How to digest food in Subnautica 2

After you reach the surface and get to work making your new aquatic habitat a home, your Subnautica 2 adventure hits a snag: You can’t digest any of this planet’s lifeforms. Whatever fish you catch and gobble up, even if cooked, throw up warnings about “digestive incompatibility.” Mercifully, Subnautica 2 leaves the physical consequences of underwater indigestion to our imaginations, but you will have to solve this problem to progress.

How to digest food in Subnautica 2

One of Subnautica 2’s premises is that genetic code can spread between organisms, allowing you to adapt traits from local creatures to work with your human physiology. At the very start of the game, you stick your hand in a big glowing pod to adapt to the local pressure.

You’ll have to do this again to acquire the digestive enzymes you need to consume the plasticy flora and fauna around you.

Explore your surroundings: As you explore and collect resources, you’ll receive notices that your Noetic Adviser—aka NOA—has new observations for you. Access NOA via the Wheatley-like orb in your lifepod.An early NOA message titled “Missing Colonists” will inform you that there are 26 missing colonists for you to track down. A little later, in a message titled “Anita,” NOA will let you know that it has found the blackbox of someone named Anita Gottschal.The location of Anita’s blackbox will appear on your HUD after you access that message. It’s about 160 meters northeast of the lifepod.You’ll find Anita’s blackbox beneath a giant glowing plant-fungus-thing just like the one you stuck your hand into in the sleep bay. Swim up to the central pod and interact with it to acquire the alien enzymes you need to digest food.

That’s it!

If at some point you swam directly past the glowing purple-and-pink pod, assuming it was just part of the scenery or too dangerous to approach, you’re not alone. Those spiky angel wings aren’t exactly inviting, and given this is a survival crafting game, I assumed I’d have to craft a solution to my tummy problems. But it’s really as simple as shaking hands with another magic goo-pod. Here’s what you’re looking for:

(Image credit: Unknown Worlds)

Once you’ve adapted to the local food supply, you can start digesting dinner. The small fish around you, such as the orange and neon-blue Halfmoon, are easy to catch with your hands and can be cooked with your fabricator. You can also use the fabricator to make “oily salad” from fibrous pulp, which you can collect by cutting plants like the Whip Gorgon (red shoots) with your Survival Multitool.

If you haven’t crafted the Multitool yet, you just need 3 titanium, which can be collected on the sea floor near your lifepod.

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