Subnautica 2: The Complete Food and Water Guide — Recipes, Salt, and the Growbed (2026)

Three months after its early access launch, Subnautica 2 remains merciless toward absent-minded divers: in Survival mode, the water gauge loses a point every 15 seconds and the food gauge a point every 21 seconds. Between two expeditions to the Root Canyon or Karakorum, it's food logistics that decides whether you make it back to base or respawn empty-handed.

The good news is that Unknown Worlds' game has considerably enriched cooking compared to the first installment: prepared dishes, salt curing, the Growbed garden, not to mention four biomods dedicated to survival. The bad news is that at the start of the game, your stomach simply refuses local food.

This guide covers the whole pantry: lifting the digestive incompatibility, securing water, farming salt, unlocking all Fabricator recipes, and setting up a farm that runs on its own. Item names are given in English where no official French label has been published, in line with the game client.

Unlocking the digestion adaptation: step zero

Upon arriving on the planet, your character suffers from Digestive Incompatibility: unable to digest local fauna and flora. Your only reliable food sources at that point are Nutrient Blocks recovered from supply crates scattered across the early biomes. Don't waste them: each is worth +40 food.

The definitive solution is called the Angel Comb, a large pink organism impossible to miss, located about 150 meters north of the survival pod. Approach its central bulb and interact with it: you get the digestion adaptation, which finally lets you eat what you catch. It's one of the very first trips to make, even before thinking about building anything.

Water: from Water Slugs to Isotonic Water

Drinking seawater is out of the question — the game's database bluntly reminds you of this, the local ocean being even saltier than Earth's. From the start of the game, the Water recipe is available at the Fabricator: a Water Slug picked up from the seabed converts into drinkable water that restores +40 hydration. These aquatic slugs are abundant around the starting area, so make it a habit to pocket two or three on every outing.

Two alternatives round out the setup. At the Processor, three fibrous pulps produce water in thirty seconds — useful if your crops are overflowing, but not very efficient. And later in the game, Isotonic Water combines a Flash Slug and a salt for +55 hydration, the best drink in the game. Once your base is powered, the Water Filtration Machine takes over to automate production.

Salt, the pivotal ingredient of all cooking

Almost all advanced recipes require salt. It's found as nodules that can be broken by hand or with a tool, and as larger deposits that require the sonic resonator. Three areas are rich in it: the Graveyard (the dead coral graveyard), the Sparse Plains, and the Root Canyon. A valuable quirk: the Graveyard's salt nodules respawn over time, making it the only renewable farming spot on the map — mark its location with a beacon.

Salt is also used to craft Sugar of Saturn, the game's sweetener: one lead and one salt yield two units at the Fabricator. The nod is deliberate — "sugar of Saturn" historically referred to lead acetate, used as a sweetener before its toxicity was understood. Here, it goes into the game's best recipes, including the Pavlova.

All Fabricator recipes

Cooking is done through the Food tab of the Fabricator. Cooking a fish increases its nutritional value and removes the hydration penalty of the raw version (most raw fish give +15 to +20 food but cost 5 water). Salt-curing, on the other hand, stabilizes the fish's nutritional value: jerky doesn't lose anything over time, making it the ideal expedition ration.

Three lessons to take away from this. First, the Threemoon Temaki offers the best weight-to-nutrition ratio for exploration: a single batch yields three temaki at +60 each. Second, the Pavlova is the ultimate dish — food, water, and health all at once — but it depends on a Deepwing Egg Clump, an egg clutch you pick up in the wild that can actually be eaten raw with great results (+40 food and +40 water with no preparation at all). Finally, the Coral Mash at +65 remains the most nourishing "basic" dish once you're stocking up on Coral Shavings.

The Growbed: your underwater vegetable patch

The Growbed is the key to food self-sufficiency. Its blueprint is unlocked by scanning two fragments at the Research Outpost, the research wreck located around 135-140 meters deep: one on the roof of the habitat, the other on the ground behind the building. Building it then only costs one titanium with the Habitat Builder, and the bed can be placed both inside and outside the base.

Nine plants can be grown. The most useful ones for cooking and base needs:

• Cherimoya Rotsac: the priority crop. It fuels Cherimoya Chutney and, above all, Pavlova on a continuous basis.
• Pent: three minutes of growth for three units harvested — the best fuel for the Bioreactor, by far.
• Necrolei Cysts: to produce strong acid without a dedicated expedition.
• Macaron Sponge, Acid Raion, Cradle Shootroot, Freesia Flower: ingredients, backup resources, and basic greenery.
• Mimic Pylon: thirty minutes of growth, no harvest — purely decorative, best reserved for finished bases.

A pair of Growbeds — one dedicated to Cherimoya Rotsac, one to Pent — is enough to cover both high-end cooking and the power supply of a mid-game base.

The four biomods that ease survival

Since the July 8 1.1 "Adaptive Measures" update, additional passive slots are obtained by scanning creatures with the Bioscanner, which makes these four biomods even more worth equipping:

• Slow Metabolism: the food gauge drops more slowly — bioscan the Nibbler Mango.
• Water Retention: same principle for the water gauge — bioscan the Coral Crab.
• Water Secretion: generates a water pocket (+5) every 150 seconds — bioscan the Water Slug.
• Dermal Garden: grows an algae block (+5 food, stackable up to +30) every 210 seconds — bioscan the Needler Mango.

Equipped together, Slow Metabolism and Water Retention literally transform the game's pace: the gauges stop being a constant, moment-to-moment constraint and become a simple checkpoint between dives.

The routine that eliminates the problem

In practice, here's the roadmap that makes hunger and thirst a non-issue. Hour 1: head to the Angel Comb for the digestion adaptation, then systematically gather Water Slugs and cook the first Halfmoons. First few days: build up a salt reserve at the Graveyard, switch to jerky and souvlaki before every long expedition. Mid-game: scan the Research Outpost fragments, plant Cherimoya Rotsac and Pent, then aim for the four survival biomods. From there, a Pavlova before heading out and an Isotonic Water in your bag will cover any dive into the depths — and you'll never think about your gauges again except when heading back to base.