Random Thoughts – Randocity!

As a follow-on to Randocity’s How to Get the Living Ship in No Man’s Sky article, you may be wondering what the difference is between an organic frigate and a technology frigate in No Man’s Sky. Yes, it ties into the Living Starship. Let’s explore.

How To Get an Organic Frigate

If you haven’t played through the Leviathan community expedition and received The Leviathan frigate, you may be wondering how to get more organic frigates if you’re starting a fresh game. Yes, you can get more organic frigates (and better ones too). To obtain an organic frigate, you’ll need to obtain certain key items:

• Dream Aerial
• Anomaly Detectors

To be complete, we’ll need to step back further. You’re also going to need to grind No Man’s Sky until your character has picked up enough items and unlocks to allow for use of the above items. These additional items and unlocks include:

• Have a ship outfitted with a Hyperdrive (and fuel) and Pulse Drive
• Enough Tritium to refill the Pulse Drive
• Enough Fuel to fill the Hyperdrive (you’ll hyperdrive jump to find each organic frigate)
• Obtain a Freighter
• At least 100-500 million units on hand. The more you have, the better. You need this to buy the organic frigates.

Getting a Freighter

Obtaining a freighter is relatively easy. You’ll simply need to jump into enough systems to find one in distress. After the ensuing space battle is completed by you, the captain will allow you to purchase that freighter. Note, the first freighter you come upon will be free, at least as of this writing.

Meaning, it’s worth waiting until you find at least an A-class or S-class freighter before accepting it. An S-class freighter is well worth waiting for because your frigate expeditions gain a HUGE bonus every time you send your frigates on expeditions. Picking up a free S-class freighter is the best option here. However, any freighter will work with organic frigates.

S-Class Freighters

I’ll be honest here. S-class freighters are relatively rare to find, but if you’re diligent enough by jumping into many different systems, you’ll eventually happen upon one. If you’ve already picked up your free freighter earlier, you’ll be required to buy an S-class freighter… and they’re typically exceedingly costly. Some S-class freighters can cost around 330 million units. Some even more than that. On one of my sessions, I found an S-class freighter that cost 13 million units, but it had very few slots and technology open. That meant I had to grind for many, many Salvaged Frigate Modules and Cargo Bulkheads to unlock everything on that freighter. Though, it was well worth it.

It doesn’t matter the number of slots opened or the amount of technology unlocked on an S-class freighter. It matters that it is simply an S-class freighter. If you find an S-class as cheaply as I found mine, buy it instantly. Don’t hesitate. The frigate expedition bonus is well worth the amount of grinding required to unlock the rest of the freighter. In fact, that bonus will help you do that via your frigate expeditions.

Dream Aerial and Technology Frigates

Circling back around, to get the Dream Aerial you’ll need to buy a number of “standard” technology frigates. In fact, you’ll need to buy enough technology frigates to be able to run 3 star missions from your freighter’s expedition board. Once you can run 3 star missions, there’s a chance a Dream Aerial will be found by your technology frigate expeditions. You can always dismiss frigates later. Once you have the plan to build a Dream Aerial, you can then locate your first organic frigate (or second, if you’ve run the Leviathan expedition), which then unlocks the ability to find more via Anomaly Detectors.

Once you have a Dream Aerial built, activate it, then use the pulse drive to obtain your first (or second) organic frigate. One down, ~29 more to go.

Anomaly Detectors

After you have your first organic frigate from the Dream Aerial, you can delete the Dream Aerial device. The Dream Aerial is only useful once to obtain your first organic frigate. From here, you’ll have to rely on Anomaly Detectors to obtain the rest of your organic frigates for your fleet.

To obtain Anomaly Detectors, you’ll need to perform a bit of grinding in the game. First, find a dense asteroid field. Second, begin destroying the asteroids non-stop, avoiding the random ships also roaming the field. Once you’ve destroyed enough asteroids, the game will award you an Anomaly Detector. Rinse and repeat until you have as many Anomaly Detectors as you need.

You’ll use up one Anomaly Detector to locate each organic frigate you wish to find. If you want all 30 frigates to be organic, then you’ll need 29 Anomaly Detectors if you didn’t play Leviathan, 28 if you did. That means grinding through an asteroid field until you have enough detectors.

How to use Anomaly Detectors

To use Anomaly Detectors, it’s nearly identical to the Dream Aerial. Activate it, then zip into pulse drive and wait. From here, you’ll see many “Rare” deep space objects appear. Ignore them and do not drop out of pulse. Instead, in 15 seconds they’ll timeout and disappear, then another will appear. Eventually, you’ll see a Whalesong. This is the one you want.

Drop out of pulse at the first sign of Whalesong and pick up your organic frigate. Organic frigates come in classes C through S, but most are likely to appear as C-class (the least costly). Typically, a C-class organic frigate might cost ~8 million units. However, an S-class organic frigate might set you back 53 million units. Be sure to have enough units on hand before performing this step. You don’t want to see Whalesong only to find you don’t have enough units on hand to buy the frigate.

Note, you may occasionally find an organic frigate that you’ve bought does not appear back at your freighter. This is a known bug. Ignore that system and don’t try to pick that frigate up again. Some organic frigates are bugged and won’t appear at your freighter even after you’ve paid for them.

One Organic Frigate Per Star System

You can only obtain one organic frigate per star system via Anomaly Detectors. This means you’ll need to hyperdrive jump to an unexplored system and use your Anomaly Detector again there. This means you’ll need a hyperdrive on your starship or freighter so you can jump into various new systems to pick up another organic frigate.

Abandoned systems may not produce organic frigates. I’d suggest caution when attempting to locate an organic frigate in an abandoned system.

30 Slot Limit

No Man’s Sky offers a maximum of 30 frigate slots. Once you reach your 30th frigate, you can’t buy anymore. If you locate an organic frigate, but find the game won’t give you the option to buy it, you have reached the maximum number of frigates you can own. You can check the number of frigate slots consumed on your freighter’s bridge at the fleet management console.

You can also check how many frigates you own by number using the Multi-tool scanner when inside of your freighter. Simply activate the Multi-tool scanner (pointing it at your freighter) and it will quickly show you your fleet number at a glance. This also means you don’t have to visit your management console to manually count your fleet size.

Always make sure that you are under the 30 slot limit and that you have enough units before venturing out with your Anomaly Detectors. Anomaly Detectors are hard enough to find without wasting them because you didn’t have enough frigate slots or units.

Benefits of Organic Frigates

You might be wondering what the difference is between an organic frigate and a technology frigate since they appear to do the same thing. Yes, both are very, very similar in what they do. However, organic frigates offer two very important differences over technology frigates, at least as of this writing:

1. Organic frigates don’t break that I’ve found. Meaning, you’ll never have to venture over onto them to repair them (as of Waypoint). I’m assuming an organic could die, but I’ve never had one do that.
2. Organic frigates offer benefits that can’t be found with technology frigates. Organic frigates can discover organic items such as Spawning Sacs and Psychonic Eggs. These items are not located by technology frigates! If you own a Living Ship, these extras are very important.

Spawning Sacs and Psychonic Eggs

These items are quite useful to the Living Ship. Spawning Sacs add inventory slots to the Living Ship in the same way as Storage Augmentations add slots to technology starships. Spawning Sacs are rare to find and can only be found by using S-class organic frigates on frigate expeditions. Psychonic Eggs extract into useful technology additions for the Living Ship, much like buying Starship modules from vendors at space stations.

Psychonic Eggs are not the only way to obtain Living Ship modules. You can also obtain them through random, but occasional pulse drive travels between worlds in a star system. You don’t need to consume anomaly detectors to find these. They’ll randomly appear while in pulse drive. Psychonic Eggs, however, give you the ability to unlock these at will rather than waiting on random encounters.

Unfortunately, you first need open slots in your Living Ship before Psychonic Eggs can become useful. That requires Spawning Sacs. In rarity, Spawning Sacs are probably the rarest items you’ll encounter, with maybe the exception of the white and gold guppy Exotic ship. Sending out 20-30 frigate missions, you might see 2 Spawning Sacs.

Note that you must send out S-class organic frigates to even have a chance of them finding Spawning Sacs. That means leveling up your organic frigate fleet to S-class before you’ll have any chance at receiving Spawning Sacs.

I didn’t begin seeing Spawning Sacs as a frigate expedition rewards until I began sending out S-class organic frigates. Even then, these Sacs are relatively rare spawn rewards.

Technology Frigates vs Organic Frigates

Because of all of the above, I strongly suggest filling out your frigate fleet with organic frigates. It’s a little more time consuming, but if you have a Living Ship and want to outfit it fully, you’ll need organic frigates to do this. Because organic frigates find all of the same stuff as technology frigates, but even more, it’s worth replacing your technology frigates with organic frigates in the long run.

Feeding Organic Frigates

One additional thing that’s been added is the ability to feed your organic frigates. However, you don’t need to feed them constantly. Instead, this feature adds a feeding slot that allows you to modify the stats of your organic frigate depending on what you “feed” them. By feeding the organic frigate with certain foodstuffs, you can modify the stats of each organic frigate.

This is something that cannot be done at all with technology frigates. Whatever stats a technology frigate has, that’s what it remains. If you want something better, you buy it. With organic frigates, you can spend time crafting unusual foods and feed them to each organic frigate to see how the stats change.

Note that some foods reset stats and some foods boost stats. Because it’s random, you won’t know what a food does what until you feed it to the frigate. After that, you’ll know. Also, what works with one organic frigate won’t work with another. Meaning, if you feed one frigate bread and it gains 20 to exploration, that doesn’t mean all frigates will respond this same way. You’ll need to trial-and-error your way to find the best foodstuffs to see the stats you’re wanting for each individual frigate.

For example, if you want to boost Combat stats on a specific frigate, you’ll need feed it a variety of foods until you find the right combination. I will say, though, that you should limit feeding your organic to basic foods. Don’t go overboard producing the rarest of cakes as it is typically overkill. Simply feeding the frigate Cake Batter might afford the same response as feeding it the cake itself.

I always recommend trying basic food components before spending time building expensive and time consuming cakes and pies. Organic frigates don’t yet have picky palettes and stats can be boosted with simpler crafted food items, like sugar, batter, pie crust and so on.

Leveling Up Organic Frigates

One question that has surfaced is how to level up less than S-Class organic frigates to S-Class. Don’t worry. They do this all on their own. All you need to do is send them out on expeditions. It doesn’t take long to see a fleet of S-Class organic frigates. It takes maybe 10-20 expeditions to see a C-Class level up to S-Class. This leveling up system works with both technology frigates and organic frigates. Admittedly, organic frigates seem to level up at a faster rate than technology frigates.

This ultimately means it will take a little bit of time to get your organics up to S-Class to begin seeing those ever elusive Spawning Sacs. Though, you may see Psychonic Eggs appear as rewards long before your organics reach S-Class.

Subject To Change

Because No Man’s Sky is an ever evolving game, due mostly to Hello Games continual meddling of it, the rules defined in this article may change with a major update in the future. For example, even though organic frigates don’t seem to become damaged or die on missions now, a future update could make this change possible. This might mean that your organic frigates could potentially die or become injured in a future update. Right now, it’s not possible. Please keep this in mind if you’re reading this article a year or two from when this article was written.

Organic Frigate Gallery

To end out this article, here’s a small gallery of images from my fleet:

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Oh, and Happy New Year to everyone reading. Please feel free to leave a comment or question below.

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