Random Thoughts – Randocity!

You’ve recently updated No Man’s Sky and you’re wondering how to get the new Living Starship? Let’s explore.

[Update for 2023]

If you’re interested in getting a new Sentinel Ship, please check out Randocity’s newest NMS article, How to get a Sentinel Ship. Let’s continue onward. You may be wondering if you can expand a Living Starship. Yes, you can. You’ll want to read Randocity’s Benefits of Organic Frigates article for complete details on how to obtain the items needed to expand your Living Ship’s slots and technology using Organic Frigates.

[Update for 2022]

Since this article was written, new things have been introduced into No Man’s Sky by Hello Games that increases the efficiency of this quest. One change has majorly improved the speed at acquiring all of the pieces. A new Target Sweep scanner has been introduced into the game. It is also integrated as part of the basic scanner functionality. No need to add anything new.

Formerly, you used the old Analysis Scanner to locate coordinates. It was clumsy and very slow. In 2021, Hello Games required finding specific X-Y coordinates using this hackneyed clumsy scanner. However, the newly added Target Sweep scanner simplifies pinpointing locations. No longer do you need to skim in and out of the atmosphere looking for specific X-Y coordinates. Hello Games now offers up a “general vicinity” HUD marker. You can then target and fly right to that marker easily. This marker is only “near” the intended location. It might be over 1,000u away. Once you land, pull out the Target Sweep scanner to determine the general direction to head and how far away it is.

Note that while it might be possible to locate the intended destination in your starship, it’s easier to do this locating on foot. I also don’t recommend using an exocraft for this part because you’ll be jumping out and in often simply so you can whip out the new scanner.

This change makes finding each of the monoliths (which gives you your individual living starship components), much much faster. Though, you’ll still need to wait between 19-22 real clock-on-the-wall hours for each of the items to “mature” or “harden”. You still can’t progress further on the Starbirth quest until each of the items has matured/hardened. However, because the new Target Sweep scanner is available, it’s so much faster than mucking about with coordinates.

Additionally, the 5 starship limit has now been increased to nine (9), now twelve (12) total ships (increased again to 12 as part of Expedition #9 – Utopia for the Speeder reward). This means there’s less pressure on players to delete or trade ships quickly.

Expeditions

In an effort to bring players back, a new Expedition system has been added. We’re on number 6 as of this article’s publish date. You can think of this new mode as a kind of campaign. The Expedition is to No Man’s Sky as the SCOREBOARD is to Fallout 76. It’s kind of a “seasons” addition that runs for several weeks. The good side is that it offers up unique rewards to the player for completing each milestone. The bad side is that you must start a brand new game from scratch to play this new mode. This means obtaining new ships and bases all over again. Unfortunately, base building is disabled in the Expedition until Phase 5, meaning no base building until the Expedition is over.

However, one of the milestones in this 2022 Expedition (Blighted) gives you a Void Egg as a reward. This makes obtaining the Living Ship much, much quicker (and cheaper). Though, there’s no guarantee to get a Void Egg with each Expedition, it’s always worth checking to see if it’s one of the rewards before getting it the old-fashioned way, through the Quicksilver store.

[END UPDATE]

Now, back to our regularly scheduled article…

Instructions

It all starts with a Void Egg. There may be several ways to obtain the Void Egg, but let’s discuss the most straightforward way to get one. Before you start, make sure you have the prerequisites.

Prerequisites

1. 3,200 Quicksilver
2. Literal days of time to kill
3. One free Starship slot
4. A Starship that shows you planet coordinates on the HUD screen. The multi-tool’s new Target Sweep scanner replaces this older, slower, clumsier requirement.

If your starship obscures the coordinates off screen, much of this questline will be even more of a pain in the ass. Choose a ship that has the coordinates front and center and fully visible.

Further, if you don’t have a free available Starship slot, you may not be able to accept the Living Starship once it’s available for pick up. If your slots are full, you will need to free up a slot by salvaging one of your Starships. I’d highly recommend doing this step WAY BEFORE the game allows you to pick up the ship.

Obtaining a Void Egg — Overview

1. Head into space and call the Space Anomaly station
2. Enter the Space Anomaly station and land
3. Open your inventory and see how much Quicksilver you have
4. If you have 3,200 or more Quicksilver, you’re all set and you can skip Step 6
5. If you don’t have enough Quicksilver, you’ll need to head to the Nexus and complete Quicksilver missions until you reach 3,200 Quicksilver. Note, weekend events can award anywhere between 1,000 and 1,200 Quicksilver. These start on Fridays. Complete these missions to get you to 3,200 Quicksilver faster. Otherwise, you’re limited to ~250 per day. Though, the game will gang up QS missions if you play the game daily, but don’t perform the QS missions daily… thus allowing you to do several QS mission in a day.
6. With 3,200 Quicksilver in hand, head over to the Quicksilver store and shop. Inside this shop, you’ll find the Void Egg for sale. Buy it.

Once you own a Void Egg, you’ll perform a new set of actions to unlock its secrets.

Unlocking the Void Egg

To begin unlocking the Void Egg, follow these steps. There may be many ways to get this to work, but these are the easiest steps. Though, I’m not going to say that the steps are in any way “easy” or “fast”. In fact, it literally takes days to complete most of the steps.

Before you begin this process, you might want to jump down to the bottom of this article under “Living Starship” to get a better understanding of what you’ll be getting out of this deal. That way, you can determine if you think this process is worth the time for you.

Step 1 — Getting the Egg to Sing

1. To begin the process and with the egg in your inventory, hop in your ship and head to space.
2. Once in space, use the Pulse Drive between any two points in a solar system. Eventually, you’ll get a notification to drop out of pulse for an Anomaly. Once you do, any of a number of things may happen. You may see a living ship just in front of you. If you get this one, then your Void Egg will begin singing. If you get anything else, admire it if you wish, but that isn’t what you want. You’ll want to keep using pulse drive between points until you get a Living Ship anomaly. This one happened really quick for me once I had a Void Egg.
3. Once you see the Living Ship anomaly, it will either give you a set of coordinates to a new solar system or it will have the egg send you to visit one of the planets in your current system.
4. If it has to jump to a new system, once there is where the “hurry up and wait” starts.

Step 2 — Visit 4 worlds and find 4 Monuments

These steps are tedious because this portion of the Starbirth quest vaguely leads you to various worlds. Once on the world, it will give you a set of two coordinates to a monument on the planet. This is the pain in the ass portion of unlocking an egg. In the past, they would mark a point on your map and you could simply fast travel there. With this questline, Hello Games has you pilot your ship manually to a set of coordinates. It’s a pain in the ass because it’s entirely slow, manual and requires a lot of mucking about with flying the ship in and out of the atmosphere to speed up and slow down.

1. Once the egg is singing, open your inventory and hover the cursor over the egg. The egg will reveal a “type” of planet to visit. Read the “type” carefully and then find world that matches where you presently are… or jump to the system where it wants you to search and look there.
2. Once you land on the world it is wanting, the quest will switch to a set of coordinates on the current world that will look something like +45.??? -170.??? Sometimes the coordinates are static and sometimes they hop around. They will stabilize as you get closer to the monument. The newly introduced Target Sweep scanner makes this process much faster and no longer requires using the silly (and insanely slow) X-Y coordinates.
3. To locate the monument, hop out of the ship and locate it on foot. You will need to use the Target Sweep device to lead you in the correct direction.

Step 3 — Final World

Once you have received and matured / hardened all 4 components needed for the living ship, you are led to the final world. To reach this world, the Void Egg will sing one last time. Continue reading down to “Final Wait” to see what you need to do.

Step 4 — Assemble and Pick up your ship

Inhospitable Worlds

Many of the planets that the egg leads you to are inhospitable worlds with frequent storms. This can make locating a monument even more difficult. This is why it’s recommended to do the last locating portion on foot or in an Exocraft.

Once you reach the monument, it will have you supply it with one of the newly crafted items listed immediately after this section. In fact, it will ask you to supply it with something that you won’t, at the time, know how to make. You will need to “Leave” the monument menu and then it will teach you the recipe. After that, you may need Hexite (or other unique resources) to make the recipe. If you need something like Hexite, it will lead you to a location to pick up the Hexite. This part is easy, but you’ll still need to go get it, craft the item and head back to the monument.

Once you have found a monument, it does put a marker onto the HUD so you can get back there easily. Otherwise, you’d be forced to drop a Save Beacon to easily find your way back. Thankfully, you don’t need to place a Save Beacon as a game marker is set up. It’s always worth keeping enough resources handy to create a Save Beacon so you can easily mark and then head back to a unique planet feature without having to build an entire base.

Once you’ve crafted the required item from the recipe the monument has given you, head back to the monument and supply it with the item you’ve just crafted. The monument will give you a new component. This is where the “hurry up and wait” part begins. The item it gives you will be something like an Immature Neural Stem or a Fragile Heart. These items require maturation of between 22 and 27 clock-on-the-wall real world hours. Yes, that means you can’t make any progress on this quest for at least 22 hours.

You can’t do anything else with this quest until these items have “matured”. You might as well put the game down and go do something else while that timer ticks down. You can do other things in the game, but you cannot progress the Starbirth quest until that timer has expired. Note that the timer ticks down regardless of whether you are playing the game.

Four Items to Craft

You will need to craft 4 different items for the Living Ship, each with unique components required to craft the recipes:

1. Consciousness Bridge
   • 250 Hexite
   • 80 Pugneum
   • 1 Korvax Casing
2. Pulsating Core
   • 250 Liquid Sun
   • 100 Gold
   • 80 Mordite
3. Impossible Membrane
   • 100 Chromatic Metal
   • 1 Hypnotic Eye
   • 150 Living Water
4. Seeds of Glass
   1. 100 Magnetized Ferrite
   2. 100 Fragmented Qualia

To locate the items which are “unique” like Liquid Sun, Living Water, Hexite or Fragmented Qualia, the game will lead you to a deposit. For standard items like Gold or Ferrite, you’ll be expected to locate or have these yourself.

Once the items are crafted, you will give each to a monument and that monument will give you an immature ship component in return. You will then wait, again, for the item to mature before you can make any further progress on this quest line.

Rinse and Repeat

After you have received your first ship component, likely the Immature Neural Stem, it will take a fair amount of time (22 hours or more) to mature into a Mature Neural Stem. Once you’ve waited for it to mature, the item is closed with nothing else to do with that item until you assemble the ship. From here, it’s simply rinse and repeat.

1. Hop in your ship and fly into space
2. Pulse drive between any two locations and wait for a Living Ship anomaly to appear
3. Once it appears, the egg will again sing and tell you which type of world it wants (hover over the egg in the inventory).
4. Search the local worlds, then head to the HUD marker, locate the monument, get the recipe, source its unusual requirements, craft it, give it to the monument and get a new item that needs to mature.

All told, you’ll need to repeat this 4 times to assemble the ship with its Neural Stem, Shell, Singularity Core, Membrane and so on. It takes 4 times, and each one is at least 1 day apart. All told, it takes at least 5 real days to finally get to the point where you can assemble and pick up the ship. Most of that time is spent waiting for something to “mature” or “harden” or whatever. This ship is easiest to obtain with Creative Mode and more difficult when using Normal mode or harder.

Hello Games would have done this quest much better to allow us to continue to find the rest of the components without waiting on the previous components to “mature”. Let us pick all of the items up and wait the time it takes for the longest component to “mature”. This would have meant waiting up to 2 days rather than 5.

Note, some players have stated you need to hyperdrive travel to trigger singing. I haven’t found that to be the case. Simply pulse drive between two points and wait for an anomaly “Living Ship” to appear after dropping out of pulse drive. Finding a living ship anomaly is all you need to trigger the egg to sing.

Final Wait

With the final “Cracking Void Egg” step, the egg will again sing once more. However, this time instead of giving you a vague description of a world to locate in your local system, it will give you a set of portal coordinates in the form of words. In my case above, the “lyrics” are:

• The Hunter
• The Reflection
• The Hunter
• The Spiral of Reality
• The Star Over Water
• The Ascending Orb
• The Obscured Companion
• The Hunter
• The Lowly Insect
• The Anomaly
• The Sailor
• The Ocean King

If you’re looking for how to translate these words into symbols, you can either guess based on the symbols or the easier method is to visit this page. The three “Euclid” means that it’s in the Euclid Galaxy somewhere. The Starbirth quest also states that you’ll need to use unconventional travel, indicating travel by Portal. The above also implies that you need to know where a portal is so that you can use it to travel to the final world to, again, locate a monument and complete the final steps.

Once you reach the final world by portal, you will be required to locate four sets of different coordinates on this portal planet. The final three coordinates may take you some time to reach as you have to locate the coordinates manually by flying to them. The first set of coordinates (the only to have a planet marker) will lead you to an abandoned building. Here you will obtain a Soul Chamber, which you are given by accessing a terminal at the abandoned building. Once you receive the Soul Chamber, you will then need to locate three gravestones each at separate specific coordinates given to you in a small panel on the screen. You will then interact with each gravestone, which will fill the chamber by 33.3%. Once you have filled the Soul Chamber with 3 souls (channeling The Elder Scrolls here much?), you will then be asked to head back through the portal to your origin world.

Once you are back at your origin world, you will then fly into space and use the pulse drive to make contact one final time with the living ship anomaly. It will sing one last time then the egg will crack open, disappear from your inventory and give you a set of coordinates to your new starship shell on a planet. Head to that planet marker to claim your new ship.

It is here where you’ll need to make sure you have a free Starship slot available. Once you reach the Living Starship coordinates, you will drop in all of the “matured” or “hardened” components you have received over the previous 4-5 days or so, including the Soul Chamber. This will then outfit your Living Starship to be fully functional. Once it’s functional, you can then claim it (assuming you have a free slot), enter and fly away in it. Just be aware that it has limited functionality due to its small Hyperdrive capacity and low gun damage levels. Don’t expect a hugely overpowered ship here. Don’t expect that you can upgrade it quickly, either. I’ll talk about those limitations next.

Note, since the introduction of even more galaxies into the game, ensure that when you portal to the final destination that the Cracking Void Egg requires that you enter the glyphs into a Euclid portal. The glyphs only lead to the correct world when using a Euclid portal. If you are in the Umirpaiya galaxy, for example, entering the Euclid glyphs into a Umirpaiya portal will lead you to the wrong world. In other words, make sure you have a Euclid portal world handy and known if you go into an Expedition that begins in one of the many other galaxies in the game and you want to obtain a Living Starship.

Living Starship

Note that Hello Games has added what is effectively a “Cargo” area, called “Inflated Sacs” to the Living Starship since this article was written. This means that it can now hold cargo, like all other ships. Additionally, the modification station in Space Stations will also now modify the living ship.

Is the ship worth it? I’ll leave that up to you to decide. The “Living Starship” is a new class of Starship. However, there are definitely drawbacks. Specifically, notice that the ship’s areas are called “Storage Sacs” and “Organ Chamber” unlike standard ships where you have “General” and “Technology” areas. Here are the drawbacks around this new class of starship:

• Cannot use existing “Technology” from “regular” ships for this new living ship.
• Cannot expand the ship using the Starship upgrade tool at a space station
• Cannot use storage augmentation to increase slots
• Cannot extend base Hyperdrive range because “regular” technology doesn’t work
• Cannot pay to increase slots like a standard starship
• Cannot scrap the ship, but you may or may not be able to trade it for another

Basically, the ship you get is all that you get quickly. However, you can get new components by using the pulse drive between two points. If an egg appears, crack it open to reveal a new starship component to install. It will be a random component with a random class. You can then install it. After installation of the component, it takes Nanites to upgrade the level of the component. You can find components for the hyperdrive, weapons systems and shields. However, getting these is a very slow process. You can’t get these items in any other way than by using pulse drive between two points and it can sometimes literally take an hour or more to find one component.

It’s possible that Hello Games may introduce a new living starship upgrade system and merchant some time in the future. Hello Games may eventually open up more details about the Living Ship such as the world where the eggs come from, where the ships are likely to be found and so on. This means that we may be able to enter star systems where the living ships are easily found and can be augmented. There might even be star systems that may only be entered by the living ships.

For now, though, you can’t add on a Positron gun or any other “standard” Starship weapons to a Living Ship… even though this new “Living” technology type is basically the same as the old technology, just with a new name and new description. The weapon type it has is all it has. Same for the Hyperdrive with its base drive range at 164.9 (at least on mine), but can be extended by finding components. Considering I’ve gotten some ships to around 1,800+ Hyperdrive range, the base Living Ship’s range is next to nothing.

Even though it is a living ship, it doesn’t really need to be “fed”… you know, like an actual living creature. I guess Hello Games thought that might be taking things a bit too far. Though, considering it is a type of living creature, it should need to be fed.

Why this ship now?

I’m not entirely sure the reason for the introduction of this new class of starship. It’s interesting, yes, but what’s the point? As bare bones as this new ship is, there’s very little it’s actually useful for, other than being a novelty item in the game. Until Hello Games decides to introduce vendors that sell Living Ship technology upgrades, it’s not very useful.

Regular ships are still way, way better options than this Living Ship for functionality, combat, upgradeability, support and travel distance.

Is it worth having? Perhaps it is… as a novel collectible simply so you can say you’ve gotten it. But, it’s not a very useful starship at this point. Until or unless Hello Games decides to add more quests and features into the game that only activate or become useful when you’re using a living starship, the ship doesn’t really have a point to exist.

The point to adding any new feature to a game is that you have also have planned a whole wider set of other features around that item and which are “unlocked” by obtaining access to the ship. Until Hello Games introduces those additional pieces to support the usefulness of a this living starship class, as I’ve already stated several times, it’s simply not very useful addition.

I was actually hoping that this new ship class would offer a completely new and different faster than light (FTL) drive technology, such a technology that could go twice or three times the distance of travel using new ways that standard ships can’t. Or, perhaps, a better class of weapon. But, no. No such luck. Effectively, the Living Starship is basically the same as any other “standard” bare bones basic ship that you can find. Except that now you have to jump through about 5 days of hoops to get it. In fact, standard ships can be outfitted much, much better than the Living Ship can. This ship needs a whole lot more game support and effort by Hello Games than it presently has. Here’s what the interior looks like:

The interior looks much the same as a regular ship, wouldn’t you say? If Hello Games is going to make us spend all of this time and effort to build this ship, they should have at least had the decency to give us something improved over regular Starships. Yet, Hello Games doesn’t offer us something better here. I’m not calling this exactly a fail, but it leans heavily in this direction.

Should I Get A Living Ship?

That’s up to you. I’d suggest reading above if you’re unsure if it’s worth your time. Perhaps in time Hello Games will make it more useful, but for now it’s mostly a novelty ship. Hello Games is going to be required to do a whole lot more quest building work to create a game that better supports the Living Ship and that gives us reasons to want to use this ship over regular ships.

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