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You've made it to the eastern depths, you've spotted some weird glowing green orbs floating in an industrial runoff pool, and your gut is telling you these are important. Your gut is right. These are Axum Bacterial Cultures, and they are arguably the most valuable resource in the current Early Access build.
Here's the thing, though: there are only five of them in the entire game right now, they can glitch through the floor if you pick them up wrong, and players are losing theirs to a Collector Leviathan on the way home.
Read this before you touch a single one.
What Is Axum Bacterial Culture in Subnautica 2?
Axum Bacterial Culture is the key ingredient for crafting a Metal Farm, which is the closest thing Subnautica 2 currently has to passive, automated resource generation. Once your Metal Farm is built, powered, and loaded with a sample ore, it grows resource nodes you can harvest repeatedly without ever needing to dive for that material again.
How Many Axum Bacterial Cultures are there in Subnautica 2?
Five. Only five Axum Bacterial Cultures are known to spawn in the current version of Subnautica 2 Early Access. That means a maximum of five Metal Farms total, assuming you collect every single one and don't lose any. In practice, most players are getting three or four due to the glitch discussed below.
Where to Find Axum Bacterial Culture in Subnautica 2
All five spawn in the same area, though in different pools: the glowing green/yellow industrial runoff pools in the Karakorum Metal Farm area, roughly 2,000 metres east of the Lifepod and around 400 metres deep. You cannot reach this area on foot. You need the Tadpole vehicle with the Depth Module installed, which you unlock by finding Ruby's second blackbox signal. Without it, your Tadpole physically cannot dive deep enough to get there.
When you arrive, you're looking for a large glowing green basin. The Axum Bacterial Cultures appear as small, clustered spherical objects inside cage-like structures within the pool. They glow, so they stand out against the environment. While you're here, you'll also find Troilite (green ore nodes around the pool) and can scan the Metal Farm structures to unlock the build recipe.
Pro Tip: a Collector Leviathan patrols this area overhead and in the waters before you arrive at this area. Approach from below, hovering at around 400 to 450 metres depth, and it won't detect you. Do not surface into its patrol path with your Axum on you.
How to Harvest Axum Bacterial Culture Without Losing Them
This is the part that matters. There is a known bug in the current build where manually harvesting Axum Bacterial Culture can cause the item to clip through the floor geometry, making it permanently unrecoverable. Players on Steam have reported losing two out of five this way.
Rule 1: Use the Sonic Resonator, not your hands. Charge up a full blast and fire it directly at the culture. This is the safest harvesting method and avoids the clipping issue entirely. If you don't have a Sonic Resonator yet, go and get one before coming here. This trip is too far to make twice.
Rule 2: Manual save before every single harvest. Before you interact with each culture, open your menu and save the game. If one glitches through the floor, you can reload and try again. Do this for all five. Yes, it's tedious. Yes, it's worth it.
What to Do If You've Already Lost Some
Bad news: if they've clipped and you didn't save, they're gone in the current build. There is no known way to recover them.
If you've lost all five before building a single farm, your passive farming setup is effectively locked out until Unknown Worlds either patches in a respawn or adds an alternative crafting route. Based on the in-game description hinting at future fabricator support, this is almost certainly coming in a future EA update, but there's no confirmed timeline yet.
Thankfully, Axum Bacterial Culture are only used for the Metal Farm as of the game's Early Access 1.0 release.
What to Build Once You Have Them
Each Metal Farm costs 1x Mangalloy Ingot and 1x Axum Bacterial Culture to build. The Mangalloy Ingot is the more involved part of that recipe:
- Mangalloy Ingot requires: 1x Titanium Ingot, 1x Atacamite, 1x Troilite.
- Titanium Ingot requires: 3x Titanium.
- Atacamite comes from obsidian black deposits near the Alien Base.
- Troilite comes from the same glowing pool area where you found the Axum.
Grab your Troilite and Atacamite on the same run you collect the Axum cultures. You don't want to make this trip three times.
Once built, the Metal Farm goes in the Cultivation tab of your Habitat Builder. Place it on any solid submerged surface, connect it to power, and insert the ore you want it to produce. A countdown timer starts, and when it finishes, a large resource node grows out of the top of the machine. Blast it with your Sonic Resonator to collect it, and the cycle restarts.
Critical point on power: each Metal Farm draws 20 units of power while running. A single Hydroelectric Turbine won't cover multiple farms. Before you start scaling up, make sure your power grid can actually handle the load, or your farms will just sit there doing nothing.
