% chance of yielding silver ores. Hence you can spend hours hunting for sandstone chunks and Reefback barnacles with no guarantee that you’ll end up with the number of silver ores you need. So what can you do about it?
Well, If you want to find more silver ores in Subnautica, you will need to implement something that would make your search for sandstone chunks a lot easier. You can do that by creating a Scanner Room, which can help you scan the area for sandstone chunks and display their location on your screen.
To implement this strategy, you will need to scan for fragments to obtain the blueprint for a scanner room (3 fragments). Fortunately, these fragments aren’t that hard to find, and there’s plenty of them in the Grassy Plateaus. Just scour the biome for wreckage on the seafloor, and you should be able to find enough fragments to obtain a blueprint.
Once you obtain the Blueprint, you will need to collect the following materials to build a Scanner Room using your Habitat Builder.
- 5x Titanium Ores
- 2x Copper Ores
- 1x Gold
- 1x Table Coral Sample
Now that you have a scanner room, another thing you will need is a Scanner Room HUD chip. You will need to equip it from your inventory to receive location information from the scanner room straight to your HUD.
To fabricate the Scanner Room HUD chip, you will need the following materials:
- 1x Magnetite
- 1x Computer Chip
At this point, you will probably find it difficult to find magnetite as it’s another rare resource in the game. The closest biome that contains this material is the Jellyshroom Cave which is around 500M West of your Lifepod. It’s a dangerous area prowling with Crabsnakes.
Save your game before you leave. Head straight to the bottom of the cave, scour the surface for magnetites, grab a few, and then get out. It’ll be worth it — I promise!
To create the Scanner Room HUD Chip, you need to enter the room and go to the Scanner room fabricator module. This is also where you can fabricate additional upgrades for the Scanner Room — Camera Drones and Scanner Room Range Upgrade.
Now that you have the Scanner Room HUD Chip, you can start scanning for Sandstone chunks. Before you start, make sure that you’ve equipped the Scanner Room HUD Chip from your inventory.
Go to the Console (inside the Scanner Room) and select Sandstone chunks as the target resource to scan for.
Wait a few minutes, and you should start receiving location information of Sandstone chunks in the area. As you can see above, this will make your search for Silver ores a lot easier since you’d know exactly where to go.
The scanner room has a range of 300 meters and can be extended up to 500 meters by installing four Scanner Room Range upgrade modules.
To build them, you’ll need the following materials (per module):
- 1x Copper
- 1x Magnetite
The best thing about this “Scanner Room” strategy is that you’re not limited to just sandstone chunks. You can use the room to locate just about anything — magnetites, diamonds, wreckage sites, reaper leviathans, etc. As long as it’s within range, you should be able to locate it from your scanner room.
You can even use the camera drones to scout areas and identify potential threats before exploring. This is useful for checking unexplored biomes and want to know what to expect. The last thing you want is to set up shop just a few hundred meters away from a Reaper Leviathan. Yikes!
Note that you can only control the camera drones from inside the scanner room.
Conclusion
So there you have it — everything that you need to know about where to find silver in Subnautica. With the strategies mentioned above, you should have an easier time getting your hands on all the silver ores you need (or any other material for that matter).
Once you’ve progressed far into the game, you’ll be able to find these large silver deposits in Subnautica that you can mine directly. However, to do so, you’ll need a Prawn Suit with a Drill Arm upgrade and maybe a Cyclops (Submarine) to transport everything. Of course, by then, you’ll probably have bigger problems than finding silver ores.
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