Where to Find Lead in Subnautica 2: Locations and Uses

01

Subnautica 2 lead locations at a glance

Here are the main sources of lead the wiki currently documents, with depths and coordinates exactly as the wiki lists them.

02

Easiest early lead: the Lead Zone and the Lander Garage

The Lead Zone sits in the Coral Gardens, the region where your Lifepod splashes down, which makes it the natural first stop. The wiki describes it as a shallow atoll with an interior cave system and a submerged wreck, named after its high concentration of lead ore. Its resource list also includes Copper and Titanium, so the trip pays off for more than one material.

The Lead page points you to the Cicada Wreck (Lander Garage), roughly 370 m northeast of the Lifepod. The Lifepod always spawns in the same place, listed at -337186, 433401, 235, so that bearing works in every save. The Lander Garage page puts the wreck at -308000, 410000 and 60 meters deep, where it crash-landed in the Lead Zone on the southeastern edge of the Plateaus.

To sweep the whole biome, use the four landmarks from the Lead Zone page:

The wreck depth differs slightly between pages (about 65 m here, 60 meters on the Lander Garage page), so treat the numbers as approximate. Keep an eye on the locals, too: the Lander Garage page says a Marrowbreach, an aggressive predator, patrols the area, and the territorial Hammerhead is listed for the Lead Zone. While you are inside the wreck, look for its Processor fragment (-307312, 407771 @ 73m), because the Processor is where lead becomes Germanium Ingots.

03

Lead Nodes vs Lead Deposits: which tool you need

The wiki splits lead into two forms. Lead Nodes break by hand or with any tool, so you can collect them from your first dive. Lead Deposits only break with the Sonic Resonator. If a regular node ever showed a "Requires Sonic Resonator" tooltip, that was a bug, fixed in the Adaptive Measures update on July 8, 2026.

Plan your first haul around nodes, because the Sonic Resonator itself costs lead: 2 Titanium Ingots, 2 Lead, 1 Wiring Kit and 1 Basic Battery at the Fabricator. Its blueprint needs two fragment scans, and among the 11 fragment spots the wiki lists are two at the Old Habitat (-337674, 392986 @ 55m on a shelf, and -336209, 393891 @ 55m inside) and one just east of Camp One (-321514, 410443 @ 33m). The finished tool runs on a battery and can stun most creatures for up to 10 seconds, the duration set in the Buddy System update.

One small extra from those patch notes: the Buddy System update also fixed large Lead Nodes not showing the resource ping icon when you ping them.

04

Subnautica 2: where to find lead beyond the Lead Zone

Once you have picked over the Lead Zone, the wiki documents a few more options. None of them beats the Lead Zone early on, but together they add up.

Overgrown Ruins

The Overgrown Ruins, in the Karakorum Ruins region at the centre of the map, are covered in large mineral deposits of nearly every material, lead included, and the wiki says those deposits need the Sonic Resonator. The biome's caves list lead as well. The wiki calls this a mid-game area, since reaching it means crossing a large trench with a Collector Leviathan in it. Its depth is listed as 210 meters on the biome page but 0 to 600 meters in the Biomes table.

Old Habitat chest and supply crates

The Old Habitat page mentions a small chest containing lead on the first floor of the south complex. The base sits on the edge of the Plateaus about 400 m north of the Lifepod, so you can grab the chest on the same trip as both Sonic Resonator fragments. The Supply Crate page also lists one small crate holding lead at x -337987.84, y 396106.03, z -5547.2812, close to the Old Habitat's listed coordinates, so it may be that same chest; the wiki does not say. Small crates hold a single item that stays the same between saves, although the page's item lists are still flagged for verification.

Coral Crabs

Coral Crabs sometimes dig up raw materials, and the wiki's dig table changes with the biome. In the Lead Zone, lead is the only listed item. In the North and South Raceway it appears at a lower weight of 0.5, next to Copper, Quartz, Salt, Sulfur and Crab Feces. The North Raceway borders the Lead Zone and has its own population of roaming Coral Crabs, while the wiki describes the South Raceway as littered with dead Coral Crabs.

Scanner Station

If you build a base nearby, a Scanner Station can filter for lead within its 300 m scanning radius, and you can turn any result into a HUD signal. Buddy System Hotfix 2 fixed the station not finding resources accurately. You get its blueprint by scanning the stations at Camp One or the Old Habitat.

05

Farming lead with a Metal Farm

For a renewable supply, the Metal Farm is the documented route. You insert one Lead as a sample, which is not consumed, and each cycle grows a deposit worth 3 Lead with a listed duration of 10:00. The farm must be submerged and powered: the wiki says it uses 20 units of electricity when placed and pauses when power runs short, and you break the finished deposit with the Sonic Resonator. You unlock it by scanning farm structures at the Karakorum Metal Farms, outside the starting Coral Gardens, and build it from 1 Axum Ingot and 1 Axum Bacterial Culture at the Habitat Builder, so expect to rely on nodes and deposits first. The full setup is in the Metal Farm guide.

Do lead nodes respawn? The Lead page does not say. Elsewhere the wiki treats respawning as the exception: the Salt page notes that Graveyard Salt nodes respawn unlike most other nodes, and the Mineralized Clinker page says the same about clinkers. So don't count on the Lead Zone refilling, and keep at least one Lead in storage to seed a farm later.

06

What lead is used for

The wiki's crafting list currently shows four recipes that take lead directly:

The Sonic Resonator is the important one, since it opens up deposits of lead, Lithium and other materials. Germanium Ingots can also be made from 2 Silver, and in current recipes they go into Power Storage (1 Germanium Ingot, 3 Titanium and 2 Salt at the Habitat Builder). Sugar of Saturn is a food worth 10 points on its own that also goes into Cherimoya Chutney, Coral Mash and Pavlova. Picking up lead for the first time unlocks its recipe, and your first Sugar of Saturn unlocks Pavlova.

07

Before you head out

• Collect Lead Nodes first and set aside 2 Lead for the Sonic Resonator.
• Combine the Old Habitat chest with the two Resonator fragments there, then use the Resonator on the Lead Deposits.
• Hold back one Lead for a future Metal Farm, since respawning is not documented.
• Playing in German, French, Spanish or Portuguese? Whether you looked up blei finden, trouver du plomb, donde encontrar plomo or onde achar chumbo, these locations are the same in every language version; this guide uses the English in-game names.

For the rest of the materials on Proteus, see the resources guide, the map and biomes guide for where each region sits, and the beginners guide if you are still in your first few hours.