How to get Atacamite in Subnautica 2

Subnautica 2 Atacamite — (Image credit: Unknown Worlds)

Finding Atacamite in Subnautica 2 might not seem that important at first, but it's a key ingredient in one very important item, the Mangalloy Ingot. You'll need this refined material to craft invaluable Metal Farms once you unlock the blueprint, and you also require ten Mangalloy Ingots to repair the Alien Power Plant, so it's worth grabbing when you can.

Unlike Celestine or Creature Enamel (for Enameled Glass), Atacamite is a lower depth material, but you won't find yourself needing it urgently for upgrades anyway.

Subnautica 2 Atacamite location

You can generally find Atacamite at lower depths, under 250 meters, around the Alien Ruins, so you'll need the Tadpole Depth Module you find in the Needler nest before you can properly acquire it. This is fine, though, since you won't really need Atacamite until you've started exploring the deeper areas of the map and are scanning stuff down there anyway.

There's a really good concentration of Atacamite, shown in the video above, about 200ish meters east-north-east, bearing about 75 degrees on the compass from the Alien Ruins Research Base. In case you can't see the video:

From the Research Base, drop off the cliff heading about 75 degrees and descend until you spot a bunch of alien dwellings
On the sand just to the left of them, you'll see a load of green Atacamite crystals by a bunch of quartz nodes

Atacamite is easy to recognise, basically a bunch of dark green columns sticking out of a rock. Smash it with your Sonic Resonator to grab the material.

Subnautica 2 Atacamite on sand — Atacamite is pretty distinctive as a material node (Image credit: Unknown Worlds)

As mentioned, you'll need at least ten of these later to repair the Alien Power Plant, so I recommend grabbing a load while you can.

Sean's first PC games were Full Throttle and Total Annihilation and his taste has stayed much the same since. When not scouring games for secrets or bashing his head against puzzles, you'll find him revisiting old Total War campaigns, agonizing over his Destiny 2 fit, or still trying to finish the Horus Heresy. Sean has also written for EDGE, Eurogamer, PCGamesN, Wireframe, EGMNOW, and Inverse.