If you’ve had your eye on the Subnautica 2 discourse for the past few days, you already know it revolves around a single topic: to kill or not to kill?

Long story short, players want a way to fight back against hostile sea creatures like Nibbler Mangos and Hammerheads, pointing out that the original Subnautica had a survival knife you could use to stab mean fish and even leviathans to death.

Subnautica 2 devs, meanwhile, have responded by essentially saying: “How about no?” Okay, what they actually said was go play some other game if you want to kill stuff, because Subnautica 2 is “not a killing game.” Fair enough: it’s their game and if they don’t want to add weapons, they obviously don’t have to.

But now there’s now an option if you like Subnautica 2 but still want to kill stuff: use a mod. The Killable Creatures mod by jibotron doesn’t give you any weapons, but it weaponizes some of the tools you already have and lets you fight back against all those oceanic pests.

“Getting into Subnautica 2 for the first time and then realizing they took away the ability to kill made me angry,” modder jibotron said. “Why take away a feature so simple especially when its a sandbox survival game? And after seeing the devs tell people it wont be coming back and it doesn’t suit their vision for the game I thought why not make it myself having experience modding other games.”

With the mod installed, swinging the survival multitool (it’s a hammer) deals 20 damage to creatures and the sonic resonator deals 50. Do enough damage and you can kill just about any creature you see, after which they’ll float upside down like an aquarium casualty.

I’ve been swimming around this morning trying it out, and it does work, though quite honestly I’m siding with the devs on this one because I don’t think the game really needs traditional weapons. You could already discourage Nibbler Mangos with a sonic resonator blast, and they do so little actual damage it hardly seems worth bothering with.

In fact, just chasing the Nibblers around to kill them was far more of a chore than worrying about a stray nibble every now and again. It takes several resonator blasts to kill them, and once they’ve been stung they swim away so quickly that it’s pretty time consuming to chase them down to deliver a few more blasts.

That said, I have to admit it’s pretty satisfying to waste one of those blue bastards. I don’t mind the tiny bit of damage they do, but they’ve startled me often enough that they deserve to pay the ultimate price.

I also took out a Hammerhead—they’re irritating since they’ll headbutt your parked tadpole endlessly—and I even resonated a Coral Crab to death, which just made me feel sad since they’re cool to look at and don’t seem particularly hostile. I haven’t tried taking out leviathan yet, because I imagine that’d take quite a long time. I’m sure someone will do it, though.

You can kill smaller fish, too, like the ones you usually grab to use as food, though the downside is that their floating corpses aren’t harvestable for resources. You can’t harvest the bigger fish, either, which is a shame. Revenge on nibblers would be much more satisfying if I could cook ’em up and nibble on ’em too.

You’ll find the Killable Creatures mod on Nexus Mods. Like most Subnautica 2 mods, you’ll need to install the UE4SS mod first.