Black Hoverthorn

The Black Hoverthorn is the dark variant of the Hoverthorn in Subnautica 2: passive, edible, and identical in shape, but living a different life. Where regular Hoverthorns school in groups, the Black Hoverthorn is usually found alone, with the same skittish streak. It is also one of the better single-ingredient meals in the game, worth 30 food once cooked.

Overview

Appearance

The Black Hoverthorn differs from the regular form only in coloration. The two-toned blue and orange is replaced by a very dark blue body crossed by a single thin light-blue line running from the eyes to the tail crystal, with a lighter fin. The dark coloring reads as an adaptation to deeper, dimmer water, though the game does not spell out why the variant exists.

Where To Find It

Root Canyon sits in the Karakorum region, well past the starting water, and it is not somewhere a diver reaches early. The usual approach is from the Karakorum Power Plant: head east and descend until the ocean turns bright green and visibility collapses, somewhere past 400 m. The canyon holds a mine and the abandoned bases of earlier colonists, and the Axum Metal Farms scattered through it are where the Black Hoverthorns hang around.

Because they swim alone rather than in schools, a single sighting is usually all you get in one pass. They flee on approach like the regular form does, so a swim speed biomod or fins make the difference between a scan and a wasted trip.

Scanning and the Databank

The Black Hoverthorn currently shares its databank entry with the regular Hoverthorn: scanning one credits the standard Hoverthorn entry rather than creating a separate record, and the creature is treated as a variant rather than its own species. The Hoverthorn entry is also the scan that unlocks the Threat Sense biomod, which warns of nearby hostiles with a beep and a growing indicator at the top of the screen. Note that the creature naming and discovery system was revised in the 1.1 update to line up with the previous game, so how variants are credited may not match older documentation; see Updates and Patch Notes. Scans also count toward the Bioscanner totals that unlock extra passive Biomods slots.

Food and Crafting

Safe digestion requires the matching entry in the Adaptations system, and a Fabricator turns 1x Black Hoverthorn into Cooked Black Hoverthorn.

At 30 food a portion it sits at the top of the plain cooked fish, level with cooked Geordie and cooked Electric Geordie and behind cooked Pneuma at 40. Unlike the moon fish it does not feed any multi-ingredient recipe, so the whole value of a catch is the single cooked portion. Raw, it costs 5 water, which cooking removes.

Related Pages

• Creatures

• Hoverthorn

• Bioscanner